Facebook's Messenger hopes to emulate others' success

But having humanised this music device more than a decade ago, the revolutionary iPod is still the default choice for consumers when it comes to playing and storing their favourite music.
In the same way, Facebook wasn’t the first social-media platform to hit the cyber world; Hi5 and Myspace enjoyed much success before Mark Zuckerberg waltzed along with his revolutionary “tinker-vention”.
“Tinker-vention” is the marriage of the two words “tinker” and “invention”, and is a word that I casually made up to delineate what the late Steve Jobs and Zuckerberg did best: to tinker and then to conjure up drastic changes to an already existing entity and forever redefining the way people live.
Having already identified Line’s and WeChat’s phenomenal success in East Asia as sustainable and lucrative social platforms that go beyond pure instant messaging through stickers, gaming, apps and e-commerce; Facebook recently jumped on the bandwagon to be part of the mix.
At the “F8 Developers Conference” last week in San Francisco, Facebook officially launched its Messenger platform, bringing new integration and methods of information-sharing to the company’s messaging experience.
Facebook will focus on how third parties can build ways for content creation, information flow and ways to communicate with businesses.
For example, Giphy, a popular GIF-sharing site, is using Facebook’s Messenger platform to launch its first mobile app, Giphy+Messenger, whereby users can search, select, and send GIFs from Giphy’s vast selection without having to exit their Messenger conversation.
Pic Stitch’s Messenger integration makes it easy to share the picture collages you don’t necessarily want to push out to all of your random Instagram or Facebook friends and followers. You can create and message collages quickly, and share them privately, without halting the conversation.
These are only a few samples of what the integration of apps into the new Facebook Messenger can do with the 40-plus apps that have already been hand-picked during its inauguration last week.
This beckons the questions, is Facebook too late in entering the race to compete with Asia’s aforementioned messaging platforms, and how will advertisers choose Messenger to be a part of their marketing mix in an already crowded messaging space?
The new Messenger is less than a week old and still very much at the experimental stage. WeChat launched its platform here in Thailand a couple of years back in the hope of breaking Line’s dominance. It proved to be a fruitless mission, as Thais were already too entrenched and addicted to Line, with its array of stickers and games on offer.
Which comes back to my point about whether Facebook is too late in entering this battlefield. Has Line already created a barrier too huge for the social-media giant to break through?
I personally haven’t used the Messenger platform yet, but I can already foresee the problems that may arise through this transformation – a lot of noise and a whole lot of spam.
Current Line users already have to compromise their privacy with messages from businesses in exchange for free stickers or alternatively block them to avoid the noise. History will surely repeat itself should Facebook intend to reinvent the wheel.
Facebook has already hedged its bets in buying out Instagram, WhatsApp (in this case, a possibility of cannibalisation, perhaps) and Oculus Rift, and now its venture into the Messenger, as it continues to expand and diversify its offerings.
As I mentioned earlier in the article, a latecomer may possibly succeed, but in this case, it may be a question of being a tad too late. Let’s wait and see if it will strike an accord with Thais.

Article by Pradon Sirakovit, Group Head, Strategy & Innovation, IPG Mediabrands Thailand.