With 1.25 billion users, can Facebook still think small?
Mark Zuckerberg has finally done it.
After a long succession of mobile mishaps, he has delivered the portable Facebook app
I've always wanted… and there's hardly any evidence that Paper is a
Facebook product. Upon opening the app for the first time you're greeted
with a shimmering Paper logo set in Helvetica Neue UltraLight, the
opposite of the bold, white logo Facebook has used since 2005. It’s a
fresh start, and it could be just what the company needed.
As Facebook reaches 1.25
billion active users and celebrates its 10th anniversary, the company
faces increased skepticism from both pundits and consumers. The company
is no longer new or cool, they say. Facebook might be too big to fail,
but that might also mean it’s too big to make aggressive changes to its
service. The company's informal motto, "Move fast and break things,"
doesn't seem to hold the same gravitas it once held.
So for its next app,
Facebook started from scratch and started small. “Great products don’t
start with a billion users, they start with just a few,” says Michael
Reckhow, product manager on Paper. And it came up with something
decidedly unlike anything Facebook’s done before.
