Facebook Says Their Messenger App Is 1% Finished

Yes you read the title right, Facebook has said that their Messenger app is only 1 percent finished and that should make the competition nervous. Facebook has massive ambitions for Messenger, ambitions so big that they don’t even think of Messenger as an app anymore. Facebook thinks of Messenger as a platform on which entire businesses will be built.

Julien Codorniou, Facebook’s director of platform partnerships told Wired;

“We are one per cent finished, as we say at Facebook, one day, there will be companies built on Messenger, and we are at the beginning of that ecosystem.”

Facebook wants Messenger to be an “app for everything.” The idea is that retailers and customers will communicate on it instead of using their own websites. From booking a flight, making a restaurant reservation, ordering groceries or even transferring money between users (available in the US currently), Facebook wants their Messenger app to do it all.

Facebook’s grand ambitions could be a problem to other companies should the social network get its way. If we imagine that Facebook manages to pull all this off and make Messenger into what they really want it to be then you will be downloading and using far fewer apps since more functionality will be built into Facebook Messenger. The app ecosystem would stop mattering as much, as everything you do would be through the Facebook Messenger app.

Facebook has for a long time wanted to be “the place” to go on the web, in an ideal world for Facebook, they want you to do everything through their website. It would be easy to dismiss such ambitions however Facebook has 1.4 billion people on its platform and 700 million using Messenger.

Clearly Facebook has a long way to go if they are to ever get near what they want Messenger to be. The social network may be big, but is it getting too big for its boots? While Facebook may be powerful, they are not the most powerful online company and it is doubtful that an online experience which has everything going through Facebook will please giants such as Apple and Google.

If Facebook are to pull off what they want to achieve with Messenger it could take some time yet. However, there is no doubt that competitors will be watching which the platform head very closely.