Facebook’s Andrew Bosworth: “The Most Exciting Things Are Things We’re Not Working On”

You got it.

And we are post-awesome announcements. It was indeed awesome.

I thought it was pretty awesome. I’m glad you agree.

So you guys announced three things. You announced a new group chat feature. You announced a new design, that right sidebar.

Absolutely.

And the fact that group chat, or all chat, will now like conform to your browser size.

Right, it will try to take advantage of all the space that users have given us for their large browsers and windows.

And then you announced Skype Video Calling.

That’s right.

Okay, so out of the three things, which one is the one that you think is the most awesome?

Video calling is really the awesome announcement. It’s the thing that Phillip was working on in Seattle when kind of when Zuck alluded to this last week. Video calling is going to really enable an immersive experiences for our users. Really face to face deep kind of deep connections with people they care most about.

And video calling isn’t

a new technology, but it’s just never been as easy I guess is the key.

Now video calling is nothing new. What about the Facebook integration? Zuckerberg was talking a lot about the social integration. How apps, how Facebook wants to be the go to place for the social infrastructure and how apps will build on top of that, and I guess Skype is one of the biggest pushes of this thus far.

Yeah. Well, if you think about it Skype has built this phenomenal technology that connects people all across the world already. You know, they want to get that technology to as many people as possible, and there’s really no better place to do that than on Facebook. Where we already have your friends, you don’t have to build a list of contacts, you don’t have to download anything separately, its all kind of inline.

And so I hope that you guys will get a chance to play with it later and see. Like, the install flow is super-lightweight, really, really easy, it’s a really small download, and it enables this kind of incredible really rich experience. And there’s a kind of viral component so when you call somebody, you know, they’re prompted to download and install it so they’re taken care of.

So, I think we were enabling people might have otherwise have access to this video-calling technology that’s been around for years, really putting in this right in their hands.

So can a Skype user now,
independent off Facebook platform calling to someone on Facebook?

Yeah, for know it’s just Facebook to Facebook. I think, you know, the potential future integrations that we can do with Skype are pretty endless, and some of them pretty obvious. Like Mark and Tony said, this is going to be a long partnership between our two companies. We’re really excited to continue working with them.

They’ve got a lot of great technology we would like to take advantage of, but for today it’s just Facebook to Facebook.

Any plans for the ability to use that plug-in on other sites? For example, if LinkedIn wanted to do Skype integration.

You know, like I said, as soon as we had the access to this kind of, cool, person to person technology on Facebook, we launched it. We haven’t looked at all the other possibilities yet. We’ve just really been pretty excited about this. We think it’s a pretty awesome launch.

So, have you tried Google Hangout?

I haven’t actually had a chance to try it yet, no.

Do you think this was, this was any kind of reaction to that?

I wish I could tell you it only took us one week to build video calling. It took us a little bit longer than that. Just a little bit longer.

So, tell me more about group chat. Are you saying that fifty percent of your user base is now on Facebook groups?

Yeah, Facebook groups has been one of our fastest growing product launches ever. I mean, we launched it nine months ago and already half of our active users are in a group, the average group size is seven people. These are really doing exactly what we hoped they would do which is connecting people in a very small shared space with the people they care most about, the most common titles for groups have the words “friends” and “family” in them which we love.

So, one of the things that we built group chat into that product, and it was incredibly popular. And one of the complaints that our users have been kind of giving was that, they had to create a group to get the group chat, and so we decided to make it really easy to create these ad hoc group chats and that can kind of follow the user around as they’re browsing using the existing chat interface.

So this is one of those features that’s one of our most requested features and we decided just to ship it today.

Awesome. Zuckerberg talked about how the future of sharing was exponential. Like that a year from now, people will be sharing twice as much as they do today, and twice as much from there, twice as much from there. And he talked about, he showed a graph and it showed video calling and then it showed a bunch of empty circles where potential new apps will be. Any ideas of what apps could be built to fill any circles?

Look, I think certainly we have some ideas, obviously some things we can’t talk about.

Project Sparta?

But I think a big part of what Zuck wants to do is enable people in the world, not just at Facebook, but anyone who wants to be the next bubble on that law of sharing graph to build those things. And it’s not about what Facebook does in terms of the app space.

It’s about what the social kind of infrastructure enables to be built. So, as much as we have some things that we’re working on, like, I think the most exciting things are things that we’re not working on that somebody else should be working on to fill out those bubbles on that law of sharing graph.

Any specifics on what somebody else should be working on?

I can’t give you any specifics at this time.

So, what change in user behavior do you anticipate on Facebook from these new features?

Yeah, I think there’s some obvious cases. Armoured servicemen talking to their families, people who are separated from their loved ones, connecting in a deeper way. But there is also these kind of casual scenarios which I expect to emerge as video calling’s never been this easy. If you’re just kind of hanging out at home and you just see the option to video call a friend.

Like maybe you call a lot more, maybe you call them when you don’t need to have a deep, intense, immersive experience. You just kinda wanna be there with them and and experiencing together. So maybe we’re watching the same show at the same time and we’re separated from distance, like, can we do this kind of casual thing.

So I think that’s actually a pretty cool feature that, you know, we didn’t necessarily build it for, we really built it for the deeper experiences. But having made it so easy I expect that kind of a, casual usage to really emerge and be a big deal.

Awesome. Any plans to launch an iPad app so shortly after launching a crazy feature like group chat.

We’ve actually been so heads down this I’ve not been paying attention to anything else in the world.

Yeah.

And, so it looked relatively easy, its one click you are going to show me how.

Yeah, sure.

How to do it now?

Its super straight forward. So what you do to start a video call on facebook.com is you either start it from a chat like right here. This is one of my colleagues, Jonathan Rosenberg.

Hey Jonathan.

We’re just doing a little text chat right now and if I want to turn that into a video call I just click on that button. and this will now ring Jonathan’s side. You can see the little splash screen comes up that lets you know everything is getting started and it gives you good status and there it is.

Hi Jonathan.

Hi Jonathan.

How are you? So that was pretty easy. What happened on your side? Did it just ring and you answered it?

Awesome.

Yeah, and that was the goal with this. We wanted to make it super easy. And then you can see obviously the video is really high quality on both sides, so that’s another key feature of this. What this is doing is it’s basically running an optimized version of Skype’s desktop software using our technology and network, and it’s powered by Facebook.com, and you can see, its super nice easy UI.

When you’re done with the call you just click over here and close the window. That’s really it. The install process is really simple too. user once you get started, they make a call with someone else, and both sides automatically install any software that’s required.

Is there a groups feature? Not right now. Right now this is just one to one video calling. And you can start that from a chat, like I showed you. You can also start it right over here on someone’s profile page. You see a little call button, and then it’ll start a one to one call.

Awesome. So, during the talk, Tony Bates said that fifty percent of Skype usership is in video.

Yeah. And also that you guys are gunning towards a billion. You want a billion users.

Right.

Do you think that this will ultimately detract people from using Skype in and of itself, or do you think it’ll move more people from Facebook over to the original Skype platform?

Well, we think it’ll, we actually consider this people using Skype, so, you know, we work very closely with Facebook and were, we wanted to do this partnership for a long time because we felt this was the best way to reach a huge number of users. We also think this will drive more interest to Skype, too.

So, we think it’s a great win-win for both companies.

Do you have plans to have this plugin integrate on other sites? For example, if LinkedIn wants to do Skype integration. Nothing right now, Nothing right now?

Yeah, we’re really focused on making this work right for Facebook users.

What about WebRTC support?

Its something we are working on. We’ve been looking at the standard for a long time, but at the moment there’s no browsers out yet that actually support it. But, you know, we’ll be keeping close track of it.

Tony mentioned during the announcement a suite of paid products. Do you have any idea what these are specifically or what plans are in the works to create you?

So we don’t have a specific timeline or anything, but what makes the most sense really is to be doing paid calling between Skype and Facebook. users in particular calling out to phones. It’s something that’s very popular with our user set. So we intend to be working on that with Facebook.

Awesome . I also mention that there were 300 million video minutes a month.

A month, yeah.

Now on Skype. Do you have any estimate with the Facebook integration how much this number will increase?

Not sure. We’re definitely sure it’s going to go way up.

Awesome. Thank you.

You’re welcome. Thank you.