Mark Zuckerberg says he wants to get back to the original Facebook, restoring it to “how it was originally used back in the day”. Once one of the world’s most popular sites, Facebook has suffered from an ageing user base and a falling cultural relevance. Other products under the same Meta parent company – from Instagram and WhatsApp – have taken the place of what is sometimes known as the “blue app”.
But Mr Zuckerberg said that he intends to make it more “culturally influential than it is today” and that the change could “take our product development in some interesting directions that we maybe haven’t had a focus on it as much over the last several years”.
He made the announcement as Meta announced its quarterly results, during which Mr Zuckerberg also committed to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the development of new AI tools. He gave little information on what that change of focus for Facebook might mean in practice. He said that he didn’t have “anything much more specific” and said it was an “investment area and something I’m going to spend some time on”.
“It might mean that in the near term, we make some trade-offs to kind of focus on some product areas of what we’re doing ahead of just kind of maximising business results in the near term on it,” he said. “I think some of this will kind of get back to how Facebook was originally used back in the day.”.
