https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/8/18256226/facebook-wechat-messaging-zuckerberg-strategy

Facebook Wants To Be WeChat

By   Nick Statt   and   Shannon Liao     Mar 8, 2019, 1:12pm EST

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

 

Mark Zuckerberg   laid out a new direction   for Facebook this week that shifts its focus from a sprawling series of social apps to a one-stop shop messaging service that combines everything the company has to offer. If there's an analog to what Facebook is trying to build, it exists in the form of Tencent's WeChat, the single largest social network in China. There are a number of key differences between the two products, but the ultimate goals look markedly similar: singular, all-purpose networks that can be leveraged to serve users all kinds of other services, from mobile payments to gaming to direct lines of contact to businesses.

The push to become more of a WeChat-like service has been a long time coming. Facebook has been constantly dogged by privacy violations due to its aggressively ad-fueled and feed-based approach to social networking, and in the US, it appears to be shedding younger users. A promised privacy-first approach to this messaging service would address Facebook's immediate shortcomings, while the bundle of services could serve to further entrench every one of Facebook's offerings.

WeChat is often considered the "everything app" for China's   nearly 800 million smartphone owners : it's a game console, a bank, and even a gateway to Chinese ride-sharing giants, food delivery, and thrift shopping. It's available in other regions as well, giving WeChat a monthly active user base of over 1 billion.

Because of its ubiquity and dominance, WeChat has been a desirable, seemingly impossible-to-replicate product for social media companies. As the do-everything app, it supersedes device manufacturers like Apple, Samsung, and Xiaomi, and it almost acts as a replacement for operating systems like iOS and Android. Nothing, including Apple's iMessage or Facebook's Messenger or even the encryption-friendly WhatsApp, can compete with WeChat in China.

 

"What WeChat has done is embed a constant stream of new services and features onto their platform. The new features take advantage of the strong network effect that WeChat already has, as the defacto messaging platform in China," says Willy Shih, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School. By continuously adding services, WeChat only becomes a more integral part of daily life, and it's harder to abandon as a result. "It's convenient for everything: payments, getting info, ordering things," he adds. As Shih notes, even the   homeless in China use WeChat-supported QR codes   to accept mobile payments when panhandling.

 

Facebook's ambitions to build a do-everything app platform for a global audience goes back years, beginning with its 2012 and 2014 acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, respectively. Since then, as Instagram and WhatsApp staved off competition from rivals, Messenger has shouldered a bulk of the responsibility in becoming Facebook's would-be do-everything app platform.

 

In the ensuing half-decade of Messenger's ongoing development, Facebook has bolted on gaming, AI chat bots, augmented reality camera features, mobile payments, and numerous other features that are designed to get you to treat Messenger like its own distinct and chat-focused mini-Facebook. In 2014, the company   hired David Marcus   — a hugely successful digital payments entrepreneur who oversaw PayPal's strategic acquisition of Venmo parent company Braintree — to run Messenger, signaling Facebook's ambitions to turn the platform into a service provider.

 

Now, with plans to bring private messaging front and center, Zuckerberg could finally create the version of WeChat that the world outside of China has thus far lacked. It could be large and scarily time-consuming, luring users to engage with the app for not just birthdays and group chats, but for style and products (Instagram) and news sharing (Facebook and WhatsApp). The Facebook mega app could extend into users' daily lives for entertainment, news, and commerce.

 

But building that kind of sprawling, do-everything network is an immense challenge, and even WeChat has not done without a good deal of help and good luck. In China, it's received government subsidies, and many of its rivals have been blocked from running: that includes Messenger since 2009, South Korea's Line since 2015, and WhatsApp in 2017, significantly trimming down the competitive landscape. The government has been happy to do that in exchange for   being able to retrieve deleted WeChat messages   to help in police investigations. (Tencent denies that it stores chat histories.)

 

WeChat largely   bombed in its attempts   to find success beyond the Chinese market. It was slow to go international, and when it finally did in 2012, Facebook was already taking off in the markets WeChat was trying to enter. The international app was also a ghost of its Chinese self; the global version of WeChat was limited to sending people private messages.

 

Facebook has already done well expanding across the globe, which could help it succeed where WeChat failed. Internationally, Facebook and WhatsApp are the most used social media apps, dwarfing the likes of Snapchat, Twitter, Viber, and others, according to a   Pew Research Center report   published yesterday.

 

The multipronged strategy of having the main Facebook app, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram also means that it's no issue if one country gravitates toward one Facebook product over another. And Facebook hasn't stopped there, either. It has a number of internet connectivity efforts in developing countries — including a gigabit Wi-Fi project called Terragraph and an app called Express Wi-Fi — that are designed to bring more people online and convert them into Facebook users of one type or another.

 

Facebook will face other issues, though. Combining its apps is likely to concern the European Commission, which is regularly troubled by the behaviors of tech giants. The United States Congress, similarly, has questioned Facebook on whether it qualifies as a monopoly. Politically, the tide is turning against these kinds of mega tech companies. This morning, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) proposed breaking up tech giants,   including Facebook   as part of her presidential campaign platform.

 

It's also not guaranteed that a messaging-first approach will win over users. In China, it's the older generations who favor using WeChat, giving the app a kind of dated reputation not too unlike Facebook's among teens. If both apps don't step it up, they could fall out of style as users grow older.

 

After Zuckerberg laid out his plans for Facebook, we have a pretty good idea of what to expect, thanks to WeChat. We also can anticipate the obstacles a Facebook monster app would face: slowing user growth, a heavy reliance on ad revenue, and Western regulatory forces that would seek to rein it back in. It's the ultimate story of merging cultures, as two (or more) apps combine so many features that they become nearly the same thing and risk losing what makes them so attractive in the first place. But Facebook has a chance to write its own story, if it can take lessons from where WeChat has stumbled.

 

The Lantern Festival In The Forbidden Palace

Lantern Festival Falls On The Fifteenth Day Of The First Lunar Month. This Is The First Full Moon Of The New Year, Symbolizing Unity And Perfection.

2019 BeiJing,The Forbidden Palace Hosts First Lantern Festival In 94 Years.

Across China, The Lantern Festival Is Celebrated In Many Different Styles.

On The Night, Except For Magnificent Lanterns, Fireworks Form A Beautiful Scene.

When ZhuDi Became The YongLe Emperor Of Ming Dynasty, He Moved The Capital Back To BeiJing, And Construction Began In 1406 Of What Would Become The Forbidden Palace.

The Forbidden Palace Was The Chinese Imperial Palace From The Ming Dynasty To The End Of The Qing Dynasty. It Is Located In The Middle Of Beijing, China, And Now Houses The Palace Museum.

But Due To The Forbidden Palace's Massive Size — Its 179 Acres House 980 Buildings — Some Of It Remains Closed To The Public.

 

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144540/china-and-india-lead-the-way-in-greening

China And India Lead The Way In Greening

2000 - 2017 PNG

The world is literally a greener place than it was twenty years ago, and data from NASA satellites has revealed a counterintuitive source for much of this new foliage. A new study shows that China and India—the world's most populous countries—are leading the increase in greening on land. The effect comes mostly from ambitious tree-planting programs in China and intensive agriculture in both countries.

Ranga Myneni of Boston University and colleagues first detected the greening phenomenon in satellite data from the mid-1990s, but they did not know whether human activity was a chief cause. They then set out to track the total amount of Earth's land area covered by vegetation and how it changed over time.

The research team found that global green leaf area has increased by 5 percent since the early 2000s, an area equivalent to all of the Amazon rainforests. At least 25 percent of that gain came in China. Overall, one-third of Earth's vegetated lands are greening, while 5 percent are growing browner. The study was published on February 11, 2019, in the journal Nature Sustainability.

The maps on this page show the increase or decrease in green vegetation—measured in average leaf area per year—in different regions of the world between 2000 and 2017. Note that the maps are not measuring the overall greenness, which explains why the Amazon and eastern North America do not stand out, among other forested areas.

"China and India account for one-third of the greening, but contain only 9 percent of the planet's land area covered in vegetation," said lead author Chi Chen of Boston University. "That is a surprising finding, considering the general notion of land degradation in populous countries from overexploitation."

2000 - 2017PNG

This study was made possible thanks to a two-decade-long data record from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites. An advantage of MODIS is the intensive coverage they provide in space and time: the sensors have captured up to four shots of nearly every place on Earth, every day, for the past 20 years.

"This long-term data lets us dig deeper," said Rama Nemani, a research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center and a co-author of the study. "When the greening of the Earth was first observed, we thought it was due to a warmer, wetter climate and fertilization from the added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now with the MODIS data, we see that humans are also contributing."

China's outsized contribution to the global greening trend comes in large part from its programs to conserve and expand forests (about 42 percent of the greening contribution). These programs were developed in an effort to reduce the effects of soil erosion, air pollution, and climate change.

Another 32 percent of the greening change in China, and 82 percent in India, comes from intensive cultivation of food crops. The land area used to grow crops in China and India has not changed much since the early 2000s. Yet both countries have greatly increased both their annual total green leaf area and their food production in order to feed their large populations. The agricultural greening was achieved through multiple cropping practices, whereby a field is replanted to produce another harvest several times a year. Production of grains, vegetables, fruits and more have increased by 35 to 40 percent since 2000.

2000 - 2017

How the greening trend may change in the future depends on numerous factors. For example, increased food production in India is facilitated by groundwater irrigation. If the groundwater is depleted, this trend may change. The researchers also pointed out that the gain in greenness around the world does not necessarily offset the loss of natural vegetation in tropical regions such as Brazil and Indonesia. There are consequences for sustainability and biodiversity in those ecosystems beyond the simple greenness of the landscape.

Nemani sees a positive message in the new findings. "Once people realize there is a problem, they tend to fix it," he said. "In the 1970s and 80s in India and China, the situation around vegetation loss was not good. In the 1990s, people realized it, and today things have improved. Humans are incredibly resilient. That's what we see in the satellite data."

NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using data courtesy of Chen et al.,(2019). Story by Abby Tabor, NASA Ames Research Center, with Mike Carlowicz, Earth Observatory.

References & Resources

• Chen et al. (2019) China and India lead in greening of the world through land-use management.Nature Sustainability, (2) 122–129.

Open Source Year In Review - Facebook Code

https://code.fb.com/open-source/open-source-2018/

POSTED ON JAN 2, 2019 TO OPEN SOURCE

Open Source Year In Review

JOEL MARCEY   ERIC NAKAGAWA   CHRISTIAN DELAHOUSSE

At Facebook, we believe in the value of open source technology to achieve a shared goal of improving tools and frameworks used by the entire community. To continue our work toward that goal, we released 153 new open source projects in 2018. Our active portfolio (after removing or archiving outdated repos) contains a total of 474 projects. Collectively, these projects had more than 94,000 commits this year, nearly 28,000 of which came from amongst our over 2,700 external contributors. This healthy and vibrant ecosystem has grown to more than 1.03 million followers, including 257,000 new followers this year.

PyTorch, our open source Python-based deep learning platform, announced its 1.0 stable release with new capabilities and partners. PyTorch is now the second-fastest-growing open source project on GitHub. We also a released pair of kernel libraries (QNNPACK and FBGEMM) that make it easier for mobile devices and servers to run the latest AI models, and PyText, a framework that accelerates NLP development.

PyTorch also provided the foundation for Horizon, the first open source end-to-end platform that uses applied reinforcement learning (RL) to optimize systems in large-scale production environments. We also expanded ONNX to support additional AI tools. And Glow, our compiler for neural network hardware accelerators, used the power of community to gain industry partnerships for supporting it in future silicon products.

Facebook AI Research (FAIR) released its object detection framework, Detectron, as well as Mask R-CNN2Go, a computer vision model optimized for embedded and mobile devices. Through the Open Compute Project (OCP), we open-sourced the specifications for two AI-based server designs, Big Sur and Big Basin. Other projects, including TensorComprehensions, DensePose, Translate, and TorchCraftAI, were released as part of our open frameworks effort around artificial intelligence.

In addition to our work on machine learning, our work on development tools, mobile, networking, data infrastructure, virtual reality, and other pillars was well represented this year. We open-sourced Flipper, our new, extensible debugging tool for iOS and Android. For Python developers, we released a type-checker called Pyre and a code refactoring tool called Bowler. In networking, we released Katran, a scalable network load balancer, and Fizz, our C++14 implementation of the TLS-1.3 standard. We also released LogDevice, our distributed data store for sequential data, and the XAR system for self-contained executables.

Docusaurus, released in December 2017, gained a lot of traction as a premier tool to help open source projects build websites and documentation. In just over a year, the number of projects using Docusaurus has grown to more than 55, including React 360(rebranded this year from ReactVR); Profilo (our high-throughput, mobile-first performance tracing library); and Spectrum, a cross-platform image transcoding library.

In November, in partnership with the founders of GraphQL, the Linux Foundation, and key participants in the community, we kicked off the process of forming the GraphQL foundation.

Our open source program would be nothing without the tools that allow our project owners to deploy their projects quickly and with high quality. The Facebook Open Source Tooling team continued to build and improve upon these tools. ShipIt allows project owners to both easily export code changes from our internal codebase to GitHub and import pull requests from the community. This provides consistency through automated synchronization. The team also developed new tools for community interaction, incorporation of GitHub issues into our internal workflows, and compliance of repo content across our entire project portfolio.

Looking ahead to 2019, we will continue our commitment to open source and to bringing innovative technology to the community.

This series of posts looks back on the engineering work and new technologies we released in 2018. Read yesterday's post about our work in Data Centers and check back tomorrow to learn about our work in Artificial Intelligence.

Data Centers Year In Review - Facebook Code

https://code.fb.com/data-center-engineering/data-centers-2018/

POSTED ON JAN 1, 2019 TO DATA CENTER ENGINEERING

Data Centers Year In Review

RACHEL PETERSON

For 2018, we knew we needed to continue scaling our data center capacity while simultaneously making our infrastructure even more powerful and efficient. Over the past year, we've expanded to a total of 15 data center locations, with new centers announced in Newton County, Georgia; Eagle Mountain, Utah; Huntsville, Alabama; and Singapore. We also announced expansions at our existing sites in Papillion, Nebraska; Henrico, Virginia; Luleå, Sweden; and Prineville, Oregon. And we announced that the Clonee Data Center is now up and running in Ireland.

In August, we shared our commitment to purchase 100 percent renewable energy and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 75 percent by 2020. Rising to that challenge drove creative design and technology solutions that helped us adapt to a variety of environments and scale to meet demand. To address the issue of scale, we designed the Fabric Aggregator, a distributed network system made up of simple building blocks. This system allows us to accommodate larger regions and varied traffic patterns, and adds the flexibility to adapt to future growth.

Earlier this year, we announced the StatePoint Liquid Cooling (SPLC) system, a new evaporative cooling system that uses water instead of air to cool data halls. The SPLC system allows us to build highly energy- and water-efficient data centers in places where direct cooling is not feasible.

Schematic of the SPLC cooling scheme for a data center: The SPLC units are deployed on the rooftop. These SPLC units produce cold water, which is then supplied to the fan-coil wall (FCW) unit. These FCW units use the cold water supplied by the SPLC units to cool the servers. The hot water from these FCW units is returned to SPLC units, where it will be cooled and recycled through the system.

In September, we broke ground on our data center in Singapore, our first custom-built center in Asia. Building for a location like Singapore presented new opportunities for design innovation and efficiency. To conserve space, the building will be our first multistory data center (11 stories). The building's façade is made of a perforated lightweight material that allows for airflow to help cool the building. It will also be one of the first to incorporate the abovementioned StatePoint Liquid Cooling system.

Singapore Data Center design

In addition to the solutions we've been able to implement this year, we've also open-sourced StateService, our state machine as a service, and shared new details and learnings about FBOSS, our open switching system.

Looking ahead to 2019, we will continue to focus on increasing our efficiency and reducing our environmental footprint.

This series of posts looks back on the engineering work and new technologies we developed in 2018. Check back tomorrow to read about our Open Source efforts and the next day to learn about our work in Artificial Intelligence.