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Zuckerberg has no plans to merge WhatsApp with Messenger

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg hosted his first ever developer Q&A in Africa today, and spoke to a crowd of developers in Nigeria about the company’s future plans.

The event in Nigeria was streamed to invited journalists in Johannesburg.

To begin with, Zuckerberg said that he could feel the enthusiasm in Lagos was palpable.

“There is an energy in Lagos, and people need to see it. Things are changing, and Nigeria is leading that charge in shaping the continent. People here have a sense of the entrepreneurial spirit,” he said.

Zuckerberg said that he came to Nigeria to simply sit down with developers to find out what challenges they have and to answer any questions that might arise from using Facebook products and services.

Naturally, a developers asked about WhatsApp’s recent update to its Terms of Service, in which you can opt-in (or out) to share your data with Facebook.

“Right now our priority with WhatsApp is to grow the community. We need to get more people on it, even though it has more than a billion using the service.”

Without going into too much detail, Zuckerberg explained why Facebook took the step to share the data between the two apps.

“The update on WhatsApp was to make it easier for businesses to contact people. As a business, you need to know your customer, and talk to them with a unified voice. This is just the beginning of the journey, but the next thing is how do we get billions of people on the service,” he said.

He was also quick to explain that Facebook has no intention to merge WhatsApp with Facebook Messenger

“Messenger and Whatsapp are their own entities and we have no plans to merge them together. Messenger is today all about contacting friends, where Whatsapp is a utility. The plan is to not combine the two, but to play with their strengths. But… we still have a lot of work to do,” he said.

Virtual Reality (VR) is also a huge talking point at the moment, and Nigeria is no different. A developer asked when Facebook will be able to make Oculus Rift cheaper so that VR can be access by the masses.

While he didn’t give a specific plan for the reducing in price, he did acknowledge that the $600 price is out of reach for most people.

“The Rift is more expensive than what we want it, and there are also less apps. It could be a while, maybe in 5, 10 or 15 years for the price to come down,” he said.

However, Zuckerberg posited an alternative to VR in the future: augmented reality (AR).

“In the next few years we will have AR that will look like contact lenses. Hopefully we will get to a point where we don’t need physical things like a TV and consoles, but will be sold as apps for VR and AR,” he said. “That will unlock a lot of creatively, and entrepreneurs will be able to build a lot of things that people will need. That will bring the price down in the ecosystem, but it will take some time to do that.”

Zuckerberg said that Facebook will be launching a satellite this week as part of its future drive to connect everybody in the world to the internet.

“The future can go in a lot of directions. But the mission I care about at Facebook is still the same as what it was in the beginning,” he said. “We can build things now that will only be profitable 20 years down the line – but we can do that. The dream of connecting everybody is still possible in our generation. If we can do that, I will feel very good about my life.”

South Africa is the only country in Africa where Facebook has some kind of physical presence, and of course a developer wanted to know why Lagos was snubbed in favour of Johannesburg.

Take it whichever way you want, but Zuckerberg’s answer made it seem like the company made a faux-pas with SA.

“There are no missed opportunities,” he said while smiling sheepishly, “just things that we still need to do.”

“A lot of the future is going to get built in Nigeria, but you need to have patience. We are at the beginning of the (African) journey.”

[Image – CC Wikmedia Commons]

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