Facebook and Google are arguably the largest content providers in the world. They have, in some cases, become the sole source of content for users. The companies have played the role of content aggregator and ad providers for many years. However, some countries are beginning to take a hard look at how they could have played a role in the slow demise of news outlets over the years.
The main issue being looked at in a lot of countries is the distribution of ad revenue. In most of these countries, the argument is that Facebook and Google’s hold on an unprecedented share of ad revenue has led to the decline in overall revenue for news outlets. This has led to an increased scrutiny by governments. Unsurprisingly, governments are beginning to argue that companies such as Google and Facebook should be paying for the content they are using on the platform.
The latest country to seriously consider the possibility of introducing such laws is Australia. The country has ordered that its Competitions and Consumer Commission (ACCC) create a mandatory code of conduct to address the issue. The code of conduct would, essentially, require companies like Facebook and Google to pay for using content generated by others; this would include listing the content. While we’ve already seen similar measures adopted in countries like France, the ACCC’s code of conduct would also require companies to share data, algorithm changes, news ranking and adopt some form of revenue sharing with content companies.
The move to introduce some form of legislation is spurred by the economic impact of COVID-19 on the news and content sectors. The country is also citing the disproportionately large share of online revenue taken by Facebook and Google in the country. A draft of the Australian code of conduct is expected to be prepared by July 2020. However, there is no clear indication of when the code of conduct will finalised.
This whole COVID-19 situation has been quite trying for plenty of people. For Malaysia, the country is in its third phase of a state sanctioned quarantine, or Movement Control Order (MCO) in their words. The MCO means that there are some imposed restrictions to how you can move about in the region. No one can come into or out of Malaysia at this time too. In other words, we are under a limited lock down.
This also means that most organisations in Malaysia are on a work-from-home policy, including us. Working from home is not a new concept though. Funnily enough, it is not tech-based firms that has gone big with work-from-home concepts. Still, this is the time when everyone just must start adopting the work-from-home culture. Not like they have a choice anyway in Malaysia.
Facebook has been one organisation at the forefront of business transformations in the region. They have also transformed how businesses work and sell their products in the modern world. They are more than just a Social Media app you have on your smartphones. Facebook is more than an app just to keep in touch with your friends.
It has become a live news channel, where you can view live updates on the most current news. You can set up watch parties (limited to Facebook Watch and videos) to a live event. It has become a live event space, if you might for the public. With Messenger and WhatsApp, it is a communication powerhouse; an all-in-one tool for your daily communication needs.
If you need to, Facebook can be your marketplace, or the place where you shop with marketplace. With Facebook Watch, it is your source of entertainment. It can even be your calendar if you really need it to be. It is truly a one-stop, go-to, solve-it-all platform where you can find anything and everything.
That is also why when we were given the chance to sit down with Nicole Tan of Facebook Malaysia, we took the offer up.
Nicole Tan is not just a random person in Facebook Malaysia. She is the Facebook Malaysia’s Country Director. When you say top brass, she is it for Facebook Malaysia. The buck stops with her. Of course, no one is better qualified to talk about Facebook’s presence and efforts in Malaysia than her.
Source: Facebook
We started the interview with a burning question of ‘how?’ Everyone is in this trying period that is the MCO and plenty are forced to bring work home. In that case, everyone has to adapt to a completely new working environment and culture. Every other person is of course looking toward the big tech names for guidance and inspiration.
Facebook has always had a very flexible approach toward this issue of course. Being a tech firm there are already measures in place for a work-from-home situation. In fact, Facebook Malaysia has adopted the work-from-home policy even before Malaysia’s MCO is implemented. According to Nicole Tan, the firm has adopted to the situation very quickly. Naturally, there has been a lot more web-conferencing that is needed for daily operations. For Nicole then, it is almost just like any other day in the office; just with more video conferencing than ever.
There is one big concern for consumers who are on Facebook though. The platform has become one of the biggest news channels in the world. In Malaysia at least, plenty rely on Facebook for the latest updates in the region. In these trying times, more so rely on Facebook and its services for information. With fears of cyber attacks and scams related to COVID-19 as well, fake news is another big concern. In that, Facebook has been working very closely with their partners which include health institutes and certain government departments to verify news sources. They are not just doing it on Facebook as a platform though. They are also doing it on Whatsapp, Messenger and even Instagram.
Source: Facebook
All this accumulates to Facebook’s very own COVID-19 specific information center. The section is also an accumulation for your benefit. Facebook, through the center is working to bring forward tips and resources from experts and other certified sources to keep you healthy and informed at this time. This is not something new for Facebook. At this time though, to verify all the news, they have spent quite a significant amount of money to work with fact-check networks just so that you get the correct information.
That is not all they have been doing in the fight for COVID-19 though. Being one of the largest tech firms in the world, they could contribute plenty to the efforts around the world. They join other multinationals in donating relief funds and even development of vaccines. In total, they probably has put forth about US$ 70 million in the efforts of not just fighting the disease, but also fighting the side-effects of the global pandemic.
In that also, Facebook is using their platform to help Small Medium Enterprises (SME) even here in Malaysia. Globally Facebook will be offering grants for SMEs or even guide businesses to survive this period of MCO. If you need more information on that, do visit their website.
Source: Facebook
Nicole also added that they are also working with certain Non-Government Organisations (NGO) and Non-Profit Organisations; one of them is Yellow House KL. Of course, there are more that they are doing in the global fight of COVID-19. You can keep yourselves updated on their efforts on their newsroom.
Nicole also gave us a lot of good insights on how Facebook has adapted to the global pandemic situation. For that you should refer to the interview video. Facebook is a free Social Media platform that is available for free on Google’s Play Store for Android and Apple’s Play Store for the iOS.
Facebook is arguably one of the largest social media platforms across the world. What started as a small project to keep a class of college mates connected is now a multi billion dollar platform. The platform has become so big that it has an estimated 2.5 billion active users. In fact, in Malaysia, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who isn’t on Facebook.
The platform has come a long way from when it first launched though. Its design has been through many revisions since the days of Vampire Wars and Pokes. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that most users today may not recognise the Facebook of the past. The design we know now is a totally different from the original Facebook.
Facebook is about to get another redesign. Yep. You read that right. The social media platform has started testing out a new design which looks like its ready to make a debut. While it would be a stretch to call it fully refined, the redesign is more content focused and easy to navigate.
The Good: You get YOUR Content in and Dark Mode
The new layout seems to have an increased focus on content; particularly content that you’ve curated yourself through liking and subscribing. It also looks like the News Feed has been redesigned to be more chronological. In my short time with the redesign, I’ve seen more posts from my friends that are more up to date than I have in years! Now this is the best thing to happen to Facebook in recent years, in my opinion. It brings a more organic, personalised feed to the user and you don’t end up commenting on something that happened months ago just cause the algorithm decided it.
Another thing I’ve enjoyed is the accessibility of the new design. Everything is laid out for you to interact with. You don’t have to click endlessly into menus and pages you’ve never been into before. Getting to your privacy settings is also a lot more intuitive than before. It only took two clicks to get to the privacy menu.
Everything is within your view. Your notifications are kept neatly in the top right under the bell icon. You settings in the down facing arrow. Messenger is tucked neatly to the right side and integrates into the overall design. If that isn’t your style you can choose to have it as a pop up over your Facebook. You have you shortcuts and pages tucked neatly on the left.
The highlight for me is dark mode. The darker design to Facebook is a lot neater and easier on the eyes. That could be a bad thing too since it was easier to look at the screen for longer periods of time.
The Bad: Gradients Everywhere!
That said, Facebook feels a lot less refined thanks mainly to the amount of gradients in the design. The design team at Facebook has adopted gradients and a pretty fluorescent colour scheme. You’d have seen this colour scheme in the many Facebook apps on Android and iOS. They’ve now made it to the main page of Facebook.
The gradients and colour scheme is atrocious. It brings a very childish and immature feel to the platform. It also forces me to use dark mode so my eyes don’t bleed as much. I’d prefer it if the colours were a little less in your face and more subtle and easy to look at. Facebook could also afford to hit the brakes on the gradients.
That said, if the changes in the News Feed and the accessibility are staying. Facebook is taking a step in the right direction to being more open and more user centric. That said, not everyone will like the new redesign, but I’m looking forward to seeing the final version.
Facebook has internally started this thing they call Project
LightSpeed. It is exactly what it sounds like. Its aim is to simply make everything
move faster. Faster for the users that is. Then again, the world today revolves
plenty on user experience.
While the world in 2019 and 2020 has been putting plenty of emphasis on user security and privacy (Facebook just had a Data Privacy brief with us two weeks ago), it does not mean that user experience in terms of the User Interface (UI) design, speed, and intuitiveness can be ignored. They are supposed to be developed hand-in-hand; they are supposed to move forward together.
Source: Facebook
Facebook understands that completely, and that is why they
are introducing a new faster, lighter Facebook Messenger specifically for iOS.
Before we go on, we did ask on the reason for the exclusivity. If you go on Google’s
Play Store on your Android smartphone now and search for Facebook Messenger,
you will notice two types of Facebook Messenger apps on the device. One of them
is the normal blue pop-up coloured Facebook Messenger, and the other one is a white-faced
pop-up called Facebook Messenger Lite. We can explain the differences in that
further in the future (comment if you want that!). For now though, that also
means that Android users get to choose between using the full beans and might
of the regular Facebook Messenger app or choose to keep their devices running
nice and quick with Facebook Messenger Lite app.
Let us get back to Facebook Messenger app for iOS. It will
be available as an app update in the App Store, so if you already have the Facebook
Messenger app there is no reason you need to download another one. It should be
an update anyway, who are we kidding.
In layman terms, Facebook says that the new Messenger is
supposed to load up or start up faster. While you may not notice too big of a
difference at first, Facebook says that the benefit is plenty more visible over
time. Thanks to simplified mechanics of the app, it is also a smaller app than before.
That also means it consumes less storage space in your smartphone, which also
means you get to take more photos. It is not just simplified mechanics though. Apparently,
the engineers in Facebook has also simplified the experience within the app to not
only ensure a lighter load on the device, but for its users too.
Now for the technical bits. It is actually simpler than you think, not as scary or overly complex. The headline figures are 1.7 million to 360,000. That is the amount of codes that were in the previous iteration of the Facebook Messenger for iOS app, and the amount that it is reduced to with the current iteration. That also means that they managed to shrink the amount of codes contained within the app by 84%. Less codes means less processing needed, and so you get faster load times. It also means reduced complexities and less maintenance needed from Facebook’s side.
Source: Facebook
What happened to the other codes that was not used in the current
iteration? Cloud happened. To be specific, SQLite happened. What they did with
SQLite, like plenty of modern mobile apps is to simplify processes and start putting
plenty of the database on SQL’s database instead of storing every command on
the device. That also means that instead of loading everything on your
smartphone, whatever interaction you have with the app is happening on SQLite
instantly. That also means that everything on the database is stored and worked
on in a server farm somewhere. Again, less load on the device.
You are not losing the experience of a feature packed app
like the Messenger with the new update though. In fact, you might be getting
more. With the changes, you are not completely using a completely redesigned UI.
It is just a small improved UI with better response time. The key here is to
not make any major UI changes to the new Messenger build. Instead, Facebook
still wanted that familiarity with their users. Like previously mentioned though,
instead of storing each interaction as a unique interaction within the device,
they moved that to a server with SQLite.
There is more to that though. Instead of storing or
processing each interaction as unique interactions, they group them together,
combine them and make them mere reactions from the database instead of completely
recoating the app whenever something changes. That also means that instead of
storing multiple different screens as unique screens, you are now only getting elements
of screens popping up as you go along your Facebook Messenger app. Yes, you never
noticed the transition. But imagine having to keep loading new screens whenever
you scroll through the app and layering them over the previous screen.
The new Facebook Messenger app for iOS with LightSpeed is available
for free on Apple’s ever-growing Apple App Store platform. For existing Facebook
Messenger app for iOS users, the fourth major iteration is available to users
as a simple app update via the Apple App Store as well. LightSpeed is also
coming to Android’s Facebook apps in time. For more information on Facebook
Messenger’s update and Project LightSpeed, you can visit Facebook’s news
release and their engineering
blog.
*This article is contributed byNicole Tan, Country Director of Facebook Malaysia*
A fisherman who uses WhatsApp and Facebook to change his quality of life and keeps his community safe by alerting each other on weather and tide conditions, a non-profit that empowers the homeless towards financial independence by turning them into tour guides, a delicious sambal recipe made in Malaysia that gained acclaim across borders from Indonesia and the Philippines — these are real examples of business innovation previously unimaginable.
The year 2020 crowns a
decade of change that has upended traditional ways of starting, marketing and
growing businesses across the world. This is even more pronounced in Asia,
where entire countries have leapfrogged to the mobile internet, making the
region home to some of the world’s fastest-growing economies. According to the
Department of Statistics Malaysia, the nations’ digital economy contributed
18.5% to the national economy in 2018, while e-commerce contributed 8%,
highlighting digital transformation as a catalyst for expansion[1].
Source: Facebook
According to a
McKinsey report, by 2040, Asia could account for more than half of the global
GDP with global cross-order flows shifting towards Asia. The report shows how
these changes could shift globalisation towards regionalisation with 60 percent
of goods traded by Asian economies being within the region. In addition, 71
percent of Asian investment in start-ups is intraregional, and 74 percent of
Asian travelers travel within the region[2].
Malaysia’s exports
accounts for more than 71.5% of GDP[3].
Digital adoption in increasing productivity is crucial for SMEs to expand
further[4]
and digital tools give SMEs a boost in economic growth (revenue and sales 65%)
and go global (82% of exporting SMEs in Malaysia say that at least half of
their exports depend on online tools usage)[5].
Against this backdrop
of macroeconomic change, people’s expectations for the experiences they have
with brands and businesses is evolving fast. As we have seen over the last few
years, people adopt new technologies long before businesses do, and it
influences how they discover, research and finally make purchasing decisions.
We see this every day
on Facebook, where every day 1.62 billion people across the world come to
connect with people, products and services they care about. We stand at the
intersection of community and creativity where brands can identify, take
inspiration from and participate in the communities that people inhabit. At the
start of 2019, we shared three social trends that were on rise across our
platforms: ephemeral sharing, videos and messaging. As we head into 2020, these
trends have only intensified in our region. Simply put, Asia is about more —
more mobile, more video, more stories, more conversation and more commerce.
Malaysia is a truly
mobile-first nation with 88% owning smartphones. According to the Malaysian
Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), 77.6% of Malaysians are
spending time streaming or downloading videos online[6].
Last year we saw how
people show preference for sharing photographs or video over typing out a text
update, the comfort of knowing what you post isn’t going to stick around
forever and the need to share everyday moments with smaller audiences.
It’s interesting to note that video on mobile is far from a homogeneous experience. Unlike traditional video, mobile video experiences are not linear and vary based on a number of factors. Through our research and experience over the last few years, we’ve seen two distinct categories of video experiences that have accelerated largely due to mobile: “on-the-go” and “captivated viewing.” As a result of these changing viewing habits, people are most drawn to brands that are easy to discover and use, whether it’s through their strong presence in online communities or their high-quality mobile content across platforms. With the continued growth in streaming services, people will be looking to brands that can clearly communicate their offerings and to those that can create a more personalised viewing experience.
We’re continuing to
see fast adoption of ephemeral sharing as each of our Stories experiences
across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp now have more than half a
billion daily users[7]. As more
and more people use Stories, we’re making it easier for marketers to adopt this
format and reach people where they’re spending their time.
The same goes for
messaging. At the start of 2018, we shared that over 8 billion messages were
sent between people and businesses on Messenger every month. That number has
more than doubled to 20 billion messages this year – which shows that people
expect to communicate with businesses in much the same way as they message with
their friends. As people increasingly use messaging apps, we’re helping
businesses make the shift too. There are now over 40 million monthly active
businesses on Messenger (i.e. sending or receiving a message on Messenger)[8]
and research shows that people in emerging countries in Asia-Pacific are more
likely than the global average to message a business. In fact, 63% of
people surveyed in Asia-Pacific messaged a business last Holiday season[9].
More than 5 million businesses are actively using the WhatsApp Business app
each month[10].
While last year we saw
the ability to message with a business made people feel more confident about
the brand and more connected to it and create a connection that fosters brand
loyalty, this year we see an interesting subset of this preference for
messaging; the growing use of messaging or online chat to buy and sell. A study
by the Boston Consulting Group in partnership with Facebook across nine
countries found that Southeast Asia outpaces other countries surveyed in both
awareness and adoption of conversational commerce. Of the nine countries
surveyed, the percentage of respondents who had undertaken a conversational
commerce transaction was the highest in Thailand and Vietnam, at 40% and 36%
respectively, followed by Indonesia (29%), Malaysia (26%) and the Philippines
(23%). The rate of adoption for other countries is still nascent – US (5%),
Mexico (6%), India (10%), and Brazil (11%), which shows substantial opportunity
for growth[11]. The
study unveiled a remarkable finding that discovery and spending behavior of
digital consumers in between Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities are very similar,
debunking the myth that Tier 1 digital consumers shop more online. Once a Tier
2 shopper adopts online shopping, habits and preferences become very similar to
Tier 1. Except for the discovery journey, where Tier 2 shoppers don’t know what
they want to buy even more, which means they are even more encouraged by
inspiration-shopping.
Source: Tech Crunch
All of these developments mean that the commerce landscape will continue to evolve with people opting to interact with businesses via experiences that are most relevant, personal, and seamless in their daily lives. With increasing affluence and access to the mobile internet, the ways people discover new products is very much about a connected experience. Therefore, ensuring that your business and brands are visible and discoverable is going to be an essential element to winning in the new era of commerce.
Today,
Most Malaysian consumers want everything almost immediately, making every step
or delay a chance for them to abandon their journeys. Awareness, information
gaps and the inability to optimise technology are some causes that contributed
to the friction[12]. So
what can businesses do to prepare for this new era of commerce? Bring
connection back to the equation.
Businesses can enhance connections by designing
mobile-friendly websites, apps, marketing and real-time communication to reduce
friction and establish the best experiences for customers[13].
