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It's time to Geek Out. [upbeat music] Hello, we're back, and welcome to a new season of Geek Out with Matt Navara with me, Matt Navara. And me, Martin SFP Bryant.
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Now, we're doing things a bit differently this time around. Yes.
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Each week we'll be doing a live interview on Twitter Spaces with someone big in the world of social media, and then bringing the recording of the interview to you right here on this podcast.
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Yeah, it's a lot of fun to do the live interviews, but not everyone can listen at the time, so we're proudly double-dipping, or something like that. In this episode, we chat with Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp.
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With more than two billion regular users, WhatsApp is one of the most important apps in the world, and an important way for Facebook to reach an audience that might not engage as much with its other apps.
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We had loads to ask him.
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We talked about encryption, the spy boss who'd singled him out for criticism the day before we spoke, the growth of messaging for businesses, and we also got him to answer lots of questions from the Geek Out audience, too.
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Now, if you're listening to this soon enough, you can catch our next live interview with Shimona Mehta, Shopify's managing director for the EMEA region.
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So if you want to know all about the social shopping revolution happening right now, make sure you join us at 11:30 AM UK time on Wednesday, the 21st of July, 2021. We have to clarify the year.
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You might be listening to this in the space year 2149, in which case, hello from the past. I hope things have got better. Uh, that's gonna be on Twitter Spaces.
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There's a link to that in the show notes today, or you can listen back in next week's edition of the podcast. But now here's what happened when we spoke to Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp.
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I think we've just had, uh, Will join us. Will, are you there? Hey, Matt. Hey, how you doing? Good. How are you? Not too bad. Whereabouts in the world are you today? I, I wasn't quite sure where you'd be.
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Oh, I'm in, I'm in California. Oh, no. Well, I bet it's slightly better temperature than this. Isn't it, like, crazy weather there at the moment in terms of temperature?
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It, it's, it's hot, but, you know, honestly, it's, it's, it's been hot every summer for the last few years. I think that's just a new reality. Oh, God, well- Absolutely...
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my s- my sister's in Vancouver, and she has much the same, uh, further up into... She was saying the other day it was, like, 46 degrees. But, but anyway, um- Wow. That's scorching...
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we, um, we've got loads of stuff we want to get through and chat about. I really appreciate you, um, being willing to come on and chat to us about all this sort of stuff. Um, and I know you're very busy.
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No, thank you both for having me.
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Um, but I guess one, one of the things we wanted to kick off and chat about is probably the thing that's most recent, which was yesterday, which is this multi-device, um, feature, which is something that I know, um, I have wanted for a while, and lots of other people have asked me, do you know, when is it coming, you know, when's it gonna come out?
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And, and it's now here, but i- it's a bit of a technical kind of, um, achievement, isn't it? And also there is a caveat that you can't use multiple phones.
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So I just wondered if you could tell us a bit about kind of how it's come to be and, and what, what's, what's happening with it now. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, we, we announced this yesterday.
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It is, it's quite the technical achievement. You know, what we've...
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His- you know, historically, WhatsApp has been a, a, a service that works on just one phone only, and there's a couple exceptions to that we made work, so you can access WhatsApp on your desktop, uh, either an app or a website.
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You can use it on a portal. But all of them just rely on the fact that your phone is actually on, running, and connected to the internet. And the reason why is that we don't have a copy of anyone's messages.
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And so to do something with true security, um, including end-to-end encryption, we needed to find a way to let you access WhatsApp from multiple devices and do it in a rich way where you have your history and what you do syncs across without us ever having access- Right...
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to the messages. So that's, that's why it's a very hard technical problem. Um, we've been working on this for a number of years.
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And what we announced yesterday is we're now at a place where we can start the, a, a public beta of this, so people who, who wanna try the experience out can.
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And immediately what it makes better is those existing secondary devices, your, your desktop computer or your portal, but also what it sets us up to be able to do over time is add better rich support for multiple devices.
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You know, we've, we've heard a lot from people who want tablet support. Um, you know, it's certainly come up that some people wanna be able to put WhatsApp on multiple phones.
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You can kind of think about all these different things of what we might be able to do. Yeah. Um, but just starting off, the desktop experience is much better once you use this. Right.
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And this is a, as you say, it's in beta at the moment. So, uh- Yeah...
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sort of how many people at the moment kind of will, will notice it in terms of the population of users, and, and how quickly will it spread to people who, kind of, use WhatsApp?
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We'll make an option to join the beta available to a lot of people, but it'll, it'll, it'll be an option.
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So in WhatsApp, if you go to your linked devices screen, which is where you can authorize a, a, a web access, your desktop access, you'll see an option right there talking about the beta and asking if you wanna opt into it.
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And so how many people use it, w- you know, will, will certainly depend on how people want to.
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And a geeky sort of question, but in terms of the b- um, the WhatsApp beta, how many people do you typically have who are beta testing the, the app in general?
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Is it, is it a fairly large proportion of people, or is it quite, still quite small? Any sort of idea around that? It, it, it's fairly large.
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We don't, we don't have a lot of features where we do an opt-in beta on a specific feature where we say to people, "Hey, would you like to?"
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But we have, um, we have beta apps on iPhone and Android, people who've opted into our beta channel.
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So, uh, you mentioned the importance of end-to-end encryption there, and, uh, here in the UK, um, uh, Ken McCallum, the head of the UK spy agency MI5, named you specifically when, uh, he was, uh, talking, uh, yesterday about them wanting ex- exceptions to end-to-end encryption.
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Uh, he said that, uh, end-to-end encryption was important but that, uh, they should still be able to investigate certain people, um, by, uh, basically having some kind of f- backdoor.
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Um, and he said that, um, uh, Facebook had falsely presented encryption as a straight choice between, uh, privacy or safety for users, uh, and that, that the UK public opinion is clear.
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Terrorists, pedophiles, and serious criminals should not enjoy an absolute right to privacy, and that tech companies have solved harder problems when they really want to. And so he named you explicitly there.
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Um, what's your response to that? Well, well, look, th- this is not a new debate. The debate over encryption's been going on for two, three- [laughs]... decades.
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And there's always, there's, there's always been along the way a call for, "Gee, can we, can we find some solution that
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lets just the good guys access more information but doesn't create security risks that all the bad guys are gonna exploit?" And the reality is, I mean, technologists have looked at this for decades.
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If there were some clever solution, it would've come up by now. Mm-hmm. The sad reality is there's not. You know, we, we, we live in a world where there are a lot of online threats, and they're growing.
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Um, I actually just saw in, minutes before this, breaking in the news that Microsoft and Citizen Lab did an investigation that exposed a new spyware from a private Israeli company that's being used to, to spy on journalists and activists and human right defenders in Europe and elsewhere.
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Now, we've come out against a different spyware, uh, that we detected from a company called NSO Group a few years ago.
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We're seeing foreign governments increasingly be sophisticated on cyber warfare and cyber security issues.
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And so the real- you know, the reality is there's no way to lower the security for people's sensitive data, which is what a backdoor would be. It'd lower the security.
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There's no way to do that and then still guard against all of the threats we would see everywhere else. So, you know, our point of view is very simple. We need the best technological...
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We need the best technology possible to secure people's private information. Governments pushing to lower security would be bad.
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Um, if anything, we think governments should be pushing tech companies to mandate more security. Do you think it's fair that they've singled WhatsApp out, particularly in this instance?
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Or do you just think that's just, you know, part of the fun at the moment of them trying to make, stoke up interest in their, their version of what they think should be the, the way it should be?
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Or, or do you think it's a bit unreasonable that you're, you're singled out? 'Cause there are other messaging apps that have encryption. There are other messaging apps that have encryption, which is great.
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Um, you know, I, I, I get that we're, you know, a lot of people in the UK use WhatsApp. Um, I think they use it because of the security.
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So I get if you're gonna complain about security, that WhatsApp's the thing to point to, um, we're secure. And, and what... So in India as well, it's... So this is, like, not, like you say, not just a UK thing.
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This is a, a, a thing around the world- No... around governments battling, um, with, um, with con- tech companies around encryption.
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And there, am I right in saying you're su- you've sued or are suing that government around that? How, how do you see that panning out? We have. You know, the, the, the government there has, um...
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You know, they've, they've publicly said they're, they're supportive of end-to-end encryption, but they've asked for a thing, uh, and mandated in some new rules they call traceability.
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And what they're asking for is the ability to come to a, to s- you know, to someone like us, to What- to WhatsApp or a different messaging service, and say, "Here's something someone said.
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We know someone said this, and maybe, you know, it got forwarded around or we saw it. We don't know who said it first. Search every one of your users, go through and look at everything they've said,
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and figure out who said it first, 'cause we wanna go punish the person who said something." Um, and there's no way... I mean, you...
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We could have a, a long conversation about whether that's a good idea or not, whether a company should go search everyone in a country to see who said something first.
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But regardless, there's no way to do that with end-to-end encryption, because by design we don't see what people say. We don't have a copy of what people say.
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Um, so we've challenged that provision, you know, something that, that they've talked about for years, and we very publicly a- as well as privately made our points about why we just think it's wrong.
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It's, it's against everything we stand for. Um, and so we've challenged that.
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So we decided to file a lawsuit in the Delhi High Court, um, challenging it, including under the privacy guarantees of the Constitution of India.
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Um, and you know, we're hopeful that, um, when we really get into the details and, and, and go through all the, the consequences and the privacy issues, the security issues, and we, we make our case, that, um, that we'll get a favorable outcome.
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Yeah. Martin, yeah, what- Yeah. Yeah, 'cause it... Well, it feels like that there are... Well, we mentioned the UK and India, but you're getting a barrage of these requests and, uh,
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in- to increasingly shrill degrees perhaps from, uh, governments, uh, who are worried about, um, the amount of communication that is, uh, is encrypted these days.
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You're going to lose this fight somewhere eventually, aren't you? Well, uh, essentially we already have. I mean, there, there's...
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This isn't new, and there's a bunch of countries that have decided they just don't believe in letting citizens talk to each other privately. Mm. Um, and they block us. Yeah.
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You know, we, we off- we offer a secure service all around the world. I wish every country would, would let it work, would, would accept that, would see the benefits. They don't all.
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Um, you know, we're, we're, we're frequently blocked in mainland China. We've been blocked off and on in other countries. Um, even in places where we're popular we've been temporarily blocked.
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For a number of years we were blocked, um, quite regularly in Brazil before we won some really important legal rulings, including an appellate court ruling that end-to-end encryption is critical to human rights.
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Um, so it's not new for us. Right. And where, where does this end, then? Do you... You either have to find backdoors, or I suppose you have to pull out of countries that, um, are, uh, wanting, uh, this kind of backdoor.
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Well, we... I mean, we, we view it as we're, we're available anywhere, and it's up to countries to decide whether or not they wanna block us.
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And look, in, in practice, a number of countries that are not, you know, liberal democracies with a lot of freedom have on balance, even though they would, you know, they would normally love to be able to spy on what their citizens say, have on balance just accepted that people wanna use WhatsApp.
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People wanna use secure messaging services from other companies too. I guess one of the, uh, before one- Um, I- Sorry, go on. Carry on, Will. Yeah. No, I was just... I mean, my, my hope for the...
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You know, you asked where does this end.
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I mean, my hope for where this ends is we start to realize that on balance, securing the private, sensitive information- Of citizens is absolutely necessary in a world with more online threats, and it's important globally for promoting human rights.
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You know, the, the UN Human Rights Council actually just two days ago, um, came out with a statement condemning internet shutdowns and talking about how encrypted communication is important for people to be able to speak freely to each other.
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It's a human right.
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Um, w- the only other thing I think I w- wanted to sort of wrap this up on in terms of the encryption bit, 'cause like you say, we could probably speak about this for, for hours and still have the similar kind of w- space where we're gonna end up with it.
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Yeah. But, um, but I guess lots of people say Facebook is an advertising business. It relies on tracking users.
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It doesn't have the strongest and best track record in privacy, and, and it now it's got a very strong encryption message, um, and sort of privacy message. Isn't that, like, a bit of a contradiction?
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Is that a ch- it's gonna be a pretty big challenge to overcome for what you're trying to achieve, I would've thought. Well, it's not new to us. Yeah.
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I mean, you know, we've, we've had end-to-end encryption in WhatsApp for five years. We've been committed to it for a long time.
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I guess, you know, I might turn that around and say to the, you know, the people who are proposing changing how services like WhatsApp work, let's be clear about what they're saying.
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They're asking private companies to store copies of everyone's messages, to have access to read what everyone says. Is that really what we want? Do we really want private companies to be able to do that?
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Well, it's, it, like you say, it's gonna be a, a debate that goes on for some time, and I would love to spend some, bit more time talking about it.
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But, uh, there was a couple of other things I know that me and Martin wanted to touch upon. Of course. Um, and, uh, one of them really is just more about, first of all, like, messaging in general.
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I just wanted to get your take on where has messaging come from in the last few years in terms of how people use it, what features apps like WhatsApp and others have been focusing on, and then how that's slightly evolved now, where, where it's headed, you know?
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Have you seen sort of a distinct change in, in the purpose and usage of, of WhatsApp and other apps like it? Yeah, absolutely. We certainly have.
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I mean, three things I'd point to in terms of just how it's changed over the fast- past few years. One is just the degree to which, um, people are using messaging for their conversations. COVID accelerated this.
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We're all, you know, we're, we th- we think of the WhatsApp product in a way as helping you have a face-to-face conversation when you can't be sitting face to face with each other.
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Well, this last year and a half, frequently we haven't been able to sit, uh, physically near someone. So we, so just usage in general has gone up. Um, you know, my, my wife and I, um, we have a daughter.
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She's thir- almost three years old now. We realized after she was born we didn't agree on how to pronounce her name, and we'd picked her name. Uh, uh, it's Naomi is how I say it. My wife says Naomi.
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And it took us a while to figure out how we'd, how we'd mess that up as parents. [laughs] Well, the reason why was all the conversations about how to name our daughter, we typed out with our thumbs,
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and it, we didn't even think about it.
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It just didn't feel any different than sitting next to each other, uh, which gets to the next trend I would, I would call out, which is w- over the last few years, I think we've gone from messaging being mostly about typing things to increasingly about video calling and voice calling, and we see that on WhatsApp.
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The fastest part, fastest growing part of WhatsApp over the last few years, especially this last year and a half, has been voice and video calls, um, because people wanna feel like they're, they're ha- having a richer conversation with someone.
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They wanna hear the sound of their voice and not just see the letters they typed on the screen. So, um- Um. Uh, no, Martin- Go ahead... and then we were talking earlier about WhatsApp Business as well.
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There was some stuff that we were talking about. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was literally actually gonna be my third trend, by the way- Oh...
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was, you know, the degree to which we're seeing people use WhatsApp for business, a great, great segue into the question. [laughs] Yeah, so, well, what's the plan there?
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Because obviously we've seen, uh, WhatsApp becoming more of a business tool in, in recent years.
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Um, I took some refresher driving lessons, uh, a few years ago when I hadn't been driving for a few years, and, uh, uh, I knew that WhatsApp had become such a prevalent part of life when a total stranger, uh, my driving instructor, who'd never messaged me before, messaged me for the first time after booking him through WhatsApp.
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It was like, "Oh, okay," [laughs] so, um, rather than, uh, uh, sending text messages. Uh, and it's developed a lot since then. So, uh, how is that going to evolve over, let's say, the next year?
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What, what can we expect to see from the business side of things? Yeah, so what we're focused on, I mean, we've seen this trend.
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A lot of people, a lot of businesses are using WhatsApp, and a lot of people are choosing to, to reach out to businesses on WhatsApp instead of calling them on the phone or going to a website.
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Um, and, and, and it makes sense when you think about why. We hear this from people all the time. Uh, when you call someone on the phone, especially when you call a larger company, you get stuck on hold.
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You get routed to a call center. It's not a good experience. And if you can just message really quickly on WhatsApp, it's much more convenient for you, and it's actually better for the business, too.
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'Cause it's much more efficient for them to deal with multiple customers, solve their problems, and at the end of the day, have a ha- happy customer or make a sale.
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So what we're focused on is, okay, given this is happening, how do we make it better? How do we make it more efficient for businesses? How do we make consumers love the experience?
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Um, so we've done things like a couple of years ago, we added a, a, a dedicated WhatsApp Business app. Oh.
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So if you're a business, you can download a version of WhatsApp that has extra features for businesses, things like auto replies, um, or, or recently things like listing out what products you have for sale.
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We've seen tremendous growth with that. We have over 50 million active users of that app.
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Um, and over time, what we're gonna be doing is just adding richer functionality so that you can interact with a business, see what they have, pay them potentially, depending on what country you're in.
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Just, just get everything done over WhatsApp without having to go to a website, without having to make a call and get stuck on hold.
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And this is, this is, this is part of a broader strategy, because we've seen lots of business features from other parts of Facebook as well.
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But do you, do you view this as a, an overall company-wide strategy across all the different, um, divisions of Facebook, or is this you plow, plow on with your business strategy, Messenger's got its, et cetera?
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It's both. So there, there's some things that we're doing that are gonna work really well across all of, um, Facebook services. For example, there's a new feature called Shops. So if a business wants to set up a shop,
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um, they can have that be on Instagram. So someone can, if they, if someone finds them on Instagram, they can see what they have for sale, and they can also have that be available on WhatsApp.
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So if after you found them on Instagram, you start messaging with them on WhatsApp, you can actually- Refer back to the stuff they have for sale and, and, and close the loop, and actually even buy something if you want to.
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Um, but it's, you know, but it's also just coming out of how people are using WhatsApp.
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So there's a lot of stuff we're doing that's just very WhatsApp specific because people are choosing to talk to businesses on WhatsApp. What happened to messaging bots?
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It just feels like it was a big thing for a while, and everyone was talking about it, and particularly Messenger, maybe slightly more so than, than WhatsApp.
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And there has been sort of quite a lot of changes and im- and improvements in terms of how bots and u- use different bits of tech to make it more of a rich and enjoyable and, and f- realistic experience into chatting to someone that maybe could be real, but probably aren't.
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Uh, is, is bots still something that you're focusing on? Are you seeing any really genuine utility in bots, uh, for WhatsApp? Well, there's this thing with technology trends.
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We hear a lot about them early on, and then you hear a little bit less about them, and you wonder what happened, but meanwhile behind the scenes they've just been steadily growing.
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Um, I actually think there's, there's a really great example of bots this year that was really, really, really powerful and that a lot of people used, which is, um, vaccine and COVID information bots.
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So we had on WhatsApp in, you know, over 100 health organizations and governments around the world set up either initially COVID information lines, so you can message on WhatsApp and get information about COVID, and more recently, um, full-on vaccine services.
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So in a number of countries, you, you instead of going to a, a really complicated website, instead of calling a phone number and being stuck on hold, you message a bot on WhatsApp to book your vaccine appointment.
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Um, most recently, just actually, uh, the CDC in the US launched one in, uh, Spanish language bot.
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Um, you know, a lot of people who use WhatsApp in the US are Spanish speaking, and so you can message the CDC on WhatsApp, and the bot will tell you where you can go get a vaccine, book your appointment, and even arrange a, a free car, um, share ride to come pick you up and take you there.
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We saw that in a bunch of countries around the world. So, you know, hundreds of millions of people this last year have been interacting with bots. We don't talk about it a lot as bots.
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We just talk about it as, hey, they messaged on WhatsApp, and they got help around COVID. Uh, you know, I...
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'Cause I, I used the COVID app, um, COVID bot quite a lot because I've got friends who work in, in the UN stuff, and they were really seeing the benefits and generating the results from, from, from using it.
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So I know that it was, uh, uh, really, really popular with, uh, lots of people.
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So we mentioned Messenger there, and recently Nick Clegg, obviously Facebook's comms chief, uh, recently said that integrating Facebook's messaging apps into one unified service is taking a lot longer than expected.
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What's the holdup? What's happening?
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Well, the, the features we wanna, uh, offer, you know, let people who want to who are using Messenger message someone on WhatsApp or vice versa, um, you know, they, they, they seem simple on the surface, but behind the scenes there's a lot of hard technological problems- Mm...
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to solve. Uh, you know, we, we just talked about multi-device, for example.
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Um, well, if you wanna be able to deliver, you know, some messages to one app and some messages to a different app on your phone or two different phones, that can be hard.
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You know, another one is, um, bring an end-to-end encryption to Messenger and Instagram Direct.
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Uh, if, you know, before you could imagine messaging someone on WhatsApp from Messenger, it needs to be end-to-end encrypted, and that's a, that's a very hard technology. Um, to, to be clear, I mean, sometimes...
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'Cause the, you know, the reporting on this has been kind of around the high level vision. To be clear, the, the types of things we're talking about offering is not, you know, not merging everything. Mm.
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It's really letting you if you want to, um, have experiences where you could message someone who's using a different app.
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You know, maybe you're, you know, maybe, maybe Matt is using WhatsApp, and Martin, you're using Messenger, but you have Matt's phone number, and rather than switching over to WhatsApp to talk to him, you just want to, you wanna stay on Messenger and send him a message and have him get it on WhatsApp.
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It's things like that. Right. And when, when's the end goal for that? And so is, is there a timeline that you're working to? Do you expect there to be some sort of finality to that piece of work?
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I'm guessing it's quite a lot to do, so. No, there's no specific date, and it, it's a, it's a multi-year project. All right. Well, ch- just for the...
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We've about 10 minutes before I know you've got to head off, so that we'll change here slightly, and I wanted to ask you a little bit about the stuff that, um, um, that your boss, Mark Zuckerberg, talked a lot about over the last year or two, which is AR and VR.
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And, you know, a lot of the stuff that, um, Facebook is investing in is to do with the Oculus and experiences in, in virtual worlds and using AR and, and all the kind of clever tech around that.
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But sort of bringing that back to your job and where you, you sit in, in the scheme of the Facebook suite of apps and things, you know, what...
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how do you see WhatsApp fitting into a world that may be 5, 10, 15 years from now is not necessarily d- dedicated to the smartphone but is some other device where we predominantly consume content and experience, uh, whatever we want to do online?
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How does WhatsApp look in that kind of a world? You know, the way I think about it is, is what does WhatsApp look like in a world where mobile phones aren't the main thing people are using?
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For today the mobile phone is the, is the main computer. For most people it's the only computer they use. Um, we see this already with, you know, smart devices in your home. So if you look at Facebook Portal, one of the
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great features on it, how a lot of people use it, is making video calls to their family. So you can sit at home in your kitchen and make a call to s- you know, a family member, and they might even just be on their phone.
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So you can do it on WhatsApp, and they can receive it on their WhatsApp phone. But looking ahead, if you think about all these new technologies, for a lot of them I think
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something people are gonna wanna do is share something or talk to someone who isn't there as if they're there.
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If you're walking around about your day wearing smart glasses, you're gonna wanna be able to send a note to your spouse.
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You're gonna wanna be able to capture a photo of a cool moment and share it with a parent or a child, and WhatsApp will fit right in for that. Or, you know, maybe, maybe technology goes in a different way.
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Maybe people are using, you know, smart devices in their ear where they say, "Hey, you know, Alexa, Siri, Facebook," whatever.
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Um, and there you're gonna be able to wanna place a phone call, and that's, that's what WhatsApp is. Uh, and so...
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And there's some other stuff as well that we want to quickly ask you before we jump into the last five minutes around, um, lots of questions that we did have some people who wanted to ask on things about features, things that w- aren't in Facebook.
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Why aren't they in Face- uh, in WhatsApp, sorry. So be- but before we do that, I just- Mm...
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wanted to ask you a quick question about, uh, WhatsApp beta info, Jane Wong, and all the people that leak a lot of these features that your teams are working on. Um, how, how do you view that?
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Is it kind of something that's kind of like funny or a little bit annoying, or is it interesting that, you know, waiting for them to discover it? Well, how do you view that?
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Well, I think it's fun, and I think, you know, the other thing is it's, it's exciting that people are really interested in what we're working on.
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I mean, it's, it's really fun to get to work on a service that people like and use and care about what's coming next or how it's changing.
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Um, you know, obviously some, you know, sure, do we wish we could control when people find out about every new thing we're doing and, and do it exactly to our schedule?
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Sure, sometimes, but at the end of the day, it's kind of fun, um, that, that, that this stuff is out there and people can learn about what we're doing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
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And, um, and I know that the, some of the guys at WhatsApp beta info are constantly kind of messaging me, "What have you found?" And, and sending me details of other things. So a lot of it goes on.
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I don't know how long it, it's been going on for them, but I've certainly been, uh, playing around with it for a few years. It's, uh, it's a, a geeky hobby.
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[laughs] But, um, but certainly we've got loads of questions from people that wanted to ask stuff.
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Um, and so rather than kind of the up and down of getting someone up on a Space and things, to get through as many as we could in, say, five or six minutes or so, we've got a, a list of them.
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So, uh, maybe me and Martin will take one or two from this list- Hmm... that we've compiled. And Martin, what was the first one we had? Okay. So someone asks, uh, "Will WhatsApp get its own version of live audio rooms?"
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I mean, I... Uh, nothing to describe there, and I, you know, I guess it would depend. Uh, we're, we're not really a service for connecting with people.
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I mean, if you think about Twitter Spaces for example, we're not really a service for connecting with people you don't know and talking about things and sharing that out to a broad audience. Yeah.
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Uh, we certainly have audio calling, and we think that's really, really, um, good, and it's gr- you know, usage has grown a lot and we've been doing work to make it better.
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And so we will have improvements coming to audio calling, but it's kind of a different need. Yeah. Got it.
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Uh, the other one was, "Will WhatsApp get any emoji reaction features for individual messages within a chat, much like you do on Messenger and, and other sort of apps like it?" Yeah.
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No- we know people love that and, and, and, you know, even how I use WhatsApp, I, I reply with emojis all the time, so can certainly see some of the benefits there, but, you know, not something we have, uh, at the moment.
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And I guess that's the kind of thing where the scrutiny we get from people like WhatsApp Beta Info or, or others out there is always the way you would tell if we were working on something like that. Got it. M- Martin?
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Uh, an interesting one, can we have an edit button for messages? Well, y- y- you know, this comes up a lot, and there's, there's trade-offs here. I mean, we have a delete button. I...
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and, and, you know, sometimes people actually ask, "Okay, when you delete a message why does it say you deleted it? Uh, why does it tell everyone?"
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And the, the reason why is you, you don't kind of want people to be confused about what's going on in a conversation.
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So the trade-off with an edit button is if you add an edit button, I could say something and then you could respond to it, and then I could totally change what I'd said, and it would look like you, you know, you, you responded.
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I mean, the, the... You could imagine me saying something benign, and you say, "I agree," and then I change it to something- [laughs]... controversial, and now it looks like you agree. So you've probably got to...
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If you do an edit button, you probably got to have an easy way to show that it changed, and that adds a little complexity.
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So there's, there's trade-offs there versus just the simplicity of you go back and forth and say things, which is kind of like how real conversations work.
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You know, again, we're trying to mimic a little bit of a real conversation where you can't really go back and, like, edit the transcript of what you said.
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So you're sticking to the Twitter line of there's no need for an edit button, basically. That's where we are with that one. I think that's fair to say.
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[laughs] Well, I mean, I, I wouldn't say that's necessarily true for all services. Yeah, yeah. You know, we have an edit button on, on Facebook, and I think it, it, it works well there. I think
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w- with WhatsApp it does feel a lot like a conversation, so we'd wanna think about how do you not lose that feeling of conversation. This one was a really popular one.
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It was probably one of the most, uh, liked comments from somebody, which was, "Can we have a way to exit a group chat without a message showing XX has left the group?" Yeah, we hear that all the time.
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[laughs] I mean, here's where it's not, it's not quite what people are asking, but here's where I will kind of jump the gun a little bit and describe something we're working on.
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I mean, o- one thing we also hear from people is, I join a group that's, you know, it's particularly loud and noisy, and it's not the most important thing
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for me, but I, I, I wanna still be in the group and be able to see what's happening. So we are working on, um, a new version of an archive folder where you can take a group and put it in that folder and y- it won't...
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When messages come to it, it won't bump to the top of your inbox like your regular threads do. But you'll still have them, and you'll still have a way to go see, uh, the messages as they come in.
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And so that, that's another thing that we've heard that's a, a very popular request around groups is, okay, I'm in these groups that are, they're a little less important to me, but I still wanna be in them.
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How do I keep track of what's going on without it overwhelming me? Right. Martin, what you got? Um, when will... What's sticking with kind of, um, group conversation, when will WhatsApp introduce a poll feature?
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Oh, that's a, that's a popular one as well. Okay. Um, nope, no plans. Won't, won't, won't preview anything there. Uh, well, we'll skip. We've got, like, two more minutes.
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We'll have to, we'll do some quick, like, n- n- nothing to say, or it's a good idea, but no plans, whatever, on it, some of these.
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So the quick ones are, uh, payment features in Europe, WhatsApp Pay, uh, when's that gonna happen do you think? We, we'd love to have payment features in a, in, in as many countries as possible.
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You know, really the sticking point for us is the work in each country specific, and we have to work through the process to get regulatory approval. So for now, the first two places we launched are India and Brazil.
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Um, and, and it'll, it, it could be a while before we're somewhere else. Martin?
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I suppose, I suppose you, you, uh, with multi-device, this kind of ac- answers this one with just use a browser, but is there an iPad version coming? There's no iPad version, but with multi-device you can do it.
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And w- when will Spark AR be WhatsApp audience tested? Oh, good question. No, no, no definitive date. No definitive date. Uh, let's pick three more and then we'll just put it to a close.
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Martin, if you're on, will I have another little look down this list? 'Cause a long list. Uh- S- someone's asking about branded or themed group chats. That's a new... That's a weird one.
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I, I haven't heard of that one before. Uh- Yeah. Well, we do now have, we do now have the ability for people to change the, the wallpaper on a thread.
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I guess it's for themselves, but, you know, one thing we hear people like to do is change the, the backgrounds on different threads so they can more easily keep track of what- That's the one- Yeah.
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I, I suppose be- because, uh, Instagram has, uh, you know, and, and Messenger have branded ones, don't they? Yeah. Yeah. It's, uh, a nice way of, uh, earning a, another line of income.
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And I think the last one will be the one that, again, also got a lot of, uh, sort of likes on it was... Where has it gone now? I just said that. I've lost it again. Oh, it's the out of office.
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Yeah, making the out of office features available for non-business accounts. Yeah. It's good to hear people... One, that we did add that for business accounts, one of the top features- Yeah...
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for business accounts on the business app. So it's good to hear people would like that themselves. Absolutely. I get it. You go on vacation and you want calls to go to voicemail.
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And something I didn't ask earlier, in terms of WhatsApp status, you know, in the UK I don't see hu- huge amounts of usage, and I know that it is really popular.
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Where in the world is it really popular, and just how popular is status? 'Cause to us it doesn't seem like anything happens on it. [laughs] It's quite popular, but you're right. It varies country by country.
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So there are a number of, you know, a number of countries where WhatsApp's incredibly popular, where a lot of people will share what's going on in their life to status, and a lot of people take a look at it.
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Um, so it's q- it, it is quite a popular feature. Awesome. Well, the question we didn't ask you, um, which was what somebody did put to us, was asking if you think Gareth Southgate was too defensive- [laughs]...
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with his tactics in the final of football, which I know you, you saw as well. [laughs] I guess they, uh, didn't get the memo.
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Thank you for everyone for joining us, and thank you, a, a special thank you to the team at, uh, WhatsApp who made it possible for us to chat.
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And, uh, and again, thank you, Will, for, uh, being with us today, and we'll, uh, hopefully catch up again soon. So there you go. Thanks to Will for taking the time to speak to us.
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Next week we'll be speaking to Shimona Mehta, Shopify's managing director for the EMEA region, about how social platforms are embracing shopping.
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And if you want to listen live, you can hear it on Twitter Spaces at 11:30 AM UK time on Wednesday the 21st of July, 2021.
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There's a link in the show notes so you can get a reminder in your notifications on Twitter for when we go live. That's all for now, though. See you soon. Goodbye, geeks.
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[outro music]
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It's time to Geek Out. [upbeat music] Hello, we're back, and welcome to a new season of Geek Out with Matt Navara with me, Matt Navara. And me, Martin SFP Bryant.
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Now, we're doing things a bit differently this time around. Yes.
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Each week we'll be doing a live interview on Twitter Spaces with someone big in the world of social media, and then bringing the recording of the interview to you right here on this podcast.
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Yeah, it's a lot of fun to do the live interviews, but not everyone can listen at the time, so we're proudly double-dipping, or something like that. In this episode, we chat with Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp.
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With more than two billion regular users, WhatsApp is one of the most important apps in the world, and an important way for Facebook to reach an audience that might not engage as much with its other apps.
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We had loads to ask him.
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We talked about encryption, the spy boss who'd singled him out for criticism the day before we spoke, the growth of messaging for businesses, and we also got him to answer lots of questions from the Geek Out audience, too.
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Now, if you're listening to this soon enough, you can catch our next live interview with Shimona Mehta, Shopify's managing director for the EMEA region.
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So if you want to know all about the social shopping revolution happening right now, make sure you join us at 11:30 AM UK time on Wednesday, the 21st of July, 2021. We have to clarify the year.
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You might be listening to this in the space year 2149, in which case, hello from the past. I hope things have got better. Uh, that's gonna be on Twitter Spaces.
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There's a link to that in the show notes today, or you can listen back in next week's edition of the podcast. But now here's what happened when we spoke to Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp.
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I think we've just had, uh, Will join us. Will, are you there? Hey, Matt. Hey, how you doing? Good. How are you? Not too bad. Whereabouts in the world are you today? I, I wasn't quite sure where you'd be.
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Oh, I'm in, I'm in California. Oh, no. Well, I bet it's slightly better temperature than this. Isn't it, like, crazy weather there at the moment in terms of temperature?
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It, it's, it's hot, but, you know, honestly, it's, it's, it's been hot every summer for the last few years. I think that's just a new reality. Oh, God, well- Absolutely...
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my s- my sister's in Vancouver, and she has much the same, uh, further up into... She was saying the other day it was, like, 46 degrees. But, but anyway, um- Wow. That's scorching...
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we, um, we've got loads of stuff we want to get through and chat about. I really appreciate you, um, being willing to come on and chat to us about all this sort of stuff. Um, and I know you're very busy.
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No, thank you both for having me.
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Um, but I guess one, one of the things we wanted to kick off and chat about is probably the thing that's most recent, which was yesterday, which is this multi-device, um, feature, which is something that I know, um, I have wanted for a while, and lots of other people have asked me, do you know, when is it coming, you know, when's it gonna come out?
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And, and it's now here, but i- it's a bit of a technical kind of, um, achievement, isn't it? And also there is a caveat that you can't use multiple phones.
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So I just wondered if you could tell us a bit about kind of how it's come to be and, and what, what's, what's happening with it now. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, we, we announced this yesterday.
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It is, it's quite the technical achievement. You know, what we've...
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His- you know, historically, WhatsApp has been a, a, a service that works on just one phone only, and there's a couple exceptions to that we made work, so you can access WhatsApp on your desktop, uh, either an app or a website.
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You can use it on a portal. But all of them just rely on the fact that your phone is actually on, running, and connected to the internet. And the reason why is that we don't have a copy of anyone's messages.
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And so to do something with true security, um, including end-to-end encryption, we needed to find a way to let you access WhatsApp from multiple devices and do it in a rich way where you have your history and what you do syncs across without us ever having access- Right...
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to the messages. So that's, that's why it's a very hard technical problem. Um, we've been working on this for a number of years.
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And what we announced yesterday is we're now at a place where we can start the, a, a public beta of this, so people who, who wanna try the experience out can.
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And immediately what it makes better is those existing secondary devices, your, your desktop computer or your portal, but also what it sets us up to be able to do over time is add better rich support for multiple devices.
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You know, we've, we've heard a lot from people who want tablet support. Um, you know, it's certainly come up that some people wanna be able to put WhatsApp on multiple phones.
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You can kind of think about all these different things of what we might be able to do. Yeah. Um, but just starting off, the desktop experience is much better once you use this. Right.
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And this is a, as you say, it's in beta at the moment. So, uh- Yeah...
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sort of how many people at the moment kind of will, will notice it in terms of the population of users, and, and how quickly will it spread to people who, kind of, use WhatsApp?
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We'll make an option to join the beta available to a lot of people, but it'll, it'll, it'll be an option.
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So in WhatsApp, if you go to your linked devices screen, which is where you can authorize a, a, a web access, your desktop access, you'll see an option right there talking about the beta and asking if you wanna opt into it.
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And so how many people use it, w- you know, will, will certainly depend on how people want to.
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And a geeky sort of question, but in terms of the b- um, the WhatsApp beta, how many people do you typically have who are beta testing the, the app in general?
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Is it, is it a fairly large proportion of people, or is it quite, still quite small? Any sort of idea around that? It, it, it's fairly large.
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We don't, we don't have a lot of features where we do an opt-in beta on a specific feature where we say to people, "Hey, would you like to?"
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But we have, um, we have beta apps on iPhone and Android, people who've opted into our beta channel.
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So, uh, you mentioned the importance of end-to-end encryption there, and, uh, here in the UK, um, uh, Ken McCallum, the head of the UK spy agency MI5, named you specifically when, uh, he was, uh, talking, uh, yesterday about them wanting ex- exceptions to end-to-end encryption.
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Uh, he said that, uh, end-to-end encryption was important but that, uh, they should still be able to investigate certain people, um, by, uh, basically having some kind of f- backdoor.
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Um, and he said that, um, uh, Facebook had falsely presented encryption as a straight choice between, uh, privacy or safety for users, uh, and that, that the UK public opinion is clear.
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Terrorists, pedophiles, and serious criminals should not enjoy an absolute right to privacy, and that tech companies have solved harder problems when they really want to. And so he named you explicitly there.
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Um, what's your response to that? Well, well, look, th- this is not a new debate. The debate over encryption's been going on for two, three- [laughs]... decades.
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And there's always, there's, there's always been along the way a call for, "Gee, can we, can we find some solution that
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lets just the good guys access more information but doesn't create security risks that all the bad guys are gonna exploit?" And the reality is, I mean, technologists have looked at this for decades.
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If there were some clever solution, it would've come up by now. Mm-hmm. The sad reality is there's not. You know, we, we, we live in a world where there are a lot of online threats, and they're growing.
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Um, I actually just saw in, minutes before this, breaking in the news that Microsoft and Citizen Lab did an investigation that exposed a new spyware from a private Israeli company that's being used to, to spy on journalists and activists and human right defenders in Europe and elsewhere.
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Now, we've come out against a different spyware, uh, that we detected from a company called NSO Group a few years ago.
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We're seeing foreign governments increasingly be sophisticated on cyber warfare and cyber security issues.
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And so the real- you know, the reality is there's no way to lower the security for people's sensitive data, which is what a backdoor would be. It'd lower the security.
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There's no way to do that and then still guard against all of the threats we would see everywhere else. So, you know, our point of view is very simple. We need the best technological...
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We need the best technology possible to secure people's private information. Governments pushing to lower security would be bad.
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Um, if anything, we think governments should be pushing tech companies to mandate more security. Do you think it's fair that they've singled WhatsApp out, particularly in this instance?
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Or do you just think that's just, you know, part of the fun at the moment of them trying to make, stoke up interest in their, their version of what they think should be the, the way it should be?
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Or, or do you think it's a bit unreasonable that you're, you're singled out? 'Cause there are other messaging apps that have encryption. There are other messaging apps that have encryption, which is great.
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Um, you know, I, I, I get that we're, you know, a lot of people in the UK use WhatsApp. Um, I think they use it because of the security.
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So I get if you're gonna complain about security, that WhatsApp's the thing to point to, um, we're secure. And, and what... So in India as well, it's... So this is, like, not, like you say, not just a UK thing.
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This is a, a, a thing around the world- No... around governments battling, um, with, um, with con- tech companies around encryption.
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And there, am I right in saying you're su- you've sued or are suing that government around that? How, how do you see that panning out? We have. You know, the, the, the government there has, um...
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You know, they've, they've publicly said they're, they're supportive of end-to-end encryption, but they've asked for a thing, uh, and mandated in some new rules they call traceability.
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And what they're asking for is the ability to come to a, to s- you know, to someone like us, to What- to WhatsApp or a different messaging service, and say, "Here's something someone said.
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We know someone said this, and maybe, you know, it got forwarded around or we saw it. We don't know who said it first. Search every one of your users, go through and look at everything they've said,
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and figure out who said it first, 'cause we wanna go punish the person who said something." Um, and there's no way... I mean, you...
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We could have a, a long conversation about whether that's a good idea or not, whether a company should go search everyone in a country to see who said something first.
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But regardless, there's no way to do that with end-to-end encryption, because by design we don't see what people say. We don't have a copy of what people say.
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Um, so we've challenged that provision, you know, something that, that they've talked about for years, and we very publicly a- as well as privately made our points about why we just think it's wrong.
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It's, it's against everything we stand for. Um, and so we've challenged that.
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So we decided to file a lawsuit in the Delhi High Court, um, challenging it, including under the privacy guarantees of the Constitution of India.
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Um, and you know, we're hopeful that, um, when we really get into the details and, and, and go through all the, the consequences and the privacy issues, the security issues, and we, we make our case, that, um, that we'll get a favorable outcome.
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Yeah. Martin, yeah, what- Yeah. Yeah, 'cause it... Well, it feels like that there are... Well, we mentioned the UK and India, but you're getting a barrage of these requests and, uh,
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in- to increasingly shrill degrees perhaps from, uh, governments, uh, who are worried about, um, the amount of communication that is, uh, is encrypted these days.
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You're going to lose this fight somewhere eventually, aren't you? Well, uh, essentially we already have. I mean, there, there's...
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This isn't new, and there's a bunch of countries that have decided they just don't believe in letting citizens talk to each other privately. Mm. Um, and they block us. Yeah.
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You know, we, we off- we offer a secure service all around the world. I wish every country would, would let it work, would, would accept that, would see the benefits. They don't all.
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Um, you know, we're, we're, we're frequently blocked in mainland China. We've been blocked off and on in other countries. Um, even in places where we're popular we've been temporarily blocked.
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For a number of years we were blocked, um, quite regularly in Brazil before we won some really important legal rulings, including an appellate court ruling that end-to-end encryption is critical to human rights.
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Um, so it's not new for us. Right. And where, where does this end, then? Do you... You either have to find backdoors, or I suppose you have to pull out of countries that, um, are, uh, wanting, uh, this kind of backdoor.
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Well, we... I mean, we, we view it as we're, we're available anywhere, and it's up to countries to decide whether or not they wanna block us.
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And look, in, in practice, a number of countries that are not, you know, liberal democracies with a lot of freedom have on balance, even though they would, you know, they would normally love to be able to spy on what their citizens say, have on balance just accepted that people wanna use WhatsApp.
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People wanna use secure messaging services from other companies too. I guess one of the, uh, before one- Um, I- Sorry, go on. Carry on, Will. Yeah. No, I was just... I mean, my, my hope for the...
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You know, you asked where does this end.
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I mean, my hope for where this ends is we start to realize that on balance, securing the private, sensitive information- Of citizens is absolutely necessary in a world with more online threats, and it's important globally for promoting human rights.
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You know, the, the UN Human Rights Council actually just two days ago, um, came out with a statement condemning internet shutdowns and talking about how encrypted communication is important for people to be able to speak freely to each other.
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It's a human right.
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Um, w- the only other thing I think I w- wanted to sort of wrap this up on in terms of the encryption bit, 'cause like you say, we could probably speak about this for, for hours and still have the similar kind of w- space where we're gonna end up with it.
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Yeah. But, um, but I guess lots of people say Facebook is an advertising business. It relies on tracking users.
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It doesn't have the strongest and best track record in privacy, and, and it now it's got a very strong encryption message, um, and sort of privacy message. Isn't that, like, a bit of a contradiction?
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Is that a ch- it's gonna be a pretty big challenge to overcome for what you're trying to achieve, I would've thought. Well, it's not new to us. Yeah.
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I mean, you know, we've, we've had end-to-end encryption in WhatsApp for five years. We've been committed to it for a long time.
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I guess, you know, I might turn that around and say to the, you know, the people who are proposing changing how services like WhatsApp work, let's be clear about what they're saying.
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They're asking private companies to store copies of everyone's messages, to have access to read what everyone says. Is that really what we want? Do we really want private companies to be able to do that?
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Well, it's, it, like you say, it's gonna be a, a debate that goes on for some time, and I would love to spend some, bit more time talking about it.
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But, uh, there was a couple of other things I know that me and Martin wanted to touch upon. Of course. Um, and, uh, one of them really is just more about, first of all, like, messaging in general.
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I just wanted to get your take on where has messaging come from in the last few years in terms of how people use it, what features apps like WhatsApp and others have been focusing on, and then how that's slightly evolved now, where, where it's headed, you know?
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Have you seen sort of a distinct change in, in the purpose and usage of, of WhatsApp and other apps like it? Yeah, absolutely. We certainly have.
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I mean, three things I'd point to in terms of just how it's changed over the fast- past few years. One is just the degree to which, um, people are using messaging for their conversations. COVID accelerated this.
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We're all, you know, we're, we th- we think of the WhatsApp product in a way as helping you have a face-to-face conversation when you can't be sitting face to face with each other.
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Well, this last year and a half, frequently we haven't been able to sit, uh, physically near someone. So we, so just usage in general has gone up. Um, you know, my, my wife and I, um, we have a daughter.
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She's thir- almost three years old now. We realized after she was born we didn't agree on how to pronounce her name, and we'd picked her name. Uh, uh, it's Naomi is how I say it. My wife says Naomi.
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And it took us a while to figure out how we'd, how we'd mess that up as parents. [laughs] Well, the reason why was all the conversations about how to name our daughter, we typed out with our thumbs,
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and it, we didn't even think about it.
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It just didn't feel any different than sitting next to each other, uh, which gets to the next trend I would, I would call out, which is w- over the last few years, I think we've gone from messaging being mostly about typing things to increasingly about video calling and voice calling, and we see that on WhatsApp.
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The fastest part, fastest growing part of WhatsApp over the last few years, especially this last year and a half, has been voice and video calls, um, because people wanna feel like they're, they're ha- having a richer conversation with someone.
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They wanna hear the sound of their voice and not just see the letters they typed on the screen. So, um- Um. Uh, no, Martin- Go ahead... and then we were talking earlier about WhatsApp Business as well.
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There was some stuff that we were talking about. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was literally actually gonna be my third trend, by the way- Oh...
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was, you know, the degree to which we're seeing people use WhatsApp for business, a great, great segue into the question. [laughs] Yeah, so, well, what's the plan there?
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Because obviously we've seen, uh, WhatsApp becoming more of a business tool in, in recent years.
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Um, I took some refresher driving lessons, uh, a few years ago when I hadn't been driving for a few years, and, uh, uh, I knew that WhatsApp had become such a prevalent part of life when a total stranger, uh, my driving instructor, who'd never messaged me before, messaged me for the first time after booking him through WhatsApp.
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It was like, "Oh, okay," [laughs] so, um, rather than, uh, uh, sending text messages. Uh, and it's developed a lot since then. So, uh, how is that going to evolve over, let's say, the next year?
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What, what can we expect to see from the business side of things? Yeah, so what we're focused on, I mean, we've seen this trend.
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A lot of people, a lot of businesses are using WhatsApp, and a lot of people are choosing to, to reach out to businesses on WhatsApp instead of calling them on the phone or going to a website.
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Um, and, and, and it makes sense when you think about why. We hear this from people all the time. Uh, when you call someone on the phone, especially when you call a larger company, you get stuck on hold.
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You get routed to a call center. It's not a good experience. And if you can just message really quickly on WhatsApp, it's much more convenient for you, and it's actually better for the business, too.
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'Cause it's much more efficient for them to deal with multiple customers, solve their problems, and at the end of the day, have a ha- happy customer or make a sale.
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So what we're focused on is, okay, given this is happening, how do we make it better? How do we make it more efficient for businesses? How do we make consumers love the experience?
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Um, so we've done things like a couple of years ago, we added a, a, a dedicated WhatsApp Business app. Oh.
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So if you're a business, you can download a version of WhatsApp that has extra features for businesses, things like auto replies, um, or, or recently things like listing out what products you have for sale.
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We've seen tremendous growth with that. We have over 50 million active users of that app.
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Um, and over time, what we're gonna be doing is just adding richer functionality so that you can interact with a business, see what they have, pay them potentially, depending on what country you're in.
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Just, just get everything done over WhatsApp without having to go to a website, without having to make a call and get stuck on hold.
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And this is, this is, this is part of a broader strategy, because we've seen lots of business features from other parts of Facebook as well.
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But do you, do you view this as a, an overall company-wide strategy across all the different, um, divisions of Facebook, or is this you plow, plow on with your business strategy, Messenger's got its, et cetera?
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It's both. So there, there's some things that we're doing that are gonna work really well across all of, um, Facebook services. For example, there's a new feature called Shops. So if a business wants to set up a shop,
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um, they can have that be on Instagram. So someone can, if they, if someone finds them on Instagram, they can see what they have for sale, and they can also have that be available on WhatsApp.
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So if after you found them on Instagram, you start messaging with them on WhatsApp, you can actually- Refer back to the stuff they have for sale and, and, and close the loop, and actually even buy something if you want to.
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Um, but it's, you know, but it's also just coming out of how people are using WhatsApp.
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So there's a lot of stuff we're doing that's just very WhatsApp specific because people are choosing to talk to businesses on WhatsApp. What happened to messaging bots?
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It just feels like it was a big thing for a while, and everyone was talking about it, and particularly Messenger, maybe slightly more so than, than WhatsApp.
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And there has been sort of quite a lot of changes and im- and improvements in terms of how bots and u- use different bits of tech to make it more of a rich and enjoyable and, and f- realistic experience into chatting to someone that maybe could be real, but probably aren't.
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Uh, is, is bots still something that you're focusing on? Are you seeing any really genuine utility in bots, uh, for WhatsApp? Well, there's this thing with technology trends.
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We hear a lot about them early on, and then you hear a little bit less about them, and you wonder what happened, but meanwhile behind the scenes they've just been steadily growing.
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Um, I actually think there's, there's a really great example of bots this year that was really, really, really powerful and that a lot of people used, which is, um, vaccine and COVID information bots.
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So we had on WhatsApp in, you know, over 100 health organizations and governments around the world set up either initially COVID information lines, so you can message on WhatsApp and get information about COVID, and more recently, um, full-on vaccine services.
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So in a number of countries, you, you instead of going to a, a really complicated website, instead of calling a phone number and being stuck on hold, you message a bot on WhatsApp to book your vaccine appointment.
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Um, most recently, just actually, uh, the CDC in the US launched one in, uh, Spanish language bot.
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Um, you know, a lot of people who use WhatsApp in the US are Spanish speaking, and so you can message the CDC on WhatsApp, and the bot will tell you where you can go get a vaccine, book your appointment, and even arrange a, a free car, um, share ride to come pick you up and take you there.
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We saw that in a bunch of countries around the world. So, you know, hundreds of millions of people this last year have been interacting with bots. We don't talk about it a lot as bots.
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We just talk about it as, hey, they messaged on WhatsApp, and they got help around COVID. Uh, you know, I...
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'Cause I, I used the COVID app, um, COVID bot quite a lot because I've got friends who work in, in the UN stuff, and they were really seeing the benefits and generating the results from, from, from using it.
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So I know that it was, uh, uh, really, really popular with, uh, lots of people.
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So we mentioned Messenger there, and recently Nick Clegg, obviously Facebook's comms chief, uh, recently said that integrating Facebook's messaging apps into one unified service is taking a lot longer than expected.
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What's the holdup? What's happening?
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Well, the, the features we wanna, uh, offer, you know, let people who want to who are using Messenger message someone on WhatsApp or vice versa, um, you know, they, they, they seem simple on the surface, but behind the scenes there's a lot of hard technological problems- Mm...
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to solve. Uh, you know, we, we just talked about multi-device, for example.
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Um, well, if you wanna be able to deliver, you know, some messages to one app and some messages to a different app on your phone or two different phones, that can be hard.
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You know, another one is, um, bring an end-to-end encryption to Messenger and Instagram Direct.
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Uh, if, you know, before you could imagine messaging someone on WhatsApp from Messenger, it needs to be end-to-end encrypted, and that's a, that's a very hard technology. Um, to, to be clear, I mean, sometimes...
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'Cause the, you know, the reporting on this has been kind of around the high level vision. To be clear, the, the types of things we're talking about offering is not, you know, not merging everything. Mm.
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It's really letting you if you want to, um, have experiences where you could message someone who's using a different app.
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You know, maybe you're, you know, maybe, maybe Matt is using WhatsApp, and Martin, you're using Messenger, but you have Matt's phone number, and rather than switching over to WhatsApp to talk to him, you just want to, you wanna stay on Messenger and send him a message and have him get it on WhatsApp.
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It's things like that. Right. And when, when's the end goal for that? And so is, is there a timeline that you're working to? Do you expect there to be some sort of finality to that piece of work?
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I'm guessing it's quite a lot to do, so. No, there's no specific date, and it, it's a, it's a multi-year project. All right. Well, ch- just for the...
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We've about 10 minutes before I know you've got to head off, so that we'll change here slightly, and I wanted to ask you a little bit about the stuff that, um, um, that your boss, Mark Zuckerberg, talked a lot about over the last year or two, which is AR and VR.
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And, you know, a lot of the stuff that, um, Facebook is investing in is to do with the Oculus and experiences in, in virtual worlds and using AR and, and all the kind of clever tech around that.
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But sort of bringing that back to your job and where you, you sit in, in the scheme of the Facebook suite of apps and things, you know, what...
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how do you see WhatsApp fitting into a world that may be 5, 10, 15 years from now is not necessarily d- dedicated to the smartphone but is some other device where we predominantly consume content and experience, uh, whatever we want to do online?
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How does WhatsApp look in that kind of a world? You know, the way I think about it is, is what does WhatsApp look like in a world where mobile phones aren't the main thing people are using?
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For today the mobile phone is the, is the main computer. For most people it's the only computer they use. Um, we see this already with, you know, smart devices in your home. So if you look at Facebook Portal, one of the
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great features on it, how a lot of people use it, is making video calls to their family. So you can sit at home in your kitchen and make a call to s- you know, a family member, and they might even just be on their phone.
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So you can do it on WhatsApp, and they can receive it on their WhatsApp phone. But looking ahead, if you think about all these new technologies, for a lot of them I think
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something people are gonna wanna do is share something or talk to someone who isn't there as if they're there.
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If you're walking around about your day wearing smart glasses, you're gonna wanna be able to send a note to your spouse.
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You're gonna wanna be able to capture a photo of a cool moment and share it with a parent or a child, and WhatsApp will fit right in for that. Or, you know, maybe, maybe technology goes in a different way.
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Maybe people are using, you know, smart devices in their ear where they say, "Hey, you know, Alexa, Siri, Facebook," whatever.
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Um, and there you're gonna be able to wanna place a phone call, and that's, that's what WhatsApp is. Uh, and so...
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And there's some other stuff as well that we want to quickly ask you before we jump into the last five minutes around, um, lots of questions that we did have some people who wanted to ask on things about features, things that w- aren't in Facebook.
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Why aren't they in Face- uh, in WhatsApp, sorry. So be- but before we do that, I just- Mm...
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wanted to ask you a quick question about, uh, WhatsApp beta info, Jane Wong, and all the people that leak a lot of these features that your teams are working on. Um, how, how do you view that?
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Is it kind of something that's kind of like funny or a little bit annoying, or is it interesting that, you know, waiting for them to discover it? Well, how do you view that?
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Well, I think it's fun, and I think, you know, the other thing is it's, it's exciting that people are really interested in what we're working on.
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I mean, it's, it's really fun to get to work on a service that people like and use and care about what's coming next or how it's changing.
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Um, you know, obviously some, you know, sure, do we wish we could control when people find out about every new thing we're doing and, and do it exactly to our schedule?
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Sure, sometimes, but at the end of the day, it's kind of fun, um, that, that, that this stuff is out there and people can learn about what we're doing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
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And, um, and I know that the, some of the guys at WhatsApp beta info are constantly kind of messaging me, "What have you found?" And, and sending me details of other things. So a lot of it goes on.
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I don't know how long it, it's been going on for them, but I've certainly been, uh, playing around with it for a few years. It's, uh, it's a, a geeky hobby.
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[laughs] But, um, but certainly we've got loads of questions from people that wanted to ask stuff.
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Um, and so rather than kind of the up and down of getting someone up on a Space and things, to get through as many as we could in, say, five or six minutes or so, we've got a, a list of them.
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So, uh, maybe me and Martin will take one or two from this list- Hmm... that we've compiled. And Martin, what was the first one we had? Okay. So someone asks, uh, "Will WhatsApp get its own version of live audio rooms?"
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I mean, I... Uh, nothing to describe there, and I, you know, I guess it would depend. Uh, we're, we're not really a service for connecting with people.
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I mean, if you think about Twitter Spaces for example, we're not really a service for connecting with people you don't know and talking about things and sharing that out to a broad audience. Yeah.
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Uh, we certainly have audio calling, and we think that's really, really, um, good, and it's gr- you know, usage has grown a lot and we've been doing work to make it better.
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And so we will have improvements coming to audio calling, but it's kind of a different need. Yeah. Got it.
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Uh, the other one was, "Will WhatsApp get any emoji reaction features for individual messages within a chat, much like you do on Messenger and, and other sort of apps like it?" Yeah.
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No- we know people love that and, and, and, you know, even how I use WhatsApp, I, I reply with emojis all the time, so can certainly see some of the benefits there, but, you know, not something we have, uh, at the moment.
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And I guess that's the kind of thing where the scrutiny we get from people like WhatsApp Beta Info or, or others out there is always the way you would tell if we were working on something like that. Got it. M- Martin?
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Uh, an interesting one, can we have an edit button for messages? Well, y- y- you know, this comes up a lot, and there's, there's trade-offs here. I mean, we have a delete button. I...
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and, and, you know, sometimes people actually ask, "Okay, when you delete a message why does it say you deleted it? Uh, why does it tell everyone?"
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And the, the reason why is you, you don't kind of want people to be confused about what's going on in a conversation.
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So the trade-off with an edit button is if you add an edit button, I could say something and then you could respond to it, and then I could totally change what I'd said, and it would look like you, you know, you, you responded.
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I mean, the, the... You could imagine me saying something benign, and you say, "I agree," and then I change it to something- [laughs]... controversial, and now it looks like you agree. So you've probably got to...
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If you do an edit button, you probably got to have an easy way to show that it changed, and that adds a little complexity.
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So there's, there's trade-offs there versus just the simplicity of you go back and forth and say things, which is kind of like how real conversations work.
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You know, again, we're trying to mimic a little bit of a real conversation where you can't really go back and, like, edit the transcript of what you said.
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So you're sticking to the Twitter line of there's no need for an edit button, basically. That's where we are with that one. I think that's fair to say.
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[laughs] Well, I mean, I, I wouldn't say that's necessarily true for all services. Yeah, yeah. You know, we have an edit button on, on Facebook, and I think it, it, it works well there. I think
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w- with WhatsApp it does feel a lot like a conversation, so we'd wanna think about how do you not lose that feeling of conversation. This one was a really popular one.
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It was probably one of the most, uh, liked comments from somebody, which was, "Can we have a way to exit a group chat without a message showing XX has left the group?" Yeah, we hear that all the time.
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[laughs] I mean, here's where it's not, it's not quite what people are asking, but here's where I will kind of jump the gun a little bit and describe something we're working on.
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I mean, o- one thing we also hear from people is, I join a group that's, you know, it's particularly loud and noisy, and it's not the most important thing
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for me, but I, I, I wanna still be in the group and be able to see what's happening. So we are working on, um, a new version of an archive folder where you can take a group and put it in that folder and y- it won't...
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When messages come to it, it won't bump to the top of your inbox like your regular threads do. But you'll still have them, and you'll still have a way to go see, uh, the messages as they come in.
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And so that, that's another thing that we've heard that's a, a very popular request around groups is, okay, I'm in these groups that are, they're a little less important to me, but I still wanna be in them.
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How do I keep track of what's going on without it overwhelming me? Right. Martin, what you got? Um, when will... What's sticking with kind of, um, group conversation, when will WhatsApp introduce a poll feature?
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Oh, that's a, that's a popular one as well. Okay. Um, nope, no plans. Won't, won't, won't preview anything there. Uh, well, we'll skip. We've got, like, two more minutes.
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We'll have to, we'll do some quick, like, n- n- nothing to say, or it's a good idea, but no plans, whatever, on it, some of these.
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So the quick ones are, uh, payment features in Europe, WhatsApp Pay, uh, when's that gonna happen do you think? We, we'd love to have payment features in a, in, in as many countries as possible.
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You know, really the sticking point for us is the work in each country specific, and we have to work through the process to get regulatory approval. So for now, the first two places we launched are India and Brazil.
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Um, and, and it'll, it, it could be a while before we're somewhere else. Martin?
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I suppose, I suppose you, you, uh, with multi-device, this kind of ac- answers this one with just use a browser, but is there an iPad version coming? There's no iPad version, but with multi-device you can do it.
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And w- when will Spark AR be WhatsApp audience tested? Oh, good question. No, no, no definitive date. No definitive date. Uh, let's pick three more and then we'll just put it to a close.
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Martin, if you're on, will I have another little look down this list? 'Cause a long list. Uh- S- someone's asking about branded or themed group chats. That's a new... That's a weird one.
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I, I haven't heard of that one before. Uh- Yeah. Well, we do now have, we do now have the ability for people to change the, the wallpaper on a thread.
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I guess it's for themselves, but, you know, one thing we hear people like to do is change the, the backgrounds on different threads so they can more easily keep track of what- That's the one- Yeah.
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I, I suppose be- because, uh, Instagram has, uh, you know, and, and Messenger have branded ones, don't they? Yeah. Yeah. It's, uh, a nice way of, uh, earning a, another line of income.
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And I think the last one will be the one that, again, also got a lot of, uh, sort of likes on it was... Where has it gone now? I just said that. I've lost it again. Oh, it's the out of office.
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Yeah, making the out of office features available for non-business accounts. Yeah. It's good to hear people... One, that we did add that for business accounts, one of the top features- Yeah...
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for business accounts on the business app. So it's good to hear people would like that themselves. Absolutely. I get it. You go on vacation and you want calls to go to voicemail.
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And something I didn't ask earlier, in terms of WhatsApp status, you know, in the UK I don't see hu- huge amounts of usage, and I know that it is really popular.
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Where in the world is it really popular, and just how popular is status? 'Cause to us it doesn't seem like anything happens on it. [laughs] It's quite popular, but you're right. It varies country by country.
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So there are a number of, you know, a number of countries where WhatsApp's incredibly popular, where a lot of people will share what's going on in their life to status, and a lot of people take a look at it.
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Um, so it's q- it, it is quite a popular feature. Awesome. Well, the question we didn't ask you, um, which was what somebody did put to us, was asking if you think Gareth Southgate was too defensive- [laughs]...
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with his tactics in the final of football, which I know you, you saw as well. [laughs] I guess they, uh, didn't get the memo.
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Thank you for everyone for joining us, and thank you, a, a special thank you to the team at, uh, WhatsApp who made it possible for us to chat.
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And, uh, and again, thank you, Will, for, uh, being with us today, and we'll, uh, hopefully catch up again soon. So there you go. Thanks to Will for taking the time to speak to us.
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Next week we'll be speaking to Shimona Mehta, Shopify's managing director for the EMEA region, about how social platforms are embracing shopping.
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And if you want to listen live, you can hear it on Twitter Spaces at 11:30 AM UK time on Wednesday the 21st of July, 2021.
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There's a link in the show notes so you can get a reminder in your notifications on Twitter for when we go live. That's all for now, though. See you soon. Goodbye, geeks.
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