a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Messaging As the Interface to Everything

Episode Date: August 28, 2015

Messaging app WeChat tells us a lot about mobile and business in China. In a recent deep-dive primer on the WeChat phenomenon, a16z partner Connie Chan analyzed WeChat and the notion of app-within-apps, payments as a gateway drug, platforms vs portals, and what happens when utility is more important than being "social". Wired senior writer David Pierce also describes the power of conversational messaging as the main interface, further arguing that “A great messaging app could be to the web browser what the browser was to the internet before it.” So what happens when a messaging app essentially becomes an operating system for our lives? What conditions made the mobile, business, and cultural environment in China so ripe for a phenomenon like WeChat? How does voice change everything? And, let's face it, what are the tradeoffs users (both consumer and business) as well as developers may have to make when one app does in fact rule an entire ecosystem? Connie and David discuss on this episode of the a16z Podcast. Plus what happens to loneliness, work-life balance, and more.

Hi everyone. This is Sonal. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. We have two guests joining the pod today, longtime A6 and Z partner Connie Chan, who focuses on China and Wired senior writer David Pierce, who was formerly at the verge. Connie is our resident China expert, and we recently wrote a sort of ethnographic deep dive on how we chat works and what it tells us about mobile and business in China. On the exact same day we shared our primer, David wrote a piece and wired about we chat and the universal interface that is messaging. We're kind of jealous actually because his headline also said screw texting. As David noted, a great messaging app could be to the web browser what the browser was to the internet before it. Both Connie and David touch on the theme of how

a messaging app can essentially become an operating system for our lives. And so that's where we'll start the conversation. So in the course of writing the piece that I wrote one huge unanswered question that I still kind of have is why does this work so much better in China than anywhere else? Well, I think there's a number of things in China that make it a ripe environment for WeChat to really take off. One is email penetration is actually much lower in China than it is in the States. Also, for people who are constantly texting, there's a lot of SMS spam in China. And I think a third contributing factor is people, it's very common to have more than one phone number. A lot of people I know have multiple SIM cards, or they might be picking up other devices and having

multiple phone numbers. And so it's an environment. where it's really hard to figure out how to contact someone. Yeah, and I feel like there's a big part of that that's just, there's so little sort of technical inertia in a lot of that stuff where China has grown so fast and they've kind of skipped things like email and these things that weigh us down in places like the U.S. now where they're not using laptops as much as we are. Like for so many people, I should know this number off the top of my head, but I don't.

For so many people in China, the mobile was, and is their only access to the internet. So there's no design cruft. Like we invented all these ways in the U.S. to do different things, and we kind of siloed everything off in its own place because that was the right way to do it. You have used a much more complete version of WeChat than I have. And so I'm very curious, like from a pure design perspective,

like you write all these features down. You're like, you can do all these things. The app just seems like it would be chaos and just impossible to figure out how to do anything or where anything is or what all the features are. Like, how does the app sort of mechanically solve some of those problems? I actually think it's a very well-designed application. And so once you get used to, it's very easy to navigate. And they've actually put a lot of thought to try and make it as clean as they can.

So, for example, all of the official accounts that are more pushing news as opposed to transactions and services, they're grouped together in a section called subscription. So that's not flooding your inbox all the time. There's a lot of thought to try and make it as clean as possible. And the centerpiece is still chat, like one to one and one to a few chat. Definitely. Which I think is so smart and so easy to forget to do and so rare. You even see it with Snapchat, which built this gigantic user base out of letting people talk to people.

And they have like pretty rapidly changed that. Which is not to say it's a bad thing, but between Discover and stories, like the fundamental aspect of what makes Snapchat. Snapchat, Snapchat is changing. And it's not necessarily worse and business-wise seems to have been smart for Snapchat, but it's just different. And you kind of get away from, or you run the risk anyway of getting away from this place people obsessively go to talk to their friends and you become something different. And when you become something different, it seems to me it's much harder to go back, as opposed to you can build and build and build on top of that. But if you lose that, I don't know how you get it back. Right. I think communication is what makes it an indispensable application. Entertainment is much more, you can take a break from it. Right. You don't need it every single day. But communication is something that's very hard to give up even for a short period of time. Yeah, I read something the other day and I'm going to totally make up the statistic. But some outrageously high, like 95% of text messages get read within three minutes or something like that. Like we're so attuned to that stuff all the time. that if you can have that, you can have anything else, because I'll be there, right? And there's all these behaviors that it's this, you know, there's this great study I read a while ago that was like, when people open their phone to do one thing, they wind up doing six things. And if you can give me all six of those things right next to you where I did the one thing I meant to do, like I'm never going to leave. And that's the crazy thing that we chat seems to have accomplished is that they've done that.

Yeah, it's not that many clicks to get each thing done. I find that less of a hassle than, closing out an application, swiping my screen to the next grid of different applications, finding the right one, and then doing whatever I need to do, and then closing that application and going back. So navigating the phone's operating system to me is not a more elegant solution than clicking to a different tab within WeChat. I think one area of app design that's very common in China but not as seen in the States is the usage of QR codes

and the usage of the scanning feature in any app. And WeChat is actually it's heavily reliant on the scanning feature. So, for example, you can scan a QR code to access Wi-Fi in a coffee shop. You can scan a QR code to find the origins of your Starbucks coffee. You can scan a QR code to follow an account,

to join events, and so forth. And that's one type of design usage that I don't see as frequently in the States. Yeah, there's an interesting. sort of chicken and egg problem inherent there where because that like those two things sort of create a virtuous cycle right where it's and i remember four square tried to do this forever ago where they were like they tried to put the symbols in every store and then half the stores were like well we don't know if you're going to take off so they didn't play along i don't know there seems to have been a point at which everybody kind of collectively decided we're going to play along that just didn't happen here like at some point you kind of need everybody to take one leap together. Right. But the beauty is, you know, when everyone does take that leap, the product, it just grows so much faster. So for example, WeChat, because QR codes are so commonly used, you see posters all over the places in malls where stores have their QR code and

it says WeChat and it says scan us to follow us on WeChat, which basically helps the network grow much faster. Do you know if the QR codes were kind of already there and then we chat started taking advantage of it or did those things start to be put out because we chat supported it because QR codes aren't you know in theory they were they were supposed to be kind of a universal standard that everything could read right for a lot of the official accounts I don't think they were pushing QR codes nearly as much four years ago and that was wechats pushed into that place I think we chat definitely contributed to it I mean the QR code usage is even used to add friends so when you're adding a friend on we chat you can do it by searching their

user ID or you can use one of their radar features to find friends in the vicinity. But the primary way that I use WeChat to add friends, I use the QR code. So each individual has their own QR code. Yeah, that's actually one thing I think is so interesting about WeChat and seems to be one of the reasons that it has grown so quickly is that there are so many different ways to connect to different people. I can't think of an app in the U.S. that's anything like that. And everything that has tried to do even pieces of that has kind of failed. But in WeChat, you can connect to a random stranger. You can connect to a not random stranger.

You can connect to people near you. You can connect to people with similar interests. You can connect to people you found on purpose. And so you create this gigantic network almost by accident where, and then suddenly over the course of doing these kind of little activities in bits and pieces, you've built this group of people. And then suddenly you have the makings of a really great messaging app. And then everything kind of builds out of that.

Right. I love what you touched upon, which is how you can use it to contact strangers. I think a lot of people don't realize we chats very frequently used, especially in its early years, to contact strangers. And it's totally socially acceptable. And so they had this one feature where you shook your phone, and they would find someone else who recently shook their phone in your near vicinity, and they would connect you to, and you guys could start a conversation. And it's very difficult for most social networks to pull off both being private and safe, but also being a place where you can meet new people.

So is there something about China that, is there something culturally about China that makes that more interesting or exciting to people? Because I think of apps like highlight in the U.S. that just launched to nothing. And they had not quite the same idea, but something similar. The goal was, you know, find people around you. Yeah, well, I think a big benefit is that WeChat has both. And so it's not an application that's used only for connections you already have, and it's not an application that's used just for meeting new strangers. But it's really the marriage of the two that makes it so interesting

because someone who you met as a stranger can then become your friend and go and switch from one ladder to the other. Or just remain a total stranger. Yes. Which is totally okay. I think if there's this app called Photoswerte that my girlfriend discovered and has fallen in love with, and all you do is you take a picture and you press the button and it sends it to someone somewhere in the world and then that person can send you a picture back. And that's it. That's the whole thing. And she loves it. It's her favorite app on the phone because she'll just spend a night like we'll be staying there on the couch and she'll just like take a picture of the TV and send it. And then somebody in St. Petersburg will send her a picture back. Well, I should tell you, Wichat had that exact same feature actually four years ago. So another feature that most people don't use on WeChat is a drift bottle feature where you can send any message, basically out into the ocean of WeChat, and then someone can look at it and reply with whatever they want, too. Which is awesome. It's such a great idea.

The idea is that WeChat can address loneliness, which is you can meet strangers. Anyone born after 1979 is an only child. And so loneliness is a very real problem in China. No, I mean, I think the thing that really struck me about WeChat and kind of this phenomenon that grew out of it was that it started as fundamentally a messaging app. Like that that was the basis of this whole thing was, and correct me if I'm wrong, but this is then this is just my impression was that it didn't start as this enormous way to, you know, pay your taxes and get cars and do your laundry. It started as a way to talk to your friends. Right. Or not even to your friends, but to people, right?

whether it was friends or strangers or whoever it was the goal was to connect people and then it grew from there and it seems it seems so obvious in retrospect that it would be that way but I think so many things try to do it in the in the wrong direction or they try to do something differently or they try to tack on this kind of one to one to one to several interaction later and it just doesn't quite work and it seems to me that's so much of the power of it it's like if you go where people are already talking to their friends and then you just replicate that mechanic, but you're talking to something other than your friends, you can go anywhere. And there's so much power in there.

Well, I think there's two nuggets that come out of that. One is they didn't start official accounts for the first year when Weechat was first created, right? And because of that, there was already a heavy reliance on Weechab for communication. And just like what you're saying, it already took a very large percentage of my digital time. And so there was already a heavy usage of it. You had to use it. It was basically like not having a phone number or not having your email if you didn't have your WeChat at that time. And the second thing, which is the interlacing of the official accounts and your personal,

what that does is it actually makes the official accounts feel more personal, which is really important to understand. So one of WeChat's first major official accounts was a celebrity. singer. And when he first launched his account, he put out videos and he put out audio recordings and he would sing messages or say notes to his fans. But when you were a fan receiving that note right next to the message from your mother or from your brother, it felt like that singer was speaking directly to you. And so it gave off a very different feel than receiving a fan newsletter. Yeah. And it, you know, the way you say that, it sounds cynical, almost like you could read it is feeling kind of gross almost in the sense of like oh i love it i think no but that's the thing

like i think it it works like i think there's this really interesting uh i don't know this thing happening where where brands want to talk to you like people and and in a lot of ways it doesn't work and you see you know whether it's hillary clinton's campaign trying way too hard to engage millennials on snapchat or it's uh taco bell trying to be funny and missing horribly all these things. It just doesn't quite play, but within something like WeChat and in a messaging app where the rest of the context shows you that you're talking to a person, it feels so much more like a person, which is really interesting. In addition to that, I think WeChat helped enable that by giving these celebrities, these official accounts, such strong capability in targeting. So, for example,

a celebrity can send a different message to users and fans in one city versus another. Oh, wow. Yeah. It's actually a very, very sophisticated targeting that official accounts can have. And by the way, an official account is basically a brand or an influencer or a company or a service that a user is connecting to. So someone not in their personal network, but a third party. And they actually have a huge amount of leeway on WeChat, right? Like this is one thing I actually thought was kind of counterintuitive to the rest of the research I was doing, which said, you know, the more you can embed into what people are. know and do and see the better. But on WeChat, it seems like, particularly in China, there's this gigantic range of things that you can do as an official account that can be unique to you. I think part of that beauty is because technically, whenever you interact with an official account, that official account can basically take you to something that's similar to a

web page that's just wrapped inside of WeChat. And so there's tremendous flexibility in design. So why is it so important? And this is one thing as a United States user, I just might not understand or somebody who's been using a computer for a long time. But why, what is it that's so powerful about being in WeChat the whole time? To be honest, I think having lower friction when you're on a mobile device is always a good thing. And being able to access or get something done with fewer clicks is always a good thing. And in my mind, that's probably why I personally like all the functionality that's baked into one application versus the app.

installation model that a lot of companies in the states tend to follow doesn't work as well for me. I don't like having to exit out an app and opening another one to do something. Another benefit of it all being inside WeChat is WeChat can then basically have you logged into all of these official accounts and also pass on your payment credentials. And so rather than typing in my credit card information every time I'm transacting with a new official account. I only have to link my payments once to the WeChat payment system. And basically payments are just one or two buttons away. To me, that's that is one of, I think, the most powerful pieces of this whole thing is that is payments, really. Like once you bake money into it, it opens up

everything else. Like I think the easiest example for me, the easiest metaphor is iTunes, really, where Apple has your credit card on file. And once they have your credit card on file, and once they have your credit card on file, it becomes terrifyingly easy to buy anything. And whether it was the numbers for them signing people up for Apple Music, because it took, it was a free trial that is going to expire and then start charging people money that they didn't mean to start charging, but because it took two seconds. And by the time you can buy, there's so much mess in entering your payment credentials that anything you can do to avoid that. And then also once you have the trust of a service like we chat or like Facebook or like iTunes that says you know we'll control paying for this stuff

you suddenly feel more comfortable paying for stuff whereas instead of going to different websites and it just becomes so much more seamless where there's I know where my credit card lives and then it's spreading it out everywhere else what do you think about how different networks and different applications in the states are integrating payments well so I think it's it's it's clear that most companies seem to understand the power of being the one thing you use to pay for everything, which has led to there being a thousand ways to be the one way to pay for everything, whether it's, you know, Amazon has the sort of payment buttons it's flinging all across the web and you can buy things through Pinterest directly now and

you can buy things through, you're going to be able to buy things through Twitter soon and Apple pay is everywhere and Samsung pay is everywhere. And so it's, we've almost, it seems like, avoided solving this problem in trying to solve this problem, which is a thing we do a lot in the U.S. I think there's that great XKCD comic where they were like, the problem is we have 14 standards and I'm going to create the universal standard. And then that's like blank pain. And then the third one is problem. We have 15 universal standards. And it's like that's that's what we do. And this is, I don't know, this, this keeps coming back to sort of the same thing that so fascinates me about WeChat is there, there was a moment that I don't, I don't

understand, I don't know when it was and I don't know how they got there where it just turned. And Wechad had a point where it was so powerful and so all-encompassing that it could then kind of do whatever it wanted. Because I think of Facebook Messenger, which is probably the closest U.S. analog to WeChat. Because We-Chat in the U.S. is nothing like We-Chat in China, which is really interesting. But Facebook Messenger has this payment backbone. They have sort of an app store. It's not quite the same, and it's not nearly as powerful, but it's there. And they have a giant user base.

but yet it doesn't have nearly the leverage or network power to start doing the things that we chat can do and for whatever reason we chat got that and once you kind of start that snowball rolling it just keeps rolling it seems like but it's nothing here everybody is trying and nobody is doing it here um which is wonderful and also sort of frustrating because you can do with anything any way you want which leads to everybody doing it differently which leads us back to the problem of not having the right way to do it. I think WeChat really benefited from becoming something that everyone now relies on. Like, it's very difficult to function now in some of the top tier cities without having a

WeChat account. When you meet someone, they're not necessarily likely to give you their phone number or their email address, but they will share their WeChat account with you. So it's almost a situation where there is no real alternative for contacting a lot of people and brands. Was the original pitch of WeChat to basically replace text messaging? That was my guess, but I wasn't actually sure if that was true. Well, Tencent already had a product called QQU that is wildly successful right now in China. But when the smartphone really came along, they realized they needed to create something else that looked completely different. So they had a separate team create a new

type of communication messaging platform. So what was the, do you have a sense of kind of what the initial sort of push was for them because they had QQQ is still very popular. I think more popular than WeChat even, but it doesn't have nearly the sort of ecosystem power that WeChat seems to. What was it that they were initially trying to create in WeChat? Well, WeChat and QQS slightly differ also in terms of which cities they cluster in. So, for example, QQQ hits a different demographic. It hits a different type of city, whereas WeChat is very common. in Beijing, Shanghai, Tier 1 cities. China, if you go to a Tier 2, Tier 3 city,

you might not see WeChat all over the malls, but you might see more people using QQU to talk to each other. But it hits a different demographic in China. So just getting back to your question on why payments is so critical to WeChat users, how payments work in this app. Basically, what you do is you go to one tab where you can see your WeChat wallet. And here you can link your banking cards or your credit card. and then once you do it once, you can basically access payments throughout the entire application.

So there's a section in the WeChat app where Tencent vets and chooses partners, and that's called the WeChat wallet. And there you'll see things like hailing a taxi, buying a movie ticket, paying off your utilities. But then there are also 10 million different official accounts out there, actually more than 10 million. And a lot of them are unable to accept payments. And so once you enter in your payments once on the WeChat wallet, you can basically use transactions throughout the entire thing. So that actually brings up two things I think I'm curious about and think of really interesting. One is that is WeChat in China? Does it have tentacles outside of WeChat?

Like can you pay for things with your WeChat wallet when you're not using WeChat? You can use WeChat payments offline. Okay. Everywhere. I shouldn't say everywhere in a lot of places. So, for example, at a 7-Eleven, if you're buying something, you can take out your WeChat app, take out payments. They scan a QR code and your payment is done. Okay.

So it definitely works offline. They're dabbling, putting it in a lot of brick and mortar shops, retail, hotels, large events, concerts. Yeah, that just seems really powerful to me because you keep reinforcing this idea that your central wallet is the WeChat wallet. No matter where you are, it's always the third. thing you have, whereas I feel like, and this is sort of oversimplifying, but there's something to the idea that I think people in the U.S., when they're going to pay for something, they take out their credit card, whether you're sitting at the computer to do it or whether you're sitting in a store to do it, the natural reflex when it comes time to pay for something is to take out

your credit card. And if you can shift that to have people take out their phone or go into WeChat to pay for it, no matter where you are or what you're doing, that's hugely powerful, I would think. Right. This isn't an area where Tencent doesn't have competition though, I should say. AlliPay is still very big in China as a way of paying for something digitally.

And they also are... Well, I think a lot of people use both. And AliPay also is accepted in a lot of offline brick and mortar places. This actually answers how I got interested in doing this story was basically that I think there's been a shift over the last

say six months where messaging has really become a key piece of interface for all kinds of things. Like I think the second story I wrote at Wired was about this startup called Magic, where their whole deal was that you could just send a text message and say you wanted anything and they would get it for you. That was the whole thing. And it was broken and it didn't work properly. And it was just a bunch of guys building an app that wasn't great. And they were like, we're going to get better at it.

but it's live now. But it is part of this whole revolution of things where you could do a lot of things just by sending text messages. And it has a lot to do with how AI has gotten better and how we're able to process language and understand what people mean when they type things and computers can start to do some of this work for you

and all this stuff. And I think the idea that messaging and chat is an interface for doing really powerful things with technology and not just typing in a text box, but all kinds of sort of conversation and messaging is fascinating. And WeChat seems to have been on that way before just about anybody else. And I'm not, I don't know why that is. Like that, you know, maybe you were talking about how China, it's harder to type in China.

So maybe that has changed things. I think to me, messaging is a way of just inputting data. And so in WeChat messaging exists not just in text. It also exists in audio formats. voicemail might not be common in the States, but leaving an audio message on WeChat is super common in China. And I even think things like sending someone's location inside a chat is another example of a data input that you can send to a person or to an account. Yeah, and all that stuff is so powerfully doable in sort of the course of a conversation where you're able to do all of this work kind of in bits and pieces as opposed to basically going through. a decision tree where you're looking at menus and drop downs and filling in forms and all these

different kinds of things. It's actually much more natural and direct to get what you want. You know, when you now create something that can allow for audio messages to be just as common for text, there's a user delight that comes when you hear someone squeal or when you hear someone laugh that doesn't come across well in text. So there are elements of adding all these different kinds of communication that actually enhances the communication. It makes it better than what people had before. Like another example is the stickers. The stickers on WeChat, some of them are licensed and some of them are cute and animated, but a bunch of them that are frequently used, at least among me and my friends, are ones that are not sold by Tencent, but you are actually able to

take any GIF, any JPEG, save it as a sticker, and send that along. Yeah. And so a lot of times during especially Valentine's Day, Christmas, New Year's, that's a very easy way to almost send like a greeting card to someone or to send someone a message without having to actually send a personal message. Yeah. Which is really cool because these stickers aren't just denoting emotions. They're denoting concepts, phrases. I think audio is particularly cool that way. I think there's, you know, we left phone calls behind a long time ago, in theory anyway. I don't think it's actually as true as people like to make it out to be. But the idea that that's not actually a good way to talk is crazy. It's a great way to talk. You can do so many more things with your voice

and by hearing someone else's voice that you just can't do with text. And by, I think I was talking to these two guys who built an app called Cord, which I really like, and their whole interface is basically you press and hold on somebody's face and you talk and then when you stop talking you take your finger off their face and it sends it to them and they were like the great thing that we did was not let you send text right they were like their whole your whole thing is

is you're going to poke on their face and you're going to talk to them and they said they've seen this totally different kind of use because people can you can do it long and you can do it short and they were like well the part that sucked about phone calls was when your phone rang and you didn't want to pick it up and then you felt like a jerk for not picking it up

So, like, well, if we can solve that and bring sort of the asynchronousity of this whole thing to our app and also all of the context and emotion and feelings and relationships that come with hearing somebody's voice, that's really powerful. And then when you can bake that into getting more work done to do things like book flights and get, you know, get movie tickets and instead of having to go back and forth and back and forth, you can just kind of say what you want and then have it get done. you, that's hugely powerful. And that goes off, you know, in this whole sort of other direction of things that are starting to happen where, you know, you're able to, whether it's Siri or some of the other kind of virtual assistants that are coming out, that you can just ask questions. I think what you're getting at, which I completely agree with, is talking is actually faster most of the time than typing something. Yeah, and it gets back to the whole thing of, like, ultimately what people want and the places people will gravitate is where they can

communicate and be together and it doesn't feel as transactional as it might otherwise because it feels like you're having a conversation as opposed to you know and there's there's no right way to say it or there's no you know to make a payment press payment like that's not that doesn't you don't need that and as soon as you don't have that that goes a long way towards what you were saying earlier about making these official accounts feel more personal because you're you can communicate with them the same way you communicate with your friend there's no context

switching, there are no vocabulary changes and write words to use and right ways to use them. It's just natural, which is amazing. And that's like, if that's, that should be the future of technology. That seems like that's, that's kind of this neat moment that we're at now is where these things are starting to come along that work the way that we do. And we don't have to remember how to use them. We just use them the way we would and if they work. Yeah. I really love how We chat focuses on the chat, the conversation element of the app as the primary use case of the app. So a lot of people in the States might not be aware, but they actually have an area called Moments, which is very similar to kind of a social news feed where you're posting links or

photos or text. But by design, that's actually not, it doesn't even have a tab of its own. You have to click on to, I think that's the third tab and it's the first choice on that tab. But it was by design not put as a primary tab because WeChat wants to be known for communication, which is something you are fully reliant on. You cannot function without, as opposed to a place where you're getting all of these social updates. It was by choice, not put as a primary tab. They wanted to keep it between people as opposed to public. More in the sense that if you think WeChat, the main thing should be chats and conversations, not a news feed of social. elements. So something that gets tricky though in the conversation element is

we chat is increasingly being used in the workplace. And that's probably really hard for people in the States to see, but a lot of Chinese companies will do a lot of a lot of communication knowledge just through WeChat. And it's for a number of reasons. One, by design, the group chats can have up to 500 members, which is actually a lot higher than a lot of the other messaging apps out there. And when you're communicating, you can use text, you can use audio. But you can also send Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, Excel, I've actually even heard stories of VC sending term sheets through WeChat conversations.

And then, so from the IT side, actually, they even have unique functionality where they can control for confidentiality. They can set it so that you can't forward specific messages. They can tier your access so you only see certain parts of official accounts. So they're really trying to structure the app so that it can be used both in the workplace but also person. personal. The tricky thing is then your chat inbox now has messages from your boss right next to messages from your mother, right next to a message from a celebrity that you're following. And so there's this intermingling of your personal and professional life that's now very hard to tear apart. And just even anecdotally, I have friends in China who complain because now they're expected

to be reachable 24-7. And there's no real shut off from work. well I just imagine like if I'm if I'm drinking I can I should not be trusted to not tap on my boss's name by accident instead of my friend's name that sounds that just that sounds dangerous but no I mean and that seems I think there's that's a real trend of of kind of how people operate and I think you know seeing and this might be sort of a uniquely Silicon Valley thing but I think work and life are sort of bleeding together in a lot of ways for people starting to yeah yeah and I think think that the it's the same with sort of public and private too where like the the lines between those things are much less clear than they once were and I get the sense that people worry about them a lot less than uh than they used to or then maybe they probably should but it just seems like it's it's the kind of thing where those it's there's this wide spectrum and the lines are increasingly not obvious and everybody's kind of perpetually walking on both sides trying to figure it out and people don't seem to worry about it as much like I have

friends who, you know, drunk text, they're boss. And it's not, it's not weird, right? And I don't know, I've done it. I guess it's fine. But I just think that that's, it's definitely sort of fraught and complicated. And I think part of. Very complicated. Yeah, and I think there's something nice about the context switching a little bit. Like I have a, I have, we use hip chat at work. And I know when I am, when I open hip chat, I am doing work things. And if I'm, if I'm going to talk to even the same people, but not about work things. I'm not going to do it in hip chat. And on the one hand, that is just terribly inefficient because I'm talking to the same people in different places. And they remember that I was also talking to them about work. But now we're talking about other things.

But we as people are able to do those contact switches. But there's something, there is something nice about kind of knowing where I am as I'm in a particular app. And WeChat seems to just throw all of that out the window. Yeah, and there are consequences to that decision, right? Like in the moment section, which is, again, like the news feed, I've even seen in the last four years in the beginning, I would see a lot of friends posting personal photos, photos of their family, photos of what they're doing each day, and now I see far more links, business articles. I see much fewer photos of children. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, that's one thing I've always kind of wondered about, and I think it's kind of what comes up when we talk about the difference between

like messaging apps and social networks, where social networks kind of necessarily become performant, right? Like you're playing some sort of character, whether it's business character on LinkedIn or you want to seem like you have a really fun life on Instagram or, you know, your kid is adorable on Facebook. Whatever it is, like I think everybody becomes something other than what they are in totality. But when you have messaging apps, my impression is at least that I'm much more able to be whatever I want to be and not worry about it because there's a sense of privacy there

and you're not worrying about kind of who's seeing what and where and in what context. Right. I mean, I love Snapchat for that reason, right? Yeah. You know that that person doesn't have a stored memory of whatever you just sent them. Right, exactly.

There is one really cool thing that WeChat did to kind of address that same exact issue is so on the moment section when you're posting photos or posting links, They made one decision for functionality that I think is really interesting, which is if I comment on some photo or anything you posted, only our mutual friends will see my comment. And therefore, that takes pressure off you as the person who posted the photo from amassing a lot of comments and likes. Because me as a person commenting, I might just assume, oh, we don't have that many mutual friends, but you might have a lot of other friends who saw it. So there is much less of this concept of collecting a lot of likes or comments or comparing it to other people because you can't see how many likes any posts actually has.

That's really interesting. And it seems like that requires kind of impressive restraint on their part to do that because there's such a pull to want to make everything big and public. Like, it was, it's a really easy thing to want to broadcast everything that everyone is doing because it makes you look good and it makes your thing look vibrant and it makes people want to use it more. And it's kind of impressive on WeChat's part that they've worked so hard to keep that. I think philosophically, they've never confined themselves to a construct of a social network. So they don't feel like everything needs to be public. And if I interact with the brand, that interaction doesn't have to be seen by the rest of the world. world. And so because they're not focusing on a social network and they're building a mobile

lifestyle where the goal is just to help you interact and connect with brands, people, company, services, they aren't as limited. Are there metrics? I just realize I have no idea. Like, are there, do you get, you know, points on WeChat for doing anything? Like, are there winners and losers of WeChat? Not in terms of, like, how many friends you have or how popular you have. there are like leaderboards for example when you're playing games with each other or they have another cool feature recently which is um if you use any of the wearables you can track your steps versus your friends there's no follower account like there is on twitter or anything no no okay i feel like that also goes a long way towards not kind of morphing

the point of it because you're not competing for anything like you use it as you will use it and other people do and there's no like you're using the same thing different ways and everybody's okay with that, as opposed to other things which kind of right or wrong push you towards certain sorts of metrics, whether it's likes or followers or what have you. And that, that again, is like, that's the relentless pull back towards social network, as opposed to being kind of a confined thing like WeChat seems to want to be. This to me is the thing that's so different about WeChat from anything in the U.S. I mean, it seems like, you know, not to keep coming back to Facebook, but like they have,

Facebook loves to break out all of its possible options into different apps. And they're like, if you want to do this thing, this way, do it here. And if you want to do it this way, do it here. And that just seems wrong. It's just fundamentally, you're losing all these opportunities to be the place that people go to do everything. Because I think you're exactly right that you want to be in a place. Like the miracle of WeChat is that they've built something that no matter what you want to do or what context you're in or how you want to do it, you can do it in WeChat. And that's kind of a design and engineering achievement more than

anything else. But it's, that's amazing. It's really hard to unseat because if you're doing 12 things well and somebody comes along and does, you know, six of those things, even if they do all six better, you're not going to leave the thing that does 12 things well. And doing 12 things better than WeChat is very, very hard. The reason why WeChat is so convenient is because it really is a place where a bunch of apps are within an app, right? And so what people don't realize when they're using official accounts is it's not necessarily stuck with the chat paradigm because it can basically show you a webpage that's wrapped inside of WeChat, it can give you a lot of app functionality,

and it can almost look like a native app in that sense. And a lot of official accounts, when they create the official account within WeChat, they'll give you a good amount of functionality in that official account. They might leave some things extra. And so what's really great is users can get enough of the feature and functionality they need from the official account. And if they need to, they might go download a separate standalone app. So, for example, in the WeChat wallet, you can hail a taxi through DD.D.com. And you can get the entire thing done, pay your tip, everything through that integration.

But if you wanted more features and functionality, you might go and download the DD.D.D.S. application separately. But I wonder, it's interesting to me that that seems like, and I say this without any, knowledge of the actual data behind it, but it seems like you have, in so doing, totally disincentivize anyone from going and downloading that app. Because if you can do a certain percentage of it or enough of it within WeChat, and again, this is, you know, part of the whole pitch of WeChat is if you can do it in there, why leave? And that, I think to me, and this is part of what I talked about in my piece, was that that's, there's part of that that's scary,

that there's, once you have enough people using your app for enough things, Often enough, you have all of the leverage. And kind of at this point, you dictate whatever terms you want. And, you know, I don't pretend to understand the political ambitions of Tencent and WeChat, but they have so much power. There's no obvious second best where it's like, well, this doesn't work anymore. We'll all go over here. And I think people are justifiably worried about that kind of thing.

And I think there's real worry and debate over how important and how good it will actually be if and when something takes over because there's this whole side of it that's wonderful and this is like this is the debate we have with Google all the time where it's like how much how much am I willing to give up for value and convenience and it's it's privacy versus convenience and it's like I'm going to the more I tell you the better Google now is and the better Google searches and the better Gmail is and all these things whereas but then it knows more about me and that's a little scary and it's sort of directionless scary right now because the the implications are not so obvious about what's going to happen because for most people,

nothing has happened yet that feels dramatic and bad with knowing information about me. But I think with something like WeChat, whether it's the power that it now has over brands to, whether to dictate terms, if it so chooses, or to take more money or whatever it is, I think it's just a complicated thing that I think is going to have to get sorted out one way and other before people here really start to buy in in a way big enough to give enough value back. I'd say WeChat since inception has been very developer-friendly and very friendly to third parties, giving them a lot of flexibility and what kind of features and functionality they want to include, but they also don't charge to create an official account.

Maybe there might be that fear, but so far it's unjustified. Right, and that's the funny part about all of this, right, is that it's not, all of that fear is kind of, it's what if fear, which is in a lot of ways useful and in a lot of ways not useful, because you should always kind of be aware of the bad things that could happen, but none of those bad things are currently happening. And I think especially with things like WeChat and Facebook and Snapchat as they get bigger and more powerful and more understanding about the world. Like, I remember when Google turned on, this is just a few weeks ago, when they turned on the location tracking. So you could kind of see where you had been in Google Maps. There were people who were like, oh, my gosh, that's terrifying. And it was like, well, no, you put your address in Google Maps. Like, of course they have this information.

That's how they do their job. And they're not doing anything with it because they're not doing anything with it. But, and I think it's perpetually, it's the right debate. And it's a debate that continues to be worth having. But I think that's the big challenge going forward for something like this. Okay. Well, that's all we have time. for it. Thanks, you guys, for joining the A6 and Z podcast.