At the company's annual developer focused event, F8, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out the vision for what Facebook, Instagram and Facebook Messenger will look like very soon in the near future.
Facebook is mostly pivoting towards becoming more like WhatsApp -- privacy conscious, private messaging type. Instagram will increasingly become bigger and bigger. WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are also getting a rethink.
Mark Zuckeberg at F8 2019
Last year was a brutal one for Facebook, as the social media giant was ravaged by data scandals and US Congressional scrutiny, leading to CEO Mark Zuckerberg's public apology. Facebook's credibility took a walloping.
So naturally, something had to change. And according to Zuckerberg, it's time to make Facebook more privacy conscious from the ground up. That's right, Facebook is pivoting towards a private messaging, privacy focused social network in the near future.
Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed that the future is about privacy, before unveiling a brand new design of Facebook on the desktop. It looks like this.
New Facebook design
You can see the direction Facebook is heading. There's no longer the dominant focus on "Newsfeed", and Stories and Videos become two new important focus points for Facebook going forward.
Facebook also wants to take a piece of the online dating pie, so it showcased a new feature called "Secret Crush", and other important social circle focused initiatives with privacy at its core.
Increased focus on Instagram
Facebook has suffered a crisis of faith recently, Instagram however has no such problems. So it's obvious that there are big plans in store for Instagram to keep the growth momentum going.
To that end, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri outlined some cool new features coming to Instagram, that makes it more than just a photo or video sharing social network. Instagram showed a new?"create mode," which is a brand new way of doing stories for text, quizzes, polls, and all anything about Instagram unrelated to photos or videos.?
"Donation stickers" is another new Instagram feature which let you raise money for charity. This will be only visible in your Instagram Stories, however. There are also new ways for brands to sell products directly on Instagram, through influencer posts.
"As the world gets bigger and more connected, we need that sense of intimacy more than ever. This is the next chapter for our services," Mark Zuckerberg said during F8 conference. And seeing the tweaks to Facebook and Instagram, the next chapter is ringing in sooner rather than later.