Yesterday Meta reported its quarterly earnings, and amid sharing updates on Threads, Instagram, and yes, the metaverse, CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined an interesting new priority for this year: getting back to ‘OG Facebook.’
Zuckerberg has ‘OG Facebook’ as focus area for the year
Facebook is, by any reasonable measure, a massive success for Meta. It has billions of active users—billions.
Yet in the current fragmented social media ecosystem, Facebook is an afterthought for many.
But it sounds like Zuckerberg aims to change that this year.
During Meta’s earnings call, the CEO explained:
Facebook is used by more than 3 billion monthly actives and we’re focused on growing its cultural influence. I’m excited this year to get back to some OG Facebook.
This comment about ‘OG Facebook’ was at first made with no further details. But later in the call, the CEO was asked to share more.
Per Meta’s official transcript, he explained:
I think that there are a lot of opportunities to make it way more culturally influential than it is today. And I think that that’s sort of a fun and interesting goal that will take our product development in some interesting directions that we maybe haven’t had a focus on it as much over the last several years.
So I don’t know that I have anything much more specific on this other than that this is going to be one of my focus areas for this year. I mean I think it’s an investment area and something I’m going to spend some time on.
[…]
But overall, I’m really excited about doing some exciting stuff here…as we start rolling stuff out…I think some of this will kind of get back to how Facebook was originally used back in the day. So I think it will be fun.
Zuckerberg even hinted that some of the changes could mean sacrificing financial gains for the sake of improving the product. He said, “It might mean that in the near term, we make some trade-offs to kind of focus on some product areas of what we’re doing ahead of just kind of maximizing business results in the near term on it.”
9to5Mac’s Take
I remember those ‘OG Facebook’ days, and they were a lot of fun. Over the years, however, Facebook became significantly less appealing to me personally.
Some attribute Facebook’s cultural decline to the fact that it’s not ‘cool’ anymore—a shift blamed on parents and grandparents joining, perhaps. But for me, I stopped using Facebook because the product itself seemed to decline. For the sake of boosting engagement, my Facebook feed started showing all kinds of information I had no interest in—for example, every random ‘like’ one of my friends made. Originally, Facebook was all about user-generated content from people I cared about.
I’d love to see OG Facebook return, so I’m curious to see exactly what Meta has in store.
Are you interested in seeing ‘OG Facebook’ come back in some form? What would that look like to you? Let us know in the comments.
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