Understanding the End of Parse & Facebook’s Vision for the Internet

Note: an excerpt of this post was originally published on VentureBeat under the title: Why Facebook’s Parse shutdown is good news for all of us.

As Jim Barksdale famously said:

“There’s only two ways I know of to make money: bundling and unbundling — most people spend half their time adding and other people spend half their time subtracting, so that’s what works out.”

Yesterday, Facebook put a bullet in Parse, their “unbundled” platform-as-a-service for mobile developers, throwing their substantial weight behind the fully bundled world of Facebook apps. Given their most recent earnings announcement, their strategy of pulling content from all over the Web into the Facebook app vortex is monetizing well. No surprise, given their panopticon like access to all user data and activities.

True to the Facebook’s motto of Move Fast And Break Things: After acquiring Parse for $85 million, the service was the centerpiece of Zuckerberg’s Facebook F8 keynote to developers just last year. Since then, however, Facebook has doubled down on messaging, which they clearly believe to be the platform of the future as they chase WeChat’s success in China globally. This might seem strange, since most people still consider Facebook a social network, but here’s the real story:

In recent months, Facebook has greatly shifted focus and resources from its original, browsing Web based social network to its mobile Messenger app, and is busy rolling out enterprise-friendly services, such as customer communication bots, to make it even more appealing for business use. This pivot for a $300B cap company is right up there with Bill Gates similar move in 1995 when he realized the Internet Tidal Wave was coming for Microsoft.

There’s a very good reason for this: Messaging, notifications and AI (bots) are rapidly eating up the Web experience, becoming the dominant way we interact with and consume Internet content and services. As we browse the Web less, we browse our social media notifications and messages more. The world’s move to mobile largely fuels this: Browsing the Web on our phones is more convenient than waiting until we’re in front of a full sized screen and keyboard, but it’s also sub-optimal. Which in turn drives us back into our social media, where Web links are contextualized — mostly by our friends we trust and people/brands we’ve opted to follow.

Facebook wants their apps to win, so they shut down Parse — which after all, only enables companies to build products which compete with Facebook and its apps — all this while retrofitting Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp to be a communication tools for enterprise. So a key question in the coming years is whether enterprise will embrace Facebook’s messenger apps, even if that means handing over their customer data and customized user experience to Facebook. (On this topic, social game developers may have some hard-earned wisdom to share.) Developers will get distribution for their content and potential reach with over 1 billion users, but in exchange, lose control over the customer relationship, experience and data which Facebook is happy to use to drive their formidable advertising engine. Companies will soon need to decide if they’re willing to give up so much to play in Facebook’s walled gardens.

However, it would be a mistake to assume that one messaging app will engulf our Internet activity, because that misses the fact that messaging and notifications is evolving to replace the browsing experience. We’re entering a phase of the Internet where the mass explosion of messaging in non-messaging apps: Dating, on-demand services, retail, gaming apps, and even enterprise apps are utterly depend on messaging for the core experience and to retain users and drive engagement. (Or as designer Luke Wroblewski put it as a corollary to Zawinski’s Law: “Every mobile app attempts to expand until it includes chat. Those applications which do not are replaced by ones which can.”) For that reason, I think the future of Internet engagement may not belong to any one platform or any single walled garden, but of mobile mega-niches of messaging and conversation.

Facebook just did developers who’ve come to rely on Parse an enormous favor by killing it — no longer dependent on a company dedicated to channeling the entire Internet experience into its own apps, they now are free to choose best in class platforms that enable them to build experiences that benefit their users. As opposed to Facebook’s dominance.

At Layer, we’ve always envisioned a world where app builders would have access to best in class building blocks for maps, payments, analytics and especially our wheelhouse — messaging.

There are alternatives to Parse for developers that want to keep control over their users and drive engagement within their own apps. Some to consider are Auth-0 for authentication, Heroku, Amazon or Azure for developers that want to host their own instances of the open source Parse engine, and of course Layer for messaging and notifications.