Mark Zuckerberg says he wants to get back to the original Facebook, restoring it to “how it was originally used back in the day”.
Once one of the world’s most popular sites, Facebook has suffered from an ageing user base and a falling cultural relevance. Other products under the same Meta parent company – from Instagram and WhatsApp – have taken the place of what is sometimes known as the “blue app”.
But Mr Zuckerberg said that he intends to make it more “culturally influential than it is today” and that the change could “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”.
He made the announcement as Meta announced its quarterly results, during which Mr Zuckerberg also committed to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the development of new AI tools.
He gave little information on what that change of focus for Facebook might mean in practice. He said that he didn’t have “anything much more specific” and said it was an “investment area and something I’m going to spend some time on”.
“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 maximising business results in the near term on it,” he said. “I think some of this will kind of get back to how Facebook was originally used back in the day.”
The changes could start rolling out over the next half year or year, he said. “I'm excited this year to get back to some OG Facebook.”
In recent years, Meta’s announcement and investment has focused primarily on other apps such as Instagram – which has rolled out new features such as Reels – as well as more speculative projects such as its work in frontier artificial intelligence and the metaverse.
Mr Zuckerberg said that both of those commitments remained important. He said that the company would invest “hundreds of billions of dollars” in AI infrastructure over the long term, and also that 2025 would be a “pivotal year” for the metaverse.
Meta has recently made some changes that affect Facebook and its famous news feed, however. That includes suggestions that it would introduce more AI posts into that feed, as well as the controversial decision to cut fact checkers and allow more hate speech.
The results showed Meta with a much higher profit and revenue in its fourth quarter. It earned $20.83 billion for the last quarter of 2024, up 49 per cent from the same period last year.
