No.8 Facebook的转型愿景

第八天:Facebook想学习WeChat,这是中国模式的胜利吗？ Mark Zuckerberg wants Facebook to emulateChina’s WeChat, but can it? 马克·扎克伯格希望 Facebook 效仿中国的微信，它做得到吗？ As Mark Zuckerberg begins shifting Facebook to private messaging and away from public sharing and open conversations, the vision he has sketched out for the future of social networking already exists—just not in the United States. 当马克·扎克伯格开始让 Facebook 从公共分享和公开对话转型到私人通讯时，他为未来社交网络勾勒的愿景已经存在了——只不过不是在美国。 Instead, it is a reality in China through a messaging app called WeChat. 相反，一个名叫“微信”的通讯应用程序，已经在中国实现了这一愿景。 To make Facebook a private messaging product, Zuckerberg may have a lot to learn from Allen Zhang, the creator of WeChat. Zhang is famous for his perfectionist pursuit of a well-designed service. 要想把 Facebook 变成一款私人通讯产品，扎克伯格有很多事可能要向微信的创造者张小龙学习。张小龙对设计精良的服务有着完美主义般的追求，因而享有盛名。 Zhang fought many internal battles when Tencent’s revenue department pushed to put more ads on WeChat. In a four-hour speech earlier this year, he pondered the question of why there were not more ads on the messaging service, especially the opening-page ads that are the norm in many other Chinese mobile apps. 当腾讯的营收部门敦促在微信上投放更多广告时，张小龙曾经在公司内部打了很多场仗。在今年年初一场四个小时的演讲中，他让大家思考了一个问题：为什么这个通讯服务平台上没有那么多广告，特别是在中国其他许多手机应用中很常见的启动页广告。 Many Chinese spend a lot of time—about one-third of their online time—on WeChat, he said. “If WeChat were a person, it would have to be your best friend so that you would be willing to spend so much time with it,” he said. “How could I post an ad on the face of your best friend? Every time you see it, you’ll have to watch an ad before you can talk to it.” 他说，很多中国人花大量时间在微信上，大约占他们上网时间的三分之一。“如果把微信比作一个人，那么它一定是你最好的朋友，这样你才愿意花那么多时间和它在一起。”他说道，“我怎么能把广告贴在你最好的朋友脸上呢？每次你看到它，你得先看到广告，然后才能和它说话。” Zhang, who has made restraint his productphilosophy, has been lucky because Tencent makes most of its money from online games so that it does not need to sell ads for revenue. Zuckerberg does not have that luxury, given that he is trying to switch from an ad-based business into a different model. It will be far from an easy task to pull off. 将克制奉为产品理念的张小龙，一直很幸运，因为腾讯大部分营收来自网络游戏，所以它不需要靠卖广告来赚钱。然而，扎克伯格并没有这样的优势，因为他正试图从基于广告的业务转向一种不同的模式，这实现起来将远没有那么容易。