What's Mark Zuckerberg working on?

Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg is so excited about what he’s working on that he’s been forgetting to eat meals. By his own admission, this ‘keeps happening’ and he thinks it may have lost him 10 pounds in the last month. In an uncharacteristically offhand Facebook post that garnered an offer from his father Edward to deliver meals (politely declined), the Zuck claimed that Facebook’s new products are going to be {fire emoji}.

While the delightful social media exchange got its due online, with netizens’ ‘Awws’ being screen-shotted with abandon, the underlying premise may be unwise to ignore. That Mark Zuckerberg is up to something beyond the normal is clear. The question is - what?

What is Mark Zuckerberg working on?

Zuckerberg, 36, is known to talk-up his mid- to long-range aspirations. Sometimes these are reactive and in figurative terms, often times upholding how Facebook’s various social media apps bring people and communities together. Sometimes they’re to do with lofty goals he sets himself - like when he decided he’d run 365km in a year and ended up doing some portion of it on his travels, or when he declared he’d develop his own ‘Jarvis’ AI to run things at his home. And sometimes, they’re to do with products and offerings that are very possibly going to become familiar to millions of people around the world very soon. This latest smidgen of excitement is clearly about the last of these.

Copious reading online along with Zuckerberg’s and Facebook’s own posts indicate that they’re hard at work on a couple of fronts - both online, and in your hands/on your face. At one end is speculation that Mark Zuckerberg has taken a very keen interest in the audio format and form-factor for content and communication, and at the other is Facebook’s growing ‘conviction’ in its hardware chops.

Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook are bringing ‘social audio’ - Soundbites, Podcasts & Live Audio Rooms

Just days before his boss’ ‘can’t eat, too excited’ update, Head of Facebook App Fidji Simo had written on the Facebook blog about how “Whether it’s an in-depth conversation or your passing thoughts, we are building audio tools and formats that connect people with the things they care about.” The post includes descriptions of Soundbites - made using a ‘Sound studio in your pocket’; Podcasts on the Facebook app, and a platform that has been likened to viral invite-only app ClubHouse.

Followers of Indian politics will remember ClubHouse was the same app where Trinamool election strategist Prashant Kishor had had a cozy chat with several journalists, the audio of which was ‘leaked’. The truth is, ClubHouse (and presumably this new Facebook feature which has also similarly been piloted by Twitter) allows one to broadcast an audio or host an ‘audio room’ with others and for an audience to listen in.

ClubHouse has been valued at an estimated $4 billion, as per the reports covering its latest fundraise. Those same reports claim that it’s being shown more love by its investors than by the people that are (or aren’t) using it. All evidence points to Facebook planning on incorporating it as a feature on to its existing platforms, rather than as a standalone app. The Facebook app head’s blog post is rather clear in this regard, and the company’s past willingness to emulate (read: copy) its competitors is well documented. ‘Stories’ spawned off Snapchat’s disappearing posts, ‘Reels’ is clearly an effort to latch on to the short vertical video format that TikTok (no longer available in India) has so quickly made its own, and the company didn’t hesitate to build its own Zoom rival into its suite either.

Facebook’s own vision (what would be the apt aural conjugation?) for audio appears to be to get content creators to make short sound clip - jokes, stories, snippets, updates - and package them to followers willing to listen. The longer ones - these live audio rooms - could become Podcasts when over. As ClubHouse has purportedly found, a steady supply of content creators is key.

Facebook’s hardware play and the Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) - VR/AR, Occulus, Quest, Portal and more

One thing Facebook has been indicating very strongly and even stating outright is that it is very firmly in the race for the next platform - whatever it is that comes after smartphones. It currently sells a video calling device called Portal which is clearly a product for the COVID-19-inspired WFH era. Even here, Facebook’s VP of consumer hardware Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth has insisted that Portal provides something a little extra than what’s out there. But the bigger bet is on Human Computer Interfacing (HCI) which is what the Facebook Reality Labs is working on with a very serious deployment of resources.

Spun off from Oculus, the VR headset-maker Facebook purchased in 2014, Facebook Reality Labs is the custodian of the current top-of-the-line Oculus Quest 2 VR headset. The product has evolved significantly since the old wire-tangle that was the Oculus Rift and more closely resembles a consumer product than a laboratory prototype. However, VR and AR and even the fabled Mixed Reality are yet to see their ‘iPhone moment’. Nobody is truly clear just yet what the finalised version of these technologies will resemble. Facebook plans to bring out a pair of co-branded smart glasses next year, and is also purportedly working on a smart watch. Clearly, Mark Zuckerberg feels Apple and Fitbit’s new owners Google haven’t cracked wearables yet.

Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) Chief Scientist Michael Abrash has compared the next paradigm in Human Computers Interface to the adoption of GUI (Graphical User Interface - essentially windows, icons and a mouse) - almost 50 years ago. This field has a tendency to be spoken about in timeframes as long as 10-15 years - eons in technology terms - and very confident end-game scenarios talk about brain implants - but let’s not go there. In this domain, Facebook and other interested parties are also in the same neck of the woods as Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which sensationally demonstrated how its system had learnt to move a cursor by following the thoughts of a nine-year-old Macaque named Pager.

The Facebook Reality Labs is quite the talk of the town among the darling publications of Silicon Valley. It apparently employs 1 out of every 5 Facebook employees and contains a number of teams full to bursting with PhD-level scientists and researchers working on virtual and augmented reality. One area where Facebook claims progress in this realm is in terms of the all-important developer ecosystem. Over 20 titles created for the Oculus Quest 2 have grossed over a million dollars, meaning that developers are likely to see a possibility of recouping their costs if they build software for the platform.

Privacy, feud with Apple, Instagram for Kids

Now worth an estimated $113 billion, Mark Zuckerberg has also over the last few years seen his relationship with Apple CEO Tim Cook deteriorate. The two simply don’t appear to see eye-to-eye on Facebook’s use of its users’ data, with Apple moving to curb the privileges that Facebook’s products enjoy in tracking user activities outside what is done on their apps, and Facebook replying in kind by defending an ‘open Internet’ by calling Apple out via front-page ads on top newspapers. An announcement that Facebook would be working on an ‘Instagram for Kids’-type product has also come under the scanner for concerns just about anyone considers to be obvious.

So what is Mark Zuckerberg working on?

If one were to guesstimate based on the choice of words, gestation periods for various technologies and word on the grapevine, the new products Mark Zuckerberg speaks of are more likely to be related to social audio than to VR, for the time being. The fact that he’s mentioned ‘products’ - plural - appears to indicate an overriding functionality across Facebook’s line rather than a singular item. To put things into perspective, his latest update regarding AR/VR is about ‘Avatars’ for Quest and how hard is it to dress them up, and about how one could have a virtual meeting at the Mausoleum of Augustus in Rome, which is ‘pretty awesome’ - all in all, interesting but gimmicky.

More revealing, however, is another post he shared along similar lines to ‘too excited to eat’ - a poster that seethes “Move Fast and Move Furious” and captioned “If I were Vin Diesel”.

Yep, he’s up to something.