Senior Facebook director says the Messenger app is 'one per cent finished'
Director Julien Codorniou has some amibitious plans for Messenger in the coming years
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Your support makes all the difference.A senior Facebook staff member has said that the company's Messenger app is "one per cent finished", and wants to see the messaging service evolve into a jack-of-all-trades app that will become a "very important part of your life".
Julien Codorniou, Facebook's director of global platform partnerships, revealed his ambitions in a wide-ranging interview with Wired magazine.
Speaking about Messenger, Codorniou said: "We are one per cent finished, as we say at Facebook."
"One day, there will be companies built on Messenger, and we are at the beginning of that ecosystem."
Codorniou sees Messenger becoming the sole place where most of your communication takes place online.
Beyond simply communicating with friends, Facebook wants Messenger to become a place where customers will be able to communicate with retailers and companies, rather than relying on email or website-based contact forms.
Other amibitious plans include a payment service that will allow users to transfer small amounts of money, a feature that almost every social network has experimented with in recent years.
Hailing taxis, playing games, managing bank accounts, booking tickets, making appointments - any kind of task you perform online that involves communicating with another person or a computer could be conducted through Messenger, and that's where Facebook sees their product going.
However, it would appear that such a wide-ranging service would push WhatsApp, the messaging giant owned by Facebook, out of the market completely.
But, according to Codorniou, the two apps operate in very different areas - he told Wired that WhatsApp is generally growing in developing countries, whereas Messenger is more focused on developed nations.
"Honestly, we are not thinking about competing at all," he said.
The prospect of having every aspect of your online life being dominated by one company may sound a little Orwellian, but the ease of being able to do so much on a single service could appeal to a lot of customers. And the sheer amounts of extra data that Facebook could harvest from users if Messenger got to this stage would be very valuable.
At any rate, Codorniou says he sees this kind of shift occuring over the course of the next ten years - so it remains to be seen whether these extra features will come to light, or more importantly, whether they'll be embraced by users.
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