Facebook and Uber Discuss Integration of Car Service Into Messenger
Mark Zuckerberg must be looking to Asia for inspiration for the kind of platform Facebook Messenger could become. — Here's one idea: An integration with popular car-hailing service Uber that would be beneficial to both companies and, presumably, their users.
Context & Ripple Effects
Re/code reports that Facebook and Uber are in unconfirmed talks to embed Uber's car-hailing service directly into Messenger, with Mark Zuckerberg reportedly looking to Asian messaging platforms for a template. The rumor lands one day after Facebook's eighth straight quarter of beating projections — $2.91B in Q2 2014 revenue, 62% of ad money from mobile, and 654M daily mobile users — meaning the company has a massive mobile surface it has so far monetized almost entirely through ads.
The idea also extends a thread already running through coverage of Uber itself: back in December 2013, analysts floated the argument that Uber could evolve into an Amazon-style logistics platform rather than a mere cab company. A Messenger integration would be the distribution-side mirror of that thesis — putting a transaction layer inside someone else's conversation app.
First-order effects
- If the talks produce a deal, Uber gains a new acquisition channel into Facebook's 654M daily mobile users without spending on its own user acquisition, while Facebook gets its first serious non-advertising revenue experiment inside Messenger.
- The report arrives just two weeks after Uber cut UberX fares by 20% in NYC to undercut taxis; a Messenger placement would compound that pricing pressure by lowering the friction of hailing a car even further.
Second-order effects
- Other messaging apps face pressure to answer with their own service integrations or risk being positioned as dumb pipes while Messenger becomes a place where conversations turn into transactions.
- Taxi operators and incumbent car services, already losing on price to UberX in New York, would now compete against a rival embedded in the default communication tool of over a billion people.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward messaging clients consolidating into super-app platforms on the WeChat/Line model, shifting power from whoever owns the service to whoever owns the conversation layer where services are discovered — an access-layer battle rather than a features battle.
- For Uber specifically, distribution partnerships of this kind reinforce its evolution from a ride-hailing company toward a general logistics and services network whose reach depends less on its own app than on how many surfaces it occupies.
The trend: Western messaging apps are beginning to copy Asia's super-app playbook, turning chat clients into transaction platforms and making the conversation layer, not any single service, the strategic high ground.