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Facebook and Uber Reportedly Talking Messenger Integration

In the future, it’s possible that you’ll be able to coordinate a ride to pick up you and your drunk friends using Facebook Messenger. Recode quotes sources familiar with the matter who say...
Facebook and Uber Reportedly Talking Messenger Integration
Written by Josh Wolford
  • In the future, it’s possible that you’ll be able to coordinate a ride to pick up you and your drunk friends using Facebook Messenger.

    Recode quotes sources familiar with the matter who say that Mark Zuckerberg has held preliminary talks with Uber CEO Travis Kalanick about some sort of Uber/Facebook Messenger partnership.

    “It’s very conceptual, and nowhere near execution…but it’s a direction that Messenger has to go in,” said the source.

    So, not really a sure thing – but you know, it surely makes sense.

    This comes on the heels of some of the biggest news to come out of Facebook’s recent earnings call – that sometime, eventually, Messenger would get some sort of payments functionality.

    Here’s the full context of Zuckerberg’s comments about Messenger and payments, if you’re interested:

    Messenger will have — over time there will be some overlap between that and payments. But I guess what I’m just trying to say is two things. One is, the payments piece will be a part of what will help drive the overall success and help people share with each other and interact with businesses. But we’re really focused on the interactions overall, rather than the mechanism and David shares that view.

    And the second thing is just that there’s so much ground work that we need to do in order to make it so that people are communicating with businesses and public figures and entities in these other apps that we’re building, which is part of the business ecosystem. And I really can’t underscore that enough that we have a lot of work to do and we could take the cheap and easy approach and just try to put ads in or do payments and make some money in the short term. But we’re not going to do that. So to the extent that any of your models or anything reflects that we might be doing that, I would strongly encourage you here to adjust that, because we’re not going to and we’re going to take time to do this in the way that we think that’s going to be right over multiple years.

    The partnership would be beneficial for both companies, at least on the surface. For Uber, they’d have a new pipeline into a user base of over 200 million, who collectively send over 12 billion messages every single day. For Facebook, Uber would be just one step in turning Messenger into a real payments platform, something that they clearly want to do…somewhere down the road…sometime…maybe.

    Image via Uber, Facebook

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