Messenger and Popularity
http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/10/7187495/facebook-messenger-500-million-monthly-users
How do the effects of Information-cascades and Direct Benefits come into play when the conversation of forced integration is on the table? This is going to be a discussion about how Facebook has forced it’s users on their mobile devices to download their Messenger application and separated its original service. The article is just a synopsis of how well the messenger application is doing thus far and what progress it can make to increase their user pool.
So in terms of information cascades, when the messenger application first came out, it was a superfluous application that many users did not see a reason to get, (they had their private signal of Bad), because why would they switch to using yet another application and add to their list of mobile programs, especially when the original application was still using the messaging service natively in the original application? There was little motivation and incentive to move to the new Messenger application, so very few people did that. What then became the case because Facebook apparently wanted to change the experience that people had with their mobile application and separate the experience of messaging to the experience of viewing a news feed, they made it a requirement to change to the Messenger app.
By forcing it’s 1.3 billion users to switch to this new application, that effectively removed the need for an information cascade based only on the users, and changed it so that the information cascade became a direct-benefit scheme. This is the case because it was no longer the weighing of if people downloaded it, then more people would download it, but more of a situation that dictated that if all your friends downloaded the service and the original service changes, would the cost and benefit weight cause you to change over to the new service as well.
This is potentially rather interesting because of how information is relayed to a population and how things become popular. What can really be said of an application that forces popularity? Is an application really popular if it was coerced into its users lives? Why can Facebook get away with forcing this upon their user-base? Is it because that they know if no one downloads the app, there isn’t really a comparable alternative so users HAVE to use it?