Facebook想模仿微信,它做得到吗?

SAN FRANCISCO — As Mark Zuckerberg begins shifting Facebook to private messaging and away from public sharing and open conversations, the vision he has sketched out for the future of social networking already exists — just not in the United States.

旧金山——马克·扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)开始让Facebook从公共分享和公开对话转向私人信息，然而他为未来社交网络所描绘的愿景已经存在了——只不过不在美国。

Instead, it is a reality in China through a messaging app called WeChat.

它反而是由一个名叫微信的通讯应用程序在中国实现的。

Developed by the Chinese internet giant Tencent in 2011, WeChat lets people message each other via one-on-one texts, audio or video calls. Users can also form groups of as many as 500 people on WeChat to discuss and debate the issues of the day.

微信是中国互联网巨头腾讯于2011年开发的，它让人们可以通过一对一的文本、音频或视频通话互相发送信息。用户还可以在微信上组成最多500人的小组，讨论和辩论当天的话题。

While Facebook users constantly see ads in their News Feeds, WeChat users only see one or two ads a day in their Moment feeds. That’s because WeChat isn’t dependent on advertising for making money. It has a mobile payments system that has been widely adopted in China, which allows people to shop, play games, pay utility bills and order meal deliveries all from within the app. WeChat gets a commission from many of these services.

Facebook用户经常在他们的资讯源中看到广告，而微信用户每天只会在他们的“发现”消息源中看到一两个广告。这是因为微信不依赖广告赚钱。它的移动支付系统在中国得到了广泛应用，人们可以在该应用内购物、玩游戏、支付水电费和订餐。微信从这些众多的服务当中获得佣金。

“WeChat has shown definitively that private messaging, especially the small groups, is the future,” said Jeffrey Towson, a professor of investment at Peking University. “It is the uber utility of business and life. It has shown the path.”

“微信明确地向人们展现出，私人信息是未来的趋势，尤其是小群体信息，”北京大学投资学教授陶迅(Jeffrey Towson)表示。“它是商业和生活的超级实用工具。它已经指明了道路。”

What is happening in China offers clues to not only how Facebook may carry out its shift, but how the internet more broadly might change. Many of Silicon Valley’s tech giants are dependent today on online advertising to make enough money to keep growing and innovating on new services. Some call online ads the lifeblood of the internet.

中国正在发生的事情不仅为Facebook转型提供了线索，也为更广泛的互联网可能发生的变化提供了线索。如今，硅谷的许多科技巨头都依赖在线广告来赚足够的钱，以保持在新服务领域的增长和创新。有些人把网络广告称为互联网的命脉。

But WeChat, which has 1.1 billion monthly active users, shows that other models — particularly those based on payments and commerce — can support massive digital businesses. That has implications for Google, Twitter and many others, as well as Facebook.

但每月活跃用户达11亿的微信表明，其他模式——尤其是基于支付和商务的模式——可以支持大规模的数字业务。这对谷歌、Twitter和许多其他网站都有启发，当然也有Facebook。

WeChat, of course, has its own flaws. The messaging app is heavily censored because of requirements by the Chinese government.

当然，微信也有自己的缺点。由于中国政府的要求，这款信息应用受到了严格的审查。

Facebook and Tencent did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Facebook和腾讯没有立即回应置评请求。

Mr. Zuckerberg didn’t elaborate much this week on how the change toward private messaging would affect Facebook’s business, which relies on people publicly sharing posts to be able to serve them targeted advertisements. In a blog post, he said Facebook would build more ways for people to interact on top of messaging, “including calls, video chats, groups, stories, businesses, payments, commerce, and ultimately a platform for many other kinds of private services.”

扎克伯格本周没有详细阐释向私人信息服务的转变将如何影响Facebook的业务，目前，它的业务依赖于按照用户公开分享的帖子，为他们提供定向广告服务。他在一篇博客文章中说，Facebook将向人们提供更多方式，让他们在信息传送的基础上进行互动，“包括电话、视频聊天、群组、故事、企业、支付、商业，最终还将成为许多其他私人服务的平台。”

Yet it’s unclear whether Mr. Zuckerberg can pull all those features off with Facebook. On WeChat, those services are underpinned by its mobile payments system, WeChat Pay. Because payments is already tied into the messaging service, people can easily order meal deliveries, book hotels, hail ride-sharing cars and pay their bills. WeChat Pay itself has 900 million monthly active users.

不过，目前还不清楚扎克伯格能否在Facebook上实现所有这些功能。在微信上，这些服务的基础是其移动支付系统“微信支付”。由于支付同信息传送服务捆绑在一起，人们可以轻松地订购送餐服务、预订酒店、叫车和支付账单。微信支付本身每月有九亿活跃用户。

People also use WeChat Pay to transfer money and to buy personal finance products. More than 100 million customers have purchased WeChat’s personal finance products, which managed over 500 billion yuan, or $74 billion, by the end of last September, Tencent has said. Its users can buy everything from bonds and insurance to money market funds through the app.

人们也使用微信支付转账和购买个人理财产品。腾讯表示，截至去年9月底，已有一亿多客户购买了微信的个人理财产品，这些产品管理着超过5000亿人民币（合740亿美元）的资金。用户可以通过该应用购买从债券、保险到货币市场基金在内的一切东西。

Facebook lacks such a payments system. So to be more like WeChat, the Silicon Valley company could have to acquire banking and payment licenses in many countries. One sign that Facebook has been thinking about payments is its work on a new crypto coin that is meant to let people send money to contacts on their messaging systems.

Facebook没有这样的支付系统。因此，为了更像微信，这家硅谷公司可能必须在许多国家获取银行和支付牌照。Facebook一直在考虑支付业务的一个迹象是，该公司正在研发一种新的加密货币，旨在让人们可以将钱发送给他们消息系统中的联系人。

To make Facebook a private messaging product, Mr. Zuckerberg may have a lot else to learn from Allen Zhang, the creator of WeChat. Mr. Zhang is famous for his perfectionist pursuit of a well-designed service.

为把Facebook变成私人消息产品，扎克伯格可能还有很多其他方面要向微信创始人张小龙学习。张小龙以对精良服务设计的完美主义追求而著称。

“He is renowned in China’s tech scene as an artist and philosopher, as well as for his fierce mission against anything that degrades user experience,” Connie Chan, an investor at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, recently wrote of Mr. Zhang.

“他在中国科技界的出名是作为一个艺术家和哲学家，还有他以抵制一切降低用户体验的东西为己任，”风险投资公司安德森·霍洛维茨(Andreessen Horowitz)的投资人陈梅陵(Connie Chan)近期在关于张小龙的文章中写道。

Mr. Zhang fought many internal battles when Tencent’s revenue department pushed to put more ads on WeChat. In a four-hour speech earlier this year, he pondered the question of why there were not more ads on the messaging service, especially the opening-page ads that are the norm in many other Chinese mobile apps.

当腾讯的营收部门催促着想要在微信上投放更多广告时，张小龙在公司内部打了很多场仗。在今年年初四小时的演讲中，他让大家思考一个问题，为什么这款消息平台上没那么多广告，特别是启动页广告，这在很多其他中国手机应用程序上是常态。

Mr. Zhang’s answer: Many Chinese spent a lot of time — about one third of their online time — on WeChat, he said. “If WeChat were a person, it would have to be your best friend so that you would be willing to spend so much time with it,” he said. “How could I post an ad on the face of your best friend? Every time you see it, you’ll have to watch an ad before you can talk to it.”

张小龙的答案是：很多中国人花大量时间——大约他们上网时间的三分之一——在微信上，他说。“如果微信是一个人，他是你最好的朋友，因为你在他那里花最多的时间，”他说。“不希望你跟最好的朋友说话，先看他脸上的广告，然后取下来再跟他说话。”

Mr. Zhang, who has made restraint his product philosophy, has been lucky because Tencent makes most of its money from online games so that it does not need to sell ads for revenue.

张小龙已将克制作为他的产品哲学，他一直很幸运，因为腾讯大部分营利来自在线游戏，所以不需要靠卖广告赚钱。

Tencent doesn’t break out its revenues from WeChat, but its financial report for the third quarter of 2018 said that social advertising revenue, which includes WeChat, grew 61 percent from a year earlier, while the category called “other businesses,” which includes payment services, rose by 69 percent.

腾讯没有公布它的微信收入，但其2018年第三季度的财务报告称，包括微信在内的社交广告收入同比上涨了61%，而包括支付服务的名为“其他业务”的类别则增长了69%。

Mr. Zuckerberg does not have that luxury, given that he is trying to switch from an ad-based business into a different model. It will be far from an easy task to pull off.

扎克伯格可没这样的优势，鉴于他正努力从基于广告的业务转向不同的模式。它实现起来将远没那么容易。

“Zuck is clearly trying to address Facebook’s problems of privacy and fake news, but it will greatly affect its monetization capability,” said Ivy Li, a venture capitalist at Seven Seas Partners in Menlo Park, Calif. “How comprehensive the surgery is going to be and whether the implementation will be twisted by all kinds of compromises is a big question.”

“扎克伯格显然在努力应对Facebook的隐私和假消息问题，但这将严重影响其盈利能力，”加州门洛帕克的七海资本(Seven Seas Partners)的风险投资人艾薇·李(Ivy Li)说。“这场变革会有多全面，执行上是否会因各种妥协而扭曲是个大问题。”

She added: “Facebook is trying to seek a balance between a public square and a private space in an increasingly polarizing society. The final result could be it will be abandoned by both.”

她还说：“Facebook正努力寻求在日趋两极化的社会中，在公共平台与私人空间之间取得平衡。最终结果可能会是被两者所抛弃。”