WhatsApp and Facebook Futures Discussed by Mark Zuckerberg in 'New York Times' Interview

Facebook has been very busy lately, buying out messaging company WhatsApp and virtual reality developer Oculus for $19 billion and $2bn respectively. The social media giant's founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke to The New York Times about their acquisitions and plans.

The NYT's Farhad Manjoo asked questions about the market for messaging, which Zuckerberg admitted was bigger than they initially thought. He also asked whether the young billionaire was concerned that his company was not the one innovating and creating things such as Instagram or WhatsApp, instead resorting to spending huge sums of money to buy them.

When asked if he feels Facebook is creating enough new things and if they are innovative enough, Zuckerberg explained that the properties they've acquired are different parts of the field from what they already owned.

"Facebook Messenger is actually a really successful thing," he assured Manjoo. "But I think we basically saw that the messaging space is bigger than we'd initially realized, and that the use cases that WhatsApp and Messenger have are more different than we had thought originally."

"Messanger is more about chatting with friends and WhatsApp is like an SMS replacement. Those things sound similar, but when you go into the nuances of how people use it, they are both very big in different markets."

Zuckerberg explains that Facebook itself is still the main part of the business, of course, but these other services support the company and build "a pipeline of experiences for people to have", all of which are in different stages of their life cycles right now and shouldn't be compared."

He has a few more insightful comments about Facebook's plans and the nature of the company, which you can read at the New York Times' website.