I was looking at an interesting collection of memos a couple weeks ago, courtesy of The Overflow #4. An interesting one that struck me was Mark Zuckerberg writing about the priorities of the Facebook Messenger platform. It’s clear to me that this guy is incredibly smart and a huge reason behind Facebook’s success. There is a remarkable difference between software that is poorly designed that relies solely on marketing means to score a profit, over expertly designed solutions that do not need cheap tricks to be successful – and this kind of success is not short-lived. It grows. It has a lot more value. I like that his memo focuses on just that – if you’re making a service that people can benefit from, they will use and share it. Business is a secondary goal.

Facebook Pay is one of the easiest methods I’ve used to transfer money, and Messenger is very convenient to keep in touch with my family. Sure, big information companies might be employing shady things in the background, like tracking pixels or data harvesting, but personally I could really care less. I’ll gladly trade as much data as companies want in exchange for solid products.

Another thing I liked was how thorough Zuckerberg was in his memo. I think that I may be overly verbose sometimes when describing something, but seeing his writing and his comprehensive elaboration of his ideas was refreshing.