And then, at F8, Zuckerberg revealed his cards. But over the next year, as WhatsApp remained lean, Messengerfunctionality kept growing - video and voice calls, peer-to-peer payments, location-sharing - even as its use was made independent of a Facebook account. Some questioned why the company was competing with its own acquisition, WhatsApp, bought two months earlier for what was then $19 billion (£12.5bn). In April 2014, it was separated from the main Facebook app users would have to download it separately to collect mobile messages. Messenger began as a simple messaging app for iOS and Android in August 2011. "Helping people communicate more naturally with businesses will improve, I think, almost every person's life because it's something everyone does." "As Messenger has grown, we think this service has the potential to help people express themselves in new ways, to connect hundreds of millions of new people, and to become a communication tool for the world," Zuckerberg told 2,000 developers at his company's F8 conference in San Francisco in March, as he announced that Messenger was becoming so much more than just an app. A year later, when WIRED visits Facebook's cavernous new Menlo Park HQ in California, Messenger is up to 700 million actives, with more than a billion Android downloads - yet his team of 200 has taken what Marcus calls mere "baby steps" towards the ultimate ambition of building the company's next great global platform. When Marcus made the surprise jump to Facebook to run its messaging division in August 2014, its Messenger app had 300 million monthly active users. Beneath a yawning seven-metre-high Frank Gehry ceiling - its outer shell covered by a 3.5-hectare Mark Zuckerberg-devised giant rooftop park its pristine 40,000-square-metre interior decorated with posters imploring staff to "Move Fast And Break Things" and "Think Wrong" - David Marcus, a former president of PayPal, is calmly explaining to WIRED what he calls "one of the biggest opportunities in tech in the next ten years".
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