Communications are big.

Whatsapp is now part of Facebook. The deal is – by a large margin – the largest-ever acquisition of an internet company. The second largest deal is Skype - Microsoft at half the price Facebook paid.

Both are communications products. Both enable people to fulfil a fundamental human need - to communicate with friends, family and other human beings.

Both engage people in conversations and re-engage people through meaningful notifications.

A lot of sharing happens in private conversations. Facebook has used the sharing growth graph several times to indicate its own growth. Sharing in a non-public way, or on a platform that is not Facebook is directly competing for people’s attention and amount of sharing that would otherwise happen on Facebook.

The communications of the future are not constrained to a unique vertical. Every experience that touches more than one person as part of the story should enable those people to communicate, to share in a way that is optimal for that experience.

The communication experience in a marketplace for home repair professionals will be different from communications in a dating product, a calendar, a ride-sharing product or an application for sports fans.

The focus will be on building delightful, engaging experiences on top of full infrastructure building blocks. One of the bigger ones being communications.