Facebook as a social network has grown by leaps and bounds over the last five years. However, only being a public social network is not going to cut it and attract advertisers as there is a constant fight for the % share of someone's time in a day which these internet companies with freemium business model are after, eyeballs and engagement. The trends are shifting and shifting very fast and we know where, towards mobile. The three mobile Ms - Mobile messaging, media and m-commerce are the top use-cases in life of a mobile user alongside gaming. And, Facebook needs to transform from a social network to a full-blown platform and these use-cases (& services) will be very important for Facebook to become one.
m-messaging:
Facebook's US$19 Billion acquisition of Whatsapp depicts how badly Facebook needed to play in this space to actually "buy the engagement time" or slice of almost 450+ million users' daily life. Whatsapp is on the verge of a much swifter growth in terms of number of active users on its platform i.e. how much a user (today) spends his/her time on mobile and engaging with this private social network rather than public social network such as Facebook.
The overall interaction done on Whatsapp will help Facebook fill in the nodes of a user's Social Graph rather than directly generating advertising revenues for Facebook. But Whatsapp's acquisition creates a strong foundation for Facebook to integrate its standalone Facebook Messenger, Chat heads and Facebook Login into Whatsapp and expand it to much more with integration of m-commerce, media
m-commerce:
Whatsapp offers a whole new opportunity for Facebook to transform it into a m-commerce platform. WeChat is one example of this. Chinese consumers can pay to buy almost anything on WeChat from Cookies to Coffee to taxi fare to even smartphones. For this Facebook will need to invest in a mobile payments solution.
m-media:
While media is a broader term, we would include images, videos, gaming and music into this category.
Acquiring companies such as Spotify could fill an important gap for Facebook to become an independent and much more powerful platform (e.g. Android) with a complete bouquet of services to take it to the next level or by building its social graph and maybe into a powerful social search engine and attract marketers, brands and advertisers.