Facebook's 'Great Unbundling' will make it easier to ignore the noise

Facebook is "basically unbundling the big blue app," Mark Zuckerberg told The New York Times' Farhad Manjoo. Rejoice, Facebook users, that means it will be way easier to ignore, unfollow, and defriend your annoying connections.

The "Great Unbundling," as GigaOm puts it, signals that the future of Facebook is less in its main app than in smaller, more specifically-focused apps. Rather than a one-stop shop for networking, you might use Messenger just for chatting and Instagram for sharing images. With the addition of WhatsApp and other breakaway features, you might be a regular Facebook customer without ever visiting the main site again.

In the Times interview, Zuckerberg explains that unbundling breaks into three separate tiers. At the top is the main app of Facebook, a heavyweight business. Below that rests a number of apps just entering adolescence, including Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Search. "These are use cases that people use a lot, and they will probably be the next things that will become businesses at Facebook," Zuckerberg told the Times. "But you want to fast-forward three years before that will actually be a meaningful thing."

And then at the least developed end are "nascent" apps like Home and Paper, which have a ways to go before reaching wider use. "Maybe in three to five years those will be in the stage where Instagram and Messenger are now," Zuckerberg notes. But it's unfair to compare across tiers as of now. "It would be a mistake to compare any of them in different life cycles to other ones. They’re in different levels."