Quora CEO Says Stickers Will Soon Overtake America

LineJapanese messaging app Line offers a wide array of stickers

Quora CEO and former chief technology officer at Facebook, Adam D'Angelo, gave a lengthy interview to Matt Lynley at BuzzFeed News yesterday.

He spoke a lot about artificial intelligence and personalization on the internet.

He said one really effective way to personalize a service is though stickers. 

He mentioned the abundance of stickers in foreign messaging apps and said he believes stickers will soon become as prevalent in America as they are in the Asian market.

"If you look online, or on some of the messaging apps, they show a different set of stickers depending on what country you're in. They specialize it for you," he said. "Quora is very different from these apps, but… I think that no one has come along and really done stickers well for the Western market."

He equated stickers in 2014 to Farmville in 2007. At the time D'Angelo was at Facebook and they were conducting research on some of the biggest social networks in Asia. The Facebook research team realized that the networks were all full of games. One of the most successful was a farm game that was integrated with the biggest social network at the time.

"it just seemed crazy - no way would people in the U.S. go for this kind of thing," D'Angelo said he thought at the time.

A year later, Facebook opened up their development platform and FarmVille was everywhere.

"I always hesitate before drawing these cultural conclusions that people are that different in other places," he said.

"Culture really matters. I wouldn't be surprised if stickers are as big here as they are in Asia in five more years."