The Everything App gets chased by the Nothing Much app
Plus the AI chatbot will fix your bike now
“Twitter was sort of plodding along before Elon came.. he’s definitely a change agent.. I do think he has been pretty polarizing.. the chance that it [X] reaches the full potential on the trajectory it’s on.. I think there’s less of a chance than there was before.”
Thus spake Zuckathustra, in a conversation that was really showcasing a photorealistic avatar system for virtual meetings: go take a look at the Threads embed (not yet available outside the system, but you don’t need a login) to be impressed. Zuck’s dead-fish eyes and won’t-tan skin look just like real life!
He’s also absolutely right in all sorts of ways. Twitter was plodding along for years. Musk is a change agent. But the chance of the text-based social network transforming, caterpillar-like, into the butterfly of “the everything app” where you can do banking, swap money, order taxis, whatever, are essentially zero. There’s a lot of delusion going on inside the modern X. I think we could effectively meme it thus:
The delusion is also on show with the current PR push by sacrificial lamb Linda Yaccarino, who was profiled at length by the Financial Times, gurning for the camera and, apparently, being surprised when Hannah Murphy, the journalist doing the interview(s) over the course of a couple of weeks, asked what it was like to work with Musk. I cannot believe that Yaccarino is so unused to the media that she would be surprised by such questions. Musk is the business version of the horse in the hospital—a John Mulaney skit that bears rewatching because 1) phew 2) actually, it could be about Musk being in charge of Twitter: “the creepiest days are when you don’t hear from the horse at all.”
Nobody thinks Yaccarino is really in charge, as the FT interview/profile frequently says:
Yaccarino’s critics say that Musk’s impulsive front-running on the CEO announcement was merely a prelude and that she has appeared on the back foot on multiple occasions since. Taking on the role has required sacrificing some integrity, they claim, becoming a puppet in Musk’s regime. “The job is not to be CEO,” says one person with knowledge of their working relationship. “You will not get to control Elon, you have to roll with the punches and channel him. If he says the sky is bright pink, you have to say you’re excited the sky is pink.” Lou Paskalis, a former top media executive at Bank of America and a longstanding Yaccarino confidante, doubts Musk’s ability to hand over the reins at all. “Since the hire, it seems to me, whether consciously or subconsciously, most of his actions seem to sabotage her success,” he says.
All of which is to say that things look, to me, better than ever for Threads, and worse than ever for Twitter. Though you could read it completely the other way round if you were, for example, to read the latest from eMarketer:
By the end of 2023, we expect Threads to have 23.7 million monthly users in the US, less than half the user base of X. That equates to 10.4% of social network users and 17.5% of Instagram users. This year, it will rank second-to-last among social networks in the US—a position that will remain unchanged through 2025.
“The path to 1 billion Threads users is longer than Meta would like,” said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence. “The link to Instagram can only take Threads so far, and the clock is ticking for the network effect to take hold. While a drop in sign-ups and engagement was to be expected after Threads’ hyped-up launch, Meta needs early adopters to actively use the platform to continue to grow its user base.”
Next year, Threads will grow its US user base by 26.4% to 30.0 million, and another 13.1% in 2025. By the end of the forecast, the app will have added just over 10 million users in the US. At that point, 23.3% of Instagram users will also use Threads.
Having half as many users as X/Twitter a few months after launch, at a time when new social networks are difficult to launch because there are so many to choose from already, is portrayed as a bad thing? That’s peculiar. Getting to be half as big as Twitter from a sort-of standing start (OK, it very much used Instagram to kickstart itself) is an amazing feat. Which Enberg then sort-of acknowledges:
“It took Instagram roughly 3 years and Twitter (now X) nearly 6 to reach the same number of US monthly users as Threads will have in less than a year and a half,” Enberg said.
He’s also forecasting that X/Twitter will shrink:
For comparison, X this year will have 56.1 million users in the US. But its user base is declining. By 2025, it will have dropped to 47.0 million, due to concerns over the content and stability of the platform. Even as growth slows for Threads in the coming years, it will close the gap with X.
The “real” competition to Meta/Facebook/Instagram comes not from Musk’s Metaverse but from TikTok, Enberg notes, and nobody is going to disagree with that. But Threads has got a particular job, which is to screw Musk over really badly, and turn Twitter/X into even more of a timesuck/moneypit than it already is (which is quite a lot).
Now that Threads has got a web interface, and added more detail to its Search functionality, it’s showing signs of pulling things together. Hasn’t yet got hashtags, nor trending topics, nor lists—the first being hugely popular with many people, the second being terrific for engagement, the third being a power user feature—but those are surely on the list to be done. Things that won’t be on the list to be done: figuring out ways to send money between users, or book a taxi.
As I said a few weeks ago, people are underestimating Threads, and they’re really underestimating Zuckerberg’s determination to grind Twitter down. He once made a bid to buy it (“before Jack [Dorsey] left the first time”), and then described it as “the clown car that drove into a goldmine”. And he still wants to bury it. Keep watching.
Glimpses of the AI tsunami
(Of the what? Read here. And then the update.)
• OpenAI can see and talk. This is really very, very big. You can show it pictures and it can interpret what’s in them. An example offered was explaining how to lower the seat on your bike. Don’t fathers show kids anything these days?
• Rumour mill: Jony Ive (you know, ex-Apple design guy) is said to be talking to Sam Altman (OpenAI software guy) about designing an AI phone, with financial backing from don’t-call-him-a-spendthrift Masayoshi Son (you know, the miracle of WeWork). The mind boggles. It also says: nope.
• Meta’s new chatbot has been trained on Facebook and Instagram conversations, though not private posts.
• You can buy Social Warming in paperback, hardback or ebook via One World Publications, or order it through your friendly local bookstore. Or listen to me read it on Audible.
You could also sign up for The Overspill, a daily list of links with short extracts and brief commentary on things I find interesting in tech, science, medicine, politics and any other topic that takes my fancy.
• I’m the proposed Class Representative for a lawsuit against Google in the UK on behalf of publishers. If you sold open display ads in the UK after 2014, you might be a member of the class. Read more at Googleadclaim.co.uk. (Or see the press release.)
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The photo of Yaccarino in the FT article looking like she was being crucified was telling!
https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/ftcms%3A6939a622-1dda-4bdf-8eb5-a40ce4300499?source=next-article&fit=scale-down&quality=highest&width=740&dpr=2