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The question is, does Musk have a plan for a super app? Or is he just flailing around with half-baked ideas trying to turn a profit on his unfortunate purchase, like his ridiculous tweets indicate? I'm not sure at this point.
But if there is a plan, X could well work – better than expected given its network effects, I mean, it's not like people can realistically leave for mastodon or Threads lol. «Everything app» like WeChat with its extensions is tacky; but it needn't be, that's just the worst of Chinese culture, failure of global synchrony and principled execution. Musk just needs to deliver something that makes Twitter's UX of yesterday (well, the day before) obsolete in people's minds. I initially thought he'd build it independently when his bid falls through, but he was not allowed to have it fall through, so here we are.
Twitter (or X now, I guess) is loved, like old reddit was, so people don't want it to change. Unlike old Reddit, it already was changed for the better (editing, longtweets) and can be substantially improved again (Ugh, DM chats). I have many gimmicky ideas but, to begin with, it has godawful search – and that's exactly what Musk's xAI thing can help with (though I suppose Igor Babuschkin wouldn't be too interested in that). For starters, just implement decent embedding search to eat www.perplexity.ai before it gets going. And while you're at it, why not make the whole of Twitter into one retrieval-augmented generative canvas, including outgoing links, a collective exocortex in the style of Roam Research (rip)? And indeed, ride the tiger: allow people to traverse a continuous generative surface, while also making it a tool for discovery of like-minded humans; eat dating apps as well. Tiers of users, different scrolling limits can be seen as a prelude to this compute-intensive paradigm shift.
Of course, the cringier outcome is more probable.
It can’t work because in the West the services you can access through super apps (food delivery, taxis, chat, online shopping, payments) already have extensively developed infrastructure and stickiness, and none of them are going to sign over their entire user data and control over their product and a percentage of their revenue to Musk in exchange for…access to the Twitter audience which they almost certainly already have.
Super Apps were a unique response to the fact that smartphone adoption in much of Asia represented the first time hundreds of millions of people got online. For various reasons texting and emails were less common and so were quickly swept away by messenger apps like QQ which ultimately became super apps at exactly the time that online shopping, food delivery, taxis, and mobile payments were becoming popular.
In the West everyone with any money (and therefore the entire lucrative market) is on iPhone where iOS serves most built-in super app functions (single sign on and near-universal payments locked to FaceID and fully integrated with all card issuers/providers, with seamless interchange fee distribution) and people are used to opening apps directly from their Home Screen or search. Even Android now has most of these features.
There’s simply no case for a super app. Why would I open Twitter/‘X’ and navigate a bloated and unwieldy app to get to the food delivery section when I could just open UberEats? Why do I need Twitter/X to pay my friends when I can open PayPal? Apple Cash actually already let’s you text people money through iMessage (by far the most popular messaging app in the US). In Europe, India and South America it seems unlikely people will drop the WhatsApp ecosystem, which itself already has full payments in India and Brazil where it’s most popular.
The Super App experience in China, Indonesia etc is actually worse than the regular smartphone experience in the US because super apps are bloated and slow and require lots of navigation. Why would Americans switch to it?
But I explicitly do not mean that pedestrian stuff. Copying WeChat is not a viable strategy because WeChat is a copy of what the West has. I mean aggregating social media/research services iPhone very much does not provide, and cannot, because they will only exist in that form thanks to a protocol leveraging Twitter data.
I think LLMs herald the complete devaluation of any public information. Anything in the training set will be free. Siri will have it, Google will have it, Bing will have it, public information will become entirely and absolutely commodified and thus worthless. Even Musk cannot keep the scrapers away. The models will be good enough for any normal person to use for information retrieval pretty universally.
So the only research that will have value will be privately commissioned stuff where access is carefully guarded (both legally and practically) to ensure it doesn’t become part of a training set.
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That's backwards though, threads shows how FB's network effects failed to translate to a new product. X is the new product Twitter's trying to transfer users to. Google/Facebook/Apple/MS do have diverse offerings, but that's as much because they execute well as because they're entrenched (and google's failure to execute has led to many of their new social products failing).
Twitter should improve search - but it's weird they haven't taken it yet, geohot mentioned it as something to improve when he interned at twitter but nothing big happened.
Not backwards at all, but it's a bit more complex. Facebook users are just not very interested in Twitter-like offering without Twitter network, they can converse between themselves just fine on Facebook; nor are Twitter users interested in Facebook people who don't have Twitter. Everyone has already self-sorted by preference. The only delta Threads has is the meme about rocket man bad.
This far it's just a new logo (and optional URL) for Twitter, it's not transfering me anywhere and I expect further changes to be built on top of the same network instead of some separate thing.
People burn out quickly under Musk. Geohot burns out quickly even without Musk. I don't expect anything from him, but search will probably be improved within a year.
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