Eh, IMO I don't think that would have worked - I suspect it would have raised too much anti-trust attention and not have been allowed.
The bigger picture is that in the UK at least, 'Meta' owns most communication channels that I use to communicate with my friends. TikTok isn't really a replacement to insta/whatsapp/Facebook, it's a replacement to Youtube.
I think Facebook is using the 'metaverse' as a metaphor to mean 'Facebook owning all forms of communication, as much as possible, both traditional messanger/audio but also extending into the real world as much as possible, and new media'. In that case, I think the metaverse is a much broader play (that nobody else can easily make, and that probably raises even more concerns!).
Bring them back to email, because there are still many small email providers in the UK. See https://delta.chat/en/ for email as IM.
Forgive my ignorance but I thought Instagram was just a place to upload random photos.
Ha ha, so, in fact, bullshit.
I'm so happy someone called it out. Being a developer, tech-savvy person, I should be all into BitCoin, VR, meta ... but I have recoiled from more or less the last decade of crap (including, I might add, "social" and maybe even phones — although they are great for navigating).
Maybe I am just getting old (that is true) or maybe this is in fact a load of bullshit: just Big-Internet trying to make "meta" a thing.
Pass.
Google in 1998 was just another search engine. Netflix mailed DVDs. Amazon grew from $150 to 600m revenue and had just started selling music and movies.
Facebook non-ad revenue is $3b annually and growing. Oculus store and devices account for easily half or more of that number. Beat Saber on the Quest 2 alone has cracked $100m. Beat Saber!
The biggest drag on Oculus right now is the need for a Facebook account. The switch to Meta fixes this, makes Facebook just one of many properties, with an eye on the prize. It’s like Microsoft pivoting to Azure and away from Windows years before Nadella did.
Valve could step up, or Apple, or Google. But otherwise Facebook is running away with VR, and that will have a massive impact on all of us.
Maybe within the tech circles and HN crowd. But outside these circles nobody even feels like something is off.
Reminds me of when no one cared about native mobile (vs the Web), or before that, no one cared about GUIs (command line is where it’s at)
GUIs started to catch on in 1992 with Windows 3.1, and only became ubiquitous when Windows 95 came out. At which point the Mac plummeted to 2% market share, before the iMac started to turn it around in 1998-1999.
The backlash to Steve's announcement of "web apps only" was largely from game developers and early adoption tinkerers. Native mobile was rejected by a majority of developers (who still complain even though we're down to 2 platforms) as an abomination that eschews the open standards of the web and required 3-5x the work to support Android, iOS, Windows Mobile , Nokia Symiban, Blackberry, etc.
Most "native" apps were thin wrappers around HTML5 sites until around 2012-2014. Instagram is arguably what changed this, and why Facebook bought them for $1b in 2012. Users liked the features and responsiveness of native apps. Shortly after, Facebook shipped their native mobile app (written by a 3rd party contractor that knew native mobile - it was an HTML5 wrapper prior to this).
Dozens of essays have been published on HN over the past decade lamenting the death of the Web, PCs, hobbyist PC tinkering, and all that is good, because of the terrible trend driven by native mobile.
So, yes, GUIs and native mobile were exciting from a certain point of view, but they've also had huge (and ultimately ineffective) backlashes that slowed things down a bit.
Saying "nobody cares about VR" feels to me exactly like this. Those that see how important AR/VR will become feel like those that saw the potential of GUIs or native mobile early. Those only seem obvious in retrospect.
In both cases the new UX environment took 5-10 years to catch on. We're now arguably in year 5 of VR/AR (if you assume 2016 era devices were the first viable mass market ones, which also coincides with the release of Pokemon Go as the first mass market AR experience) which is easily as big a shift as it was from keyboard to mouse.
Or a sign that Zuckerberg's read all the popular fiction on the subject but failed to comprehend how much of it was either satirical or meant as a warning.
What are you talking about - they went after TikTok exactly the same way as they did after Snapchat: By cloning the feature and making it prominent in the app, then double-listing them in the main Big Blue App, too.
Instagram added Stories to copy Snapchat and they are still prominently at the top of the app.
Then they added Reels to copy Tik Tok and it's the primary central bottom button of the app, and also one of the first things you see in the Facebook app.
The hilarity though is that Tiktok watermarks exported videos. Vast majority of "Reels" on Instagram have Tik Tok watermarks.
They're failing to destroy Tik Tok the way they succeeded in destroying Snapchat (effectively) for a couple of reasons though:
1) Snapchat was primarily for person-to-person communication (their attempts at highlighting "creators" was always awkward. Instagram already had all the celebrities, and what grows success in "social networks" these days isn't the social graph between peers but parasocial graphs with big time creators
2) Snapchat was always technologically inferior. The quality of the photos and videos was awful. The AR filters were slow. Instagram offered higher quality and better performance. TikTok doesn't have that problem. It's blazing fast and for the kind of meme content it is best for, video quality isn't important.
3) TikTok's For You Page (FYP) recommendation algorithm is truly groundbreaking, and will be remembered in 10 years the way we remember panning around on Google Maps and not having the page reload. It is truly incredible how effectively it learns content you might be interested in after some engagement, and crafts an FYP that feels like it's speaking directly to your anxieties, sense of humor, neurosis, aspirations, goals, etc.
You can call it creepy and you can worry about how all this information about your personality is going to the Chinese government, but that's a separate issue...
They were wrong. They should've gone after TikTok by acquiring it. Just like they did with Instagram.
That seems shortsighted. I’m not even talking about destroying the app by adding ads or selling user data.
They could add payments between individuals, it would instantly become the default method in many countries. Expand it to pay businesses then, via QR codes like they have in China. Make sure you’re cheaper than cards and Apple/Google Pay, especially for small sums.
They could sell business accounts, and allow customers to message any business by searching them by name (without having them as a contact). Give them a url and QR code that opens a conversation directly. Develop tools for pros to efficiently handle customers. Let customers book a business directly from the app for example. Given the reach of Whatsapp in many places you’d have a lot of interested businesses.
They have a place in the phone dock of entire first-world countries, billions of people literally have the app open all day, and they can’t monetize?
When Facebook thinks of monetizing Whats App as one of their major/only assets, it needs to find a business plan that'd allow billions of dollars.
It is, they talked about introducing ads to the status tab before. I agree on the rest though
I still have not agreed to the terms of use since I continue to be able to opt out and am amused by FB basically chickening out requiring their users to actually agree. The normal course of action would be to eventually block access to the app. That hasn't happened.
So, they could turn on ads but then they'd have to get me to agree to that first or risk losing me. They really want to do that but at the same time they are afraid of what will happen.
In the same way they chickened out of their blockchain plans by simply not talking about it anymore. The Meta announcements featured a large absence of any of that. Which basically means they are probably giving up on the whole notion.
I'm guessing Meta might turn out to be more of the same. FB is struggling to come up with things that actually work. A lot of their efforts just fizzle out. Facebook bots kind of never happened. Payments are dead in the water. They threw out the baby with the bathwater when they had an actual gaming platform with gamers on facebook and shutdown the platform in favor of a glorified ad platform.
Actually a good plan for them would be to rewind fifteen years of bad decision making. Of course that would require getting rid of the chief decision maker.
Me too. Every couple of weeks they show me a popup asking me to accept the new terms and I just click the x and continue about my day. At first they were threatening me that I'd lose access to the app by some date but that date passed months ago and I still have access. I'm amused because I feel like I called their bluff and it turns out they're not as confident as they make themselves out to be. One day they'll probably block me but until then...shrug.
Something like that that has no benefit to users is an absolute death warrant for them. The other apps only need to reach a tipping point and they will be absolute dead in the water, they're already creeping up.
By the way, a hefty portion of that cash was pocketed by Facebook and Instagram.
Facebook's deathbed is gold laden. Ads targeted to 45+ users are 2-3 times more expensive than ads for 16-25. By the way, ads targeted to 30+ women (hello, Instagram!) are even more expensive.
Facebook has _nothing_ for the future.
* Blue app is already on it's death bed.
* Instagram is already seeing a massive decline in quality and engagement as its getting close to the end of its lifecycle.
* They managed to survive Snapchat, but I think that made them think Instagram is too big to fail. Thus, they didn't go after TikTok. It was a mistake.
* What's App is not monetizable.
* Oculus is not becoming the next PS4/Xbox like they hoped.
Facebook is usually being compared to the likes of Apple, Google and Amazon. It's nothing compared to them. It's not even gonna be able to do a Microsoft/IBM pivot as it has no monetizable developer ecosystem.
I personally think they should've acquired TikTok last year when TikTok was looking to be acquired by Microsoft. They probably would've extended their survival for another 10-ish years (lifecycle of a social media)