Going cold turkey on Facebook
I’ve just spent my first full week of going cold turkey on Facebook. Apart from my primordial lack of trust in the world’s number one social network, I got sick of its ability to suck time out of my life for little or no return.
Given I tend towards the obsessive/ compulsive anyway, it made a bad tendency worse.
So far, so good on the break. And I reckon I’ve probably got another three hours a week back in my life without having the all-encompassing social network in it.
While its easy to be critical of the investment of personal time into Facebook, the same isn’t true of the commercial investment by Facebook’s holding company Meta into growing its product and expanding into adjacencies.
They’ve taken 2 billion eyeballs and converted them to a range of money making verticals.
With the rise of Trade Me fees, many Kiwis now try Facebook Marketplace first when it comes to selling used goods. While the trust and safety controls aren’t flash, Kiwis are a trusting lot and it’s ‘‘safe enough’’ for someone to take the risk when selling a widget (or buying a heater for that matter).
Meanwhile, if you pick up in person and do your homework, it’s also a pretty handy way to pick up a car. Particularly if you use one of the ‘‘enthusiast’’ car groups where most people are well geolocated within aficionado networks, so ratbags are rooted out by the community.
The advertising product afforded through the Facebook display network can now be targeted down to the level of the individual, and the use of dynamic creative means that if one pitch doesn’t work there’s a good chance one of the others will. It’s a heck of an advertisement business.
Meanwhile, Facebook Pay is now used
in more than 50 countries and is particularly strong in Latin America and Europe. It has also been extended to Instagram, Messenger and Portal.
At a higher level, Meta is now providing a system that allows people to connect through its Oculus virtual reality products. An augmented system that is likely to grow exponentially, given Meta chairman’s Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to build out a ‘‘Metaverse’’.
By comparison, microblogging platform Twitter has struggled to grow its product set in any meaningful way for the past decade.
Ask most Twitter users the last time they noticed any innovation or expansion on the site, and they will probably point to the doubling of tweet sizes from 140 characters to 280. And to be clear, that was five years ago.
A year ago the company announced big product plans ranging from audio chat, through to an electronic direct mail platform, exclusive content originators and special interest communities. Most of these have failed to fire.
Standing back a few steps, Twitter has struggled to fulfil its potential and still feels dangerously close to the
microblogging widget that a few propellor-heads demonstrated at the South By Southwest conference in 2006. Meanwhile, it is reportedly losing US$4 million (NZ$6.6m) a day.
So perhaps no wonder that Elon Musk has started his tenure as new owner at Twitter by firing a few people. Starting with three of the leaders in the executive suite and then expanding that to an estimated 50% of the company’s 7500 global workforce in a single week.
The most common reaction I’ve heard from industry tech heads, is to ask the question ‘‘what did they all do anyway – cos they sure as hell weren’t building product or shipping code’’.
While not all of the 7500 were software developers, an estimated 1900 were. Let’s put that into local clothes.
That’s more coders than Stuff, Xero, Pushpay and Trade Me put together in Aotearoa. And if you look at the product expansion evident to users of all those businesses, they’ve shipped a hell of a lot of code.
That’s a good thing. Software engineers typically like shipping code, so I’m guessing that along with being unproductive the Twitter coders suffered
from a toxic culture, so they were unlikely to be the right people to build the new Twitter, or ‘‘X’’ as he has called it.
Similar to WeChat in China, X will be a super app which you never have to leave. In fact this ‘‘everything app’’ would contain everything from retirement savings, to dog grooming to dating and paying your power bill. Plus of course all government services from filing a police report to paying your taxes.
In fact WeChat is now so pervasive in China that there is talk of WeChat access being treated as a basic human right to be able to function normally in society.
To be clear Twitter isn’t going to be panel-beaten into X 1.0, but rather the platform and the customer base (which amounts to 8% of all internet users globally) is a pretty useful first step.
If X if half as popular as WeChat, then here in Aotearoa it would see 2.5 million Kiwis using it everyday – from catching the bus to ordering beersies.
And somehow I doubt I’d be able to go cold turkey on that.