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RIP Twitter’s iconic bird logo
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this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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Technology
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He bought the company to bootstrap his idea of his "X" app which he envisions becoming something like WeChat for the world outside of China.
I think it's a terrible idea that's a solution in search of s problem. WeChat works in China because the government literally enforces it's usage. The rest of the world isn't interested in a one-stop-shop for anything and everything.
It's the problem of trying to be everything for everyone. You end up with mediocre or bad solutions for many problems instead of great solutions for a couple of problems. It works when there's no competition, see WeChat, but when there is competition that competition is going to beat you at their game because you're too busy playing a dozen others.
It’s funny if that’s his endgame, since Meta is already closer to that achievement than he is, and their Twitter alternative exploded in popularity immediately thanks to Musk’s own incompetence.
I'm not entirely sure this is true. Look at the constant posts and commenting on how people hate to deal with the complication of additional apps / sites. It's a major negative of the fediverse, it's one reason I think Signal shot themselves in the foot getting rid of SMS. It's why people keep using Amazon or Netflix even as they get worse and worse and more expensive. Heck, I'm not even immune - I wish we had one fast and cheap way to transfer money rather than Zelle, Paypal, various bank schemes, venmo and on and on. I wish we had a universal shopping cart thing like Paypal checkout more widely adopted vs making ever more accounts and typing in all my details for a one time order from a different website (and this is one reason why people gravitate to Amazon vs individual sites).
I'm not saying I'd like an all in one app, but I can see it potentially being interesting to people if it simplified their lives. I don't think Musk and X are likely to be able to do it, but I don't actually think there's no interest.
In most nordic countries, we have a single payment app that's been codeveloped by the major banks. everyone has the app and it's automatically connected to your checking account. We also have easy direct bank-to-bank money transfers at every bank. Most online stores in Sweden also use Klarna which saves your credit card information for you across all sites.
I think it's one thing to be the one stop shop for a single category of goods, but when one company tries to to be in every pie, it crashes and burns. Look at how much of a mess AWS is, or how Google closes a service every few months, or how Facebook is a cluttered mess.
Low barrier to entry can be good, but you're just opening yourself to exponentially more competition by trying to be in every market.
There is a kindle ground that people want between an app for literally every small part of something and absolutely everything in a single app.
They don't want 100 different newspaper apps to read 100 different newspapers when they all work differently.
Twitter and Facebook serve different purposes and made sense to be separate.