Since Mark Zuckerberg announced the name change from Facebook to Meta at the end of October last year, the direction of the most important and influential company in the world in terms of social networks has not stopped changing. Surely, perhaps, because his obsession is now to jump from a ship that he sees as increasingly old and that sails in increasingly competitive seas to another that has just left port and that has a huge ocean yet to be discovered and exploited.
However, no one said that this shift in the market from segmented advertising and increasingly controlled data management to what ends up being the metaverse that Meta is now proposing was going to be easy.
In just a few weeks, Meta has given several signs of the many efforts it has to make to continue growing what was its most buoyant business until now and what it is costing to lift the wing of the second.
After presenting its first prototypes for the metaverse, inspired by the scarce hardware it sells right now under the Oculus heritage, Meta announced that it was freezing its ambitious plans to hire more than 10,000 engineers.
Shortly after, it announced that on Facebook —the social network, with fewer and fewer active users and, above all, fewer and fewer young people— its ‘newsfeed’, the concept that rocked its growth and the format of all social networks, was evolving to a new space where users would see fewer and fewer posts from friends and family to see more content suggested by their interests… According to an algorithm, of course.
Finally, Instagram, its platform with more luster still today, announced some changes to prioritize the video and, again, the suggested content and supposedly not followed by the user who turned against some of its most influential creators and users and who, despite reaffirming himself on the first occasion; forced its CEO, Adam Mosseri, out again to say they were freezing the changes. Changes, however, that are assumed to end up coming.
Social networks, especially from TikTok, but thanks to everything planted by the Facebook/Meta conglomerate, are now more of a channel between users and advertisers, with the intermediate route of suggested content as an attention magnet, than a social network between users with genuine ties.
And, in the middle of that sea, Mark Zuckerberg, an amoral visionary, villain, or businessman depending on who you ask—or maybe all of these things at once.finds the worst results in its history.
Meta: between Apple’s sword and TikTok’s wall
But, as we say, the situation in Meta is not good. In the last quarter of 2021, Facebook’s global daily user count decreased for the first time in the company’s 18-year history. And, this week, its financial results also carried that trend to the accounts, registering its first annual drop in income since the firm is listed on the stock market. Specifically, the Californian technology company registered 28,022 million dollars in revenue during the second quarter of this yearabout 1,000 million below compared to the same period of the previous year.
Meta’s US user base is showing very little growth in user attention. It’s no secret that Facebook is being beaten by TikTok when it comes to engaging young people and keeping their attention for longer.
But Meta, which has a history of blatantly copying its competitors’ successful products and features, has seen TikTok copied. It has found the opposite position of the users and creators themselves, especially on Instagram when it warned that the Reels, its copy of the TikTok model, would now be dominant, occupying the entire screen and advocating the feed.
In addition, the effectiveness of Meta ads has always depended on the personal preference data that the company collects from the movements of users in its applications and on the web. But since Apple has given users of its devices the ability to opt out of such tracking, Meta’s ability to match ads to specific groups of users has been impaired, especially in the US, where the weight of iPhone users is greater. As a result, advertising is becoming less effective, but also more expensive.
Add to all this the worsening economic winds, its identity issues (what is Meta today?), and limited ad targeting capabilities, and we have a tough business environment for a company that once seemed impregnable. A few days ago, we also knew from the New York Times that Zuckerberg is charging inks against his employees, beginning to feel the pressure.
About Apple, a few days ago, some statements by Zuckerberg himself also emerged in which he said that Meta and Apple are entering a period of “very deep and philosophical competition” that will define the future of the Internet, according to comments from the CEO of Meta, obtained by TheVerge.
Both Apple and Meta plan to invest heavily in mixed reality over the next decade, but have diametrically opposed views on what the technology should be used for.
“Philosophical competition” with Apple
The Verge obtained an audio recording of a meeting of all Meta employees, in which Zuckerberg answered in great detail a question from employees about the company’s future competition with Apple. His comments shed some light on how Meta, at least, sees the rivalry.
This is what Zuckerberg had to say:
“I think it’s pretty clear that Apple is going to be a competitor to us, not just as a product but philosophically. We’re approaching this in an open way and trying to build a more open ecosystem.”
mark zuckerberg
He noted that Meta co-founded the Metaverse Open Standards Group with other companies such as Microsoft, with the goal of establishing some level of interoperability or portability of assets between virtual spaces. Apple did not join, with Zuckerberg saying, “I don’t think that’s a surprise.”
It is a competition of philosophies and ideas, in which they believe that by doing everything themselves and closely integrating, they build a better experience for the consumer.. And we believe that there is much to be done in terms of specialization between the different companies, and [eso] It will allow a much broader ecosystem to exist.
mark zuckerberg
One of the things that I find interesting is that it’s not very clear up front whether an open or closed ecosystem is going to be better. Both Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook have said in the past that they believe augmented reality, virtual reality, or mixed reality will be the next big computing platform, after the desktop and mobile eras.
How it will be and how much it will have of metaverses with avatars or closest technological applications and what options each company will propose, remains to be seen. Perhaps ridiculing Meta’s proposal as a kind of naïve video game with pretense of reality is also underestimating someone who, for better or worse, has changed the ways we communicate, advertising and the Internet in just 20 years.