The claim is a major departure for the service, which has long been known as a destination for posting short snippets of text.
The claim is a major departure for the service, which has long been known as a destination for posting short snippets of text.
The big difference between Twitter and all those other apps, as someone who has used both KakaoTalk and Line, is that they didn’t start out as social media posting apps - they were just chat messaging apps for talking to your friends, not the world. Then they added payment for things like buying stamps or sending friends money. From there, once they had established payment methods and users that trusted them, they started slowly adding services people thought were useful. The ecosystems built up organically over time. No one planned for them to be everything apps or tried to force it on the apps and users. They became those because they adapted to how people were using the internet on their phones.
I’d say if any app is poised to become the Western world’s ‘everything app’, it’s Facebook.
They’ve got a marketplace, video content, livestreaming, photo sharing, instant messaging, online dating which shits all over mainstream dating apps, and that’s just what Facebook can do.
Facebook is probably as close as we’ll get to a western “everything app.” They kind of missed the window, though, which is another thing Elon doesn’t seem to realize - the big eastern “everything apps” were there as people were starting to switch to doing things on their phones, so the ecosystems grew around them as things were developing (especially WeChat). Elon’s coming in trying to turn Twitter into an everything app nearly ten years too late.