A fast-evolving social media landscape, fixing Sonos and Grok’s got your data

Good morning!

Just because X doesn’t talk numbers in the Elon Musk era, doesn’t mean social media user base trajectory is any less interesting to keep an eye on. There are the certainties, and then there are platforms which are finding their feet more assuredly. I had a fresh look at these numbers (as any journalist should, in an ideal world), ahead of an exclusive interaction with Emily Dalton Smith, who is the Vice President of Product Engineering at Meta. More on what she said in a moment, but I’ll focus on the numbers for a moment. There are a few things which caught my attention.

AI and alt-X: Behind the hunt for more social media users

I mentioned the certainties. Those would be Facebook leading with more than 3 billion monthly active users (MAUs). Meta’s other app, Instagram, has 2 billion MAUs. Messenger, also a Meta app, stays close to around 1.01 billion MAUs, and I believe hasn’t really had the sort of momentum which apps around it have had. And that’s where I must talk about the ones that have risen fast. YouTube, which now finds a place for itself within the broader social media category according to research firm Statista, in fact has more (2.5 billion) MAUs than even Instagram. The pivot with more social features has worked, clearly. Then there’s TikTok’s upward trajectory, now at 1.58 billion. As well as WeChat, with around 1.34 billion. Both, now ahead of Messenger in the stakes. Snapchat, another long-standing name in the social media space, stays around 800 million users.

It isn’t easy for social media apps to now gain a foothold. Take a look at the last year and a half, and within it, a pursuit for building alternatives to Twitter (Gen Alpha may have forgotten, that’s what X used to be called). Two networks that initially provided hope, Mastodon and Bluesky, never gained momentum to challenge X’s robust 611 million MAUs. Not for the lack of trying, and believe me, they continue to try. Unless you differentiate, it is doubly difficult – as Koo’s demise proves.

The next frontier on which hopes reside? A decentralised social media platform. That’s what Meta’s Threads as well as Mastodon to name a few, are plugging in to. ActivityPub is the protocol that’ll take user posts to a decentralised social platform called Fediverse. ActivityPub aims to create a structure based on open protocols allowing users to communicate regardless of their chosen server. No one owns the Fediverse, because it is a collection of independent, inter-communicating servers.

Surprised? Turns out, a few days ago, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) is less than impressed with X’s attempts to collect a treasure-trove of user data for training its AI chatbot Grok. Basically, a silent change rolled out enrolled everyone to allow their posts, interactions, inputs as well as results with Grok, to be used as part of training data sets. There is more to be expected on this in the coming days (perhaps even before you read this newsletter on Thursday). In the meantime, this is what you need to do – Open X on desktop -> Settings -> Privacy and safety -> Data Sharing -> Grok -> uncheck the box.

RESPONSIBILITY

It is not often that a tech company’s CEO has to apologise for an app update that isn’t ticking all the boxes on a checklist. But that’s what happened, as Sonos’ CEO Patrick Spence had to, after a redesigned Sonos app that rolled out at some point in May for all users, ended up breaking important functionality for users. That included an ability to detect Sonos’ speakers and subwoofers. He now calls it “number one priority” to fix the app and all that was broken. Alongside a fix roadmap for the next few months. That may all be well and good, but does a period of almost three months to accept a shoddy app update and then begin work to restore crucial functionality, befit a premium audio brand? More to the point, what happens to customer confidence, considering you’ve to part with considerable money for a Sonos speaker? Or would you take this as a healthy development, that things are being fixed?

JOURNEY

It has been one year since Threads became a thing. Meta’s rival to Twitter/X, and to be fair, it got the momentum within the first week and that’s something it has taken full advantage of since. 100 million users signed up in the early days, and 175 million MAUs at the end of the first year. Good time then, to take stock of the journey thus far and the roadmap, in a conversation with Meta’s Smith. The user base which came to Threads early, she insists, has been priceless in defining how Threads is the way it is today. This was when I asked her why a Threads timeline every time we open the app, feels much more welcoming and cheerful, compared with X. “It is our community. It’s just the nature of the people who are on there,” she says. That works alongside the integrity protections teams which are hard at work to ensure content that may be divisive, misleading or simply fanning a trend, get deprioritised from your feed.

Exclusive | We’re competing with X, with a bigger vision: Meta’s Emily Dalton Smith

Is the mission still to supplant X? Yes. Smith pointed me to Mark Zuckerberg’s statement from a while ago, that there is room for another billion-person conversation app in this world. There are very few tech companies that have the capability or the stamina to do it, and Meta is one of those. That said, Threads doesn’t want to be just a X competitor, and there is a bigger vision at play. Some of the recent feature additions give us a hint. Sports scores is one. Who doesn’t love staying up to date with cricket match scoreboards? The ability to pinch to remove borders from images shared in the same post – iPhone only for now, and I’d suggest you check that out. And a timeline that’s even more tuned towards timeliness and highlighting events of relevance, without spoiling your mood with politics or intolerant views masquerading as freedom of speech in posts. Make of it, what you will.

NOTES

Time and again, I’ve pointed out that the way we search is changing. No longer are we defaulting to search engines, as was perhaps the habit 12 months prior. AI or chatbots in the apps we use, or even as standalone apps, are a way to get the information or context you’re looking for (I’d still suggest, doublecheck; my trust levels with anything that AI generates, is very limited). No surprise then that OpenAI wants to be more prominent in the search game. They’ve begun advanced testing with something called SearchGPT search engine. Google Search in their sights? Yes, as is pretty much any other search engine. The context it can potentially provide with results, thanks to the AI foundation, could be give it a significant advantage over plain search engines. Or maybe not, because AI often stumbles with fact and context. We’ll know, soon.