In the world of social media today, there are stories of struggles among Facebook (Purity) users and Google/Chrome, and another rather interesting story about #ElonMusk walking into #Twitter HQ today with a sink in hand (to let it "sink in" he'll be taking over - and he's promised to lay off 3/4 of the company workers!
Circling back to the landscape of #SocialMedia as a phenomenon, both #social and #business, the NY Times this morning came out with an interesting, almost "hip" look at some of the most dominant social media businesses/platforms today.
"A Social Media Status Update"
Top social media apps are struggling after a decade of dominance.
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Thin-Sliced:
Top social media apps are struggling after a decade of dominance.
For years, most of the conversation about social media companies was about how powerful and dominant they were.
These days? Not so much.The tech industry has had a rough year, and social media companies have been hit especially hard. The stock price of Meta (formerly known as Facebook) has plummeted more than 60 percent. Snap, the maker of Snapchat, has fallen more than 80 percent. Layoffs and hiring freezes are common, and some companies have begun cutting their famously cushy employee perks. (No more free laundry, Metamates!).
Social media is still an important part of billions of people’s lives. But …
Meta’s cash-cow social media apps — Facebook and Instagram — are in decline, with younger users abandoning them for apps like TikTok. Meta has also lost billions of dollars in advertising revenue because of changes Apple made in 2021 to its mobile operating system, which made it harder for apps to track users across the internet.
Prognosis: Vitals are falling fast. The patient needs a transfusion, stat.Twitter has spent most of 2022 locked in battle with Elon Musk — who wanted to buy the company for $44 billion, then decided he didn’t, then decided he did again.
Prognosis: Acute short-term pain, with promises of a vague miracle cure ahead.TikTok has what every social media company wants — a big, engaged user base, a format that keeps people scrolling for hours and an iron grip on youth culture and the entertainment industry… But in some ways, TikTok is the most vulnerable app of all.
Prognosis: Unlikely to die of natural causes but could easily be killed by a blunt instrument.Snapchat is still popular among young people, but Snap’s advertising business (like many) took a dive during this year’s economic downturn, and the company recently laid off roughly 20 percent of its workers. Like Meta, Snapchat is also a casualty of Apple’s privacy changes, which made it harder to target ads to iPhone users, and a victim of TikTok, which is eating into Snapchat’s following.
Prognosis: Snapchat should recover if it survives the winter.
And after a quick fluffy look at trends, including the impact of the right-wing "Free Speech Brigade", along with the "new class" of apps rolling (or crawling) out.... The NY Times piece ends with this:
For more: Musk has injected himself as a chaotic actor into global politics.
And here we are.
For more on #cyberpsychology - the interface people and (computer/AI/VR) technology: Cyberpsychology.com
For the addiction and gaming aspects of social media: http://www.devicedevotion.com
#media #communication #Internet #GAFA #facebook #meta #twitter #snapchat #TikTok #apple #devices #2022
