What's the plan for X?
Tweet your wants; sell $100B in ads every year.
Musk’s X marks an interesting spot. Elon’s latest plan for the platform formerly known as Twitter is to be the everything app. Don’t scoff. It’s happened twice – in my old professional lifetime; and likely once in your young one. It doesn’t need the best tech at everything; it just has to do something other apps can’t.
The Great Integration.
In the early 1980s, the PC was toddling around. Word Perfect was Perfect (for its time). Visicalc was everything your calculator wasn’t. Corel could draw CAD-CAM stuff – whatever the hell that is.
We ranted that those don’t-yet-call-me-apps didn’t integrate. The Microsoft gods heard our prayers and came down from the Mount with Windows.
No surprise. Word, PowerPoint, and Excel were shite from the get-go. When they were birthed, none of them were close to being best in class. But they worked together.
Microsoft blew the day’s biggest products to smithereens. With… wait for it… copy and paste. Excel could make a table into a graph. You could copy it to Word. Scoff all you want. This was productivity unchained. A technical troglodyte could make shockingly ugly slides in hours. Ok, that part hasn’t changed, but you could drop said chart into it.
Winning with a winning UX.
In 2005 or so, the phone battle was Nokia vs Blackberry. It was a classic: B2C vs B2B.
Nokia was ideal for calls and tap-texting. It also had that ubiquitous ring tone.
In the other corner weighing in at a svelte 180 grams, we had the Blackberry (nee blue). The scowled-browed phone for serious business people who email.
So, who won? Neither. Apple.
The iPhone demolished them. Its pretty interface won the thumbs of regular folks. Not long after that, their App Store won over the business crowd.
So, what’s today’s pain point?
Let’s reword the question… what do we rant about the most? It has to be something we use, love, and love to hate. Take a moment.
Our social platforms.
“I want chrono feeds.”
“They changed the interface.”
“The algos throttle my posts.”
“Twitter never sends me traffic.”
Our social platforms are getting really anti-social. They hate outside links because they hate our outside worlds. And, we bitch about it.
That’s so far removed from traffic, it’s not even funny. The everything of the everything app, could be something as simple as thinking of Twitter as a command line interface for all your products.
Tweet (or X), …
“@UberEats, Bring me a Big Mac and large fries.”
“Sell 10 shares of @Exxon.”
“Buy me pants at @Uniqlo.”
Forget media. Forget personal assistants. Think of the ease of life. Think about how often you’d come back to X. Think of what it learns about you. Think of how it could place ads.
Amazon sold $38B of ads in 2022. 21% growth. 50% margins. Because ads at the moment of intent entropy is all that a bag of chips. Amazon knows what you’re about to buy. X could know what you’re about to do.
The app of everything seems: (a) not so far fetched now; and (b) wildly more profitable than most of us considered.
Now, ask this question… Why would Linda Yaccarino leave NBC for Twitter? To run a smaller, down-trending media business? To help save Elon Musk from himself? Because she believes in the Twitter -> X rebrand? No.
Because there’s something bigger that hasn’t been shared yet. Because she’s not crazy. And, because she believes whatever “it” is.
Elon and Linda don’t loop me into the Zoom calls. I’m not on Slack with them. If I would have emailed Twitter comms, I would get an automated, “F*ck off” reply. So, this is rampant speculation is just me rampantly speculating. Based on some tealeaves Elon has left strew in his timeline.
