It's fun to think about until you realize building the company/service portofolio that can support a mega-app would almost certainly attract ire from regulators even within the U.S., ignoring the amount of capital investment required to achieve it.
Plus, Uber/Spotify/Doordash/Yelp can barely turn a profit as-is. What incentives will the everything app offer to pull consumers away from these existing competitors other than subsidizing the services with VC money, which would only worsen profitability and sustainability?
Let's imagine Google Cloud, AWS, Azure are resp. Google's / Amazon's / Microsoft's everything apps. They are managing to handle the regulatory weight of supporting applications of all kinds of nature, and if you rethink Twitter as a platform you can do the same as well.
Many things are possible, and the Twitter app today may even continue to work as-is. But underneath it will be able to power more apps and more use cases, all tied under a common cohesive set of interactive primitives, much higher level than what cloud applications today support. This means less to reinvent, less to rediscover, and easier more natural integration between apps, services and components.
It'd be a lot of work, definitely not a 2-3 month project. So you'd need also a survival strategy that keeps Twitter 1.0 working and profitable.
Google, Amazon, and Microsoft absolutely do not have "everything" apps. Google Maps is the closest to a mega-app and it's still highly focused on things that are location-based.
These companies also don't favour their own services over others on their cloud platforms. That's why regulators aren't coming after them. Twitter is not a cloud service provider and it's not hard to see why the argument you presented does not hold up.
1. A general purpose computing platform is an everything app.
2. Cloud platforms and their APIs are a significant step towards moving higher-level in development platforms compared to, say, compiling a raw binary and running it on Linux.
3. Keep moving in that direction.
1. The "everything app" being talked about is essentially a Chinese tech giant mega-app, which are absolutely not general purpose computing platforms which are not "apps" themselves.
2. Agreed but this has nothing to do with Twitter or mega-apps whatsoever.
3. Transitioning to cloud service is not what Twitter needs to do right now even under the mega-app vision. And attempting so under their current situation is a sure fire way to actually go bankrupt.
His everything app idea is similar to WhatsApp yes, but he's had this idea from way back, when he got the X domain. The thing I'm describing is a long term vision, you need to first be profitable with the current platform before you start that.
Has he ever stated anywhere that his long term vision is a "general computing platform"? Because mega-apps are not that. There has been zero building happening or even hinted at towards his everything app vision while he is wrecking everything at Twitter.
He has compared Twitter to a neural network where we (and bots) are the nodes. I feel this was him mostly trying to sound fancy, but in my mind I'm absolutely gonna grab this and run with it.
Mega-app, the way I understand that term, is not what he's after. He's mentioned that he wants to allow HQ video and compete with YouTube and have a separate app which shows a YouTube-like view of only tweets with videos on them. Like a projection of that content, from the same platform.
Or alternatively you can see it as merely a "videos tab" in a single "mega-app", but this distinction is not quite substantial on a higher level, only about the logistics of marketing the app and maintaining it.
As for there being zero building happening... of course. He's trying to stop bleeding cash for now. I'm not suggesting he's working on this NOW.
Let's agree to disagree here because we are clearly not talking about the same things at all. I suggest reading up on what Chinese mega apps look like and Musk's personal comments that referred to WeChat. Adding longform video is exactly part of a conventional mega-app and it is absolutely not revolutionary whatsoever.
Haha, funny response, but I did say the details matter ;-)
I may be projecting my own ideas onto "everything". When Elon took over Twitter, I was inspired by his idea, and combined with concepts from some projects I'm working on, over two weeks or so, in my free time I wrote like 50+ pages of notes on what "Twitter 2.0" might be.
Is Elon's idea anything close to so comprehensive, I don't know. We only know he wanted payments in it, but this is barely scratching the surface of what Twitter could be.
Twitter's timeline of messages could be seen as a communication platform, computation platform, verified facts registry and so on. The rabbit hole is deep if you let your fantasy run wild.
