Let's (byte) dance!

Long before Facebook became a household name, there was MySpace. MySpace was intended to be a platform on which friends can connect online and up until 2009 was the largest social network in the world. But as the world soon realized, the 'new kid on the block' with aggressive public relations always beats the competition. In 2009, MySpace was eventually displaced by Facebook with having the larger unique global users.

Facebook's mantra was 'build communities and bring the world closer together. And it did. By the time the company came public, it had almost one billion users. As a marketing platform for companies, no other platform came close to reaching such a large audience. But 'connecting people' was really harvesting enough information from users to sell to companies. The company has and still treats users as products and businesses as customers. Nowadays, Facebook is just a division of its parent company, Meta Platforms ("Meta"). Its slogan is now "move fast and break things." Though Facebook still has over 2 billion users, being connected seems like an afterthought.

Other companies have tried to take a bite out of Facebook's playbook. Users share and engage in e-commerce on Pinterest and Snapchat. Twitter, which was created two years after Facebook, lets people share their thoughts with followers. Instagram founded in 2010 is a photo and video sharing network that was subsequently purchased by Facebook. Though no one came close to the success Facebook has.

Tiktok, owned by a Chinese company called ByteDance, launched in 2018 lets users share videos for as long as 3 minutes. The company is gaining global users that Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's founder and CEO, acknowledged the threat to his business model less than a year ago. He started positioning his business to take on TikTok. Tiktok has 1 billion users and growing fast.

So given the stiff competition for billions of eyeballs, who is next?

Well, taking the current state of social media and what deep technology is capable of doing using artificial intelligence ("ai"), the sensible progression is networking and advertising in a virtual world facilitated by augmented reality to harness social connections. It's a 3D world seen through a headset currently used by gamers. People, through 'avatars', can transport themselves anywhere to meet anyone and to do anything. This seems like the holy grail for advertisers. Metaverse is how it is commonly referred to. Our Instagram page, 'FitFlecks' shows metaverse posts on what this interactive reality looks like.

The metaverse is a very nascent ecosystem that everyone is trying to figure out, let alone be familiar with. The biggest impediment is mass-producing a very expensive head gear essential to the metaverse experience. Oculus 2 which sold 10 million units in 2021 is selling for $400 while the next iteration, Cambria, will cost upwards of $800 according to market speculators. Apple is reportedly working on its own version that will be around a 'couple of thousand dollars.'

Until everyone who wants a headset can afford one, it may be safe to assume that the music will keep playing for everyone to (byte)dance.