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I thought Elon's tweet was pretty funny, not just because "X" is already taken by X.com which he founded, but also because we already kinda tried an "everything

I thought Elon's tweet was pretty funny, not just because "X" is already taken by X.com which he founded, but also because we already kinda tried an "everything app". It's called Facebook, and the reason why other social networks like Instagram and Twitter exist _at all_ is because Facebook could not keep everyone on their network. Lest we forget, Facebook was the ONLY social network people used for a good long while, at least when I was graduating HS and entering college. You had Facebook for actual social networking, band/music pages on MySpace, and everything else was essentially porn bots and pedophiles, aka "spam city". So you have to wonder, if an everything app actually is a good idea, why couldn't the one company who had the most opportunity at the perfect time with as much funding as they could possibly need...not be able to do it? Just because something works in China, doesn't mean it will work everywhere else. Actually, I would say that if something works in China, your best bet is that it _won't_ work anywhere else. TikTok being a notable exception.

rsynnott 4y ago
And TikTok is maybe proof that the "everything apps" don't work so well even in China; if they did then there would, by definition, be no need for TikTok.
- jlmorton 4y ago
  Note that WeChat has a Douyin-competing product, "Channels."
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    Oh, sure; so does Facebook. Douyin/TikTok is clearly the market leader in both its incarnations, tho.
- chrischen 4y ago
  Also Taobao/Tmall and Alipay is completely separate. WeChat certainly filled in a lot of holes in iOS such as QR code scanning (which didn’t get native support until a few years ago) so it provided a sort of OS within the phone OS to get a utility knife of features being used in China that Apple neglected. But I wouldn’t say they have complete domination of all markets. Keep in mind QR codes were a thing in China since the early 2010s, whereas the US didn’t start adopting QR codes until the later half of the decade when Apple finally made QR scanning part of the OS… because Apple was hell bent on making BLE beacons a thing. So our “everything app” was iOS and Apple literally held us back by 5-8 years regarding QR code adoption just because of some corporate agenda…
- numpad0 4y ago
  I think the “social media everything app/superapp” characterization is slightly off the mark: A lot of those are private chat apps. It’s called WeChat, you know, not WePostPublic.
  - joe_the_user 4y ago
    Sure but that's just more of an argument that an "everything app" hasn't succeeded even in China.
    - numpad0 4y ago
      Yeah, I’m thinking it’s more like “extreme scope creeps in private real-time text console sometimes works”. Like there had been the famous PizzaTool in SVR4, countless hacks over modern history with IRC, server status reports with pagers, prepaid topups over SMS, or food deliveries and micropayments with WeChat, on and on. The common denominator of those isn’t China or Asia. Sorry I didn’t post it as a top level comment, maybe I should have.
rosnd 4y ago
> I thought Elon's tweet was pretty funny, not just because "X" is already taken by X.com which he founded Not sure why this would be funny. Elon owns X.com since 2017.
- joelrunyon 4y ago
  I was gonna say this. He bought it back.
loceng 4y ago
Facebook is a very poor attempt at an "everything app" - and that's wholly due to who its founder is, his unethical tactics, and him not being a creative person. Walled gardens and trying to control and extract as much wealth-value for yourself, and lazily to maximize profits and reduce effort and intelligence-skill-sophistication required, goes contrary to nature and how tribes work - where adequately sharing of resources, and arguably distribution skillfully with purpose, is necessary for [social] cohesion. Facebook was so successful solely because it piggybacked on the VC and advertising industrial complexes and was first-to-market; externalities wise though they weren't successful - Facebook and what Mark created and maintains has been net harmful to society, and arguably to a very severe degree; though he's not solely to blame, other systems and processes had to be corrupt, captured, in order for the scale of harm to be able to unfold, cascade.
- Trufa 4y ago
  Beyond moral/privacy reasons, I don't get why you say an app from China wouldn't work.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    Culture and consumer expectation is a big part of product/market fit. It's really only the current crop of SV companies that have sometimes managed to transcend this culture gap and operate identically in every market while making a profit. (To see an SV example of this bombing, Uber did not fare well in China or SE Asia.) But traditionally, companies like Walmart, KFC, etc. have had many failures branching out of their home markets because of a lack of product market fit. China runs a risk of any sufficiently isolated economy; its consumer preferences start diverging from the rest of the world's. The intentional isolation of the Chinese economy through measures like protectionism and the Great Firewall only increase this risk. It's not limited to China though, Japan has similar issues. As an example, until the advent of smartphones Japanese phonemakers were producing increasing amounts of esoteric features that only Japanese consumers wanted.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Facebook could have been an "everything app" if they had bothered to really try; as it is they ate almost all small business/small group "websites", sadly.
Bud 4y ago
- Brusco_RF 4y ago
  Musk owns Instagram?
- bombcar 4y ago
  Instagram is owned by Meta unless Musk did something surprising last night.
  - rosnd 4y ago
    It's been widely known for months now that Meta entered into a secret deal to sell Instagram to Musk.
- jjeaff 4y ago
  Umm, no, Musk doesn't own Instagram.
- hall0ween 4y ago
  A comment stating Musk owns Instagram and claims other people are unaware.
- dang 4y ago
  You have a long history of breaking the site guidelines like this. If you keep doing it we will ban you. Commenters need to follow the rules regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29916995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29916995 (Jan 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29424722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29424722 (Dec 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28934735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28934735 (Oct 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28711245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28711245 (Sept 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25177097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25177097 (Nov 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24246111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24246111 (Aug 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19107006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19107006 (Feb 2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15892823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15892823 (Dec 2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14679796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14679796 (July 2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12569702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12569702 (Sept 2016) --- Edit: dismayingly, your recent comments have been so frequently vicious that I think enough is enough at this point. I've banned your account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
selfhoster11 4y ago
I would say that if something works in China, that's a useful heuristic to know that it should be stopped from adoption in the West at all costs due to anti-democratising technology.
- Bakary 4y ago
  The EU is currently the only territory that is even trying to make the internet less dystopian
  - hunterb123 4y ago
    No they just made it peppered with useless popups. They regulate it without innovating it.
    - happymellon 4y ago
      The Americans peppered it with useless pop-ups because they want to try and make people think that regulations empowering users is annoying. Just look at the amount of Americans that think that they have to request permission to use cookies. Disinformation is a powerful tool.
      - wruza 4y ago
        I bet on legal safeguards, not on conspiracy. Because for most companies a chance of a lawsuit is a chance of instant bankruptcy.
    - imiric 4y ago
      Is there a better effort done elsewhere? Governments have always lagged to regulate corporations, either because of conflicts of interest or plain incompetence, which is especially true for Big Tech. But at least the EU is trying to some extent, which was GP's point. > No they just made it peppered with useless popups. The popups were a workaround the web adopted due to the lack of technical details in the law, but the law itself isn't to blame. There have been many fines handed out, which is a step in the right direction, at the very least. We should celebrate any step towards protecting citizens from corporations, not scoff that it's not perfect.
dylan604 4y ago
Because teenagers will always want to rebel against the status quo. It's one of those "nobody goes there anymore because it's always too crowded" situations. It's no longer cool to listen to that band because they're on the radio now and everyone listens. It's no longer cool to post on that site because everyone's mom is there now. etc etc etc. At some point, moms will once again infiltrate TikTok to make the kids not want to be there. Something else will pop up in its place, and the process will start all over. again.
irobeth 4y ago
> we already kinda tried an "everything app". It's called Facebook Before Facebook, we had America Online, and that had vertically integrated the browser, feed readers, search, file sharing, email, async messaging, chat, social networking, and the ISP. It was so integrated with society that we used to advertise brands e.g. "Go to Keyword NBC1999" and everyone just knew that was an AOL keyword and knew how to use it. As best as I remember, AOL failed because it only offered dial-up access for the longest time, and users jumped ship to DSL. Would something like AOL survive now?
- bombcar 4y ago
  Wasn't the "Facebook phone" internet deals in some countries an attempt to build an AOL-like thing? If it does come around again, it'll be as a protection against spam, mark my words.
- com2kid 4y ago
  AOL was a mix of premium subscriber features and free features. Its main social component, AIM, was free for anyone to use. Basically they were unable to monetize the primary social component of their network! Except on mobile, where on feature phones AIM was a paid add on. In some alternate timeline AIM could have become the WeChat of the west, AOL had all the needed features, but by the time technology was ready for WeChat like apps, AOL was basically gone. They should have become WhatsApp though. Missed opportunity there. People forget how great AOL was in the 90s, it was way more powerful than the web at the time. Great forum software, good chat interfaces, and tons of original content was being generated for it.
  - antifa 4y ago
    AIM is the only part of AOL that I experienced, and AFAIK was the best of the GUI instant messengers in that era. Sadly even today, it's either IRC or something written in electron, not much competition otherwise.
    - antifa 4y ago
      Sadly, I must offer a correction, my positive memories of AIM are because for later usage I was actually using alternative clients like DeadAIM and pidgin.
babyshake 4y ago
The biggest problem with Elon's "everything app" concept is AFAIK he has not explained what problem it solves, aside from capturing a lot of value for shareholders.
- antifa 4y ago
  Reminds me of the TV show Silicon Valley. The technology was an easily copyable algorithm, but the business plan was an incoherent and vague competitor to a giant yahoo/google type company, to be built from scratch.
com2kid 4y ago
> but also because we already kinda tried an "everything app". It's called Facebook, While WeChat was adding features, such as an independent creator marketplace, or payment systems, Facebook spent time aggressively pushing online web games that almost killed their platform. Then Facebook started going for attention metrics above all else, and it became an app that fed people stories that made everyone angry and depressed, but did a good job increasing engagement! Facebook should have started cloning WeChat features years earlier than they did. Facebook's other problem is their real name policy. Having to be friends with someone to message them seriously limits how many people I talk to through Messenger. But as it is, Facebook Marketplace is winning. Facebook events is winning. Facebook payments, no, not sure how they messed that up. Venmo and a few others are duking that one out, heck Venmo is used at garage sales. Facebook doesn't need hyper growth, they need to just keep current user's happy and coming back for things. It doesn't matter if they aren't the #1 destination for GenZ to post photos. If everyone is buying/selling used goods, and going to concerts, and arranging birthday parties, and posting a small selection of curated travel photos, then be happy with that, and keep expanding into adjacent markets. And separate out "people I want to talk to" from "people I want to show my life to".
- jdhn 4y ago
  Good point on Facebook Marketplace, I really think it's cut into the niche that was previously occupied solely by Craigslist.
- asveikau 4y ago
  > Facebook should have started cloning WeChat features years earlier than they did. I think the fact that nobody in the west has taken a WeChat like "everything app" position might be a sign that it's not necessary or inevitable. So then ... Why should they copy WeChat? As an exercise in and of itself? The best answer I could come up with is "domination" and I don't think that's a good reason to do something.
- mandeepj 4y ago
  > Having to be friends with someone to message them seriously limits how many people I talk to through Messenger. That's not a requirement at all. You can message literally anyone on FB, conditionally - there 'message' button is visible (exception to hackers). You can also message Zuck, even though you may not be friends with him.
Angostura 4y ago
> we already kinda tried an "everything app". It's called Facebook I think Compuserve was probably a better example. It was pretty good at being an everything app - but sadly wasn't able to adapt to the internet
- kelnos 4y ago
  Yeah, if I remember right, their "connect to the internet" mode was a special dial string at the end of the dialup number that selected between normal Compuserve access, and Internet access. If you used Compuserve to get on the Internet, you were unable to access the normal Compuserve services through the Compuserve app! Not a great way to integrate. The only main integration point I remember was that you could use your Compuserve login ID as a full Internet email address. (This was all back in the 90s when I was a teenager of course, so I may have gotten the details wrong, or just didn't know what I was doing when I was using Compuserve's Internet connectivity.)
Melatonic 4y ago
Facebook was also limited to JUST college students at that point which very much made it not an Everyone app. Part of the appeal originally was that Grandma couldn't comment on the photo your friend posted of you where you were passed out shirtless on a random persons couch covered in doritos
lazzlazzlazz 4y ago
iOS is an "everything app" and its power is profound.
siruncledrew 4y ago
Looking back at Wechat from how it was since ~2013, I think there’s a decent amount of recency bias influencing it as “the everything app”. It definitely wasn’t close to being as horizontally integrated until recently. On another note about Facebook, even though Facebook/Messenger is still past its prime in the US, Whatsapp is like the closest Facebook-made Wechat equivalent because that is absolutely popping off in other parts of the world like Latin America. Literally everyone (people & businesses) use it as their primary channel of interaction on a daily basis. In the US it’s still not nearly as popular.

rsynnott 4y ago

And TikTok is maybe proof that the "everything apps" don't work so well even in China; if they did then there would, by definition, be no need for TikTok.

jlmorton 4y ago
Note that WeChat has a Douyin-competing product, "Channels."
- rsynnott 4y ago
  Oh, sure; so does Facebook. Douyin/TikTok is clearly the market leader in both its incarnations, tho.
chrischen 4y ago
Also Taobao/Tmall and Alipay is completely separate. WeChat certainly filled in a lot of holes in iOS such as QR code scanning (which didn’t get native support until a few years ago) so it provided a sort of OS within the phone OS to get a utility knife of features being used in China that Apple neglected. But I wouldn’t say they have complete domination of all markets. Keep in mind QR codes were a thing in China since the early 2010s, whereas the US didn’t start adopting QR codes until the later half of the decade when Apple finally made QR scanning part of the OS… because Apple was hell bent on making BLE beacons a thing. So our “everything app” was iOS and Apple literally held us back by 5-8 years regarding QR code adoption just because of some corporate agenda…
numpad0 4y ago
I think the “social media everything app/superapp” characterization is slightly off the mark: A lot of those are private chat apps. It’s called WeChat, you know, not WePostPublic.
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  Sure but that's just more of an argument that an "everything app" hasn't succeeded even in China.
  - numpad0 4y ago
    Yeah, I’m thinking it’s more like “extreme scope creeps in private real-time text console sometimes works”. Like there had been the famous PizzaTool in SVR4, countless hacks over modern history with IRC, server status reports with pagers, prepaid topups over SMS, or food deliveries and micropayments with WeChat, on and on. The common denominator of those isn’t China or Asia. Sorry I didn’t post it as a top level comment, maybe I should have.

rosnd 4y ago

> I thought Elon's tweet was pretty funny, not just because "X" is already taken by X.com which he founded Not sure why this would be funny. Elon owns X.com since 2017.

joelrunyon 4y ago
I was gonna say this. He bought it back.

loceng 4y ago

Facebook is a very poor attempt at an "everything app" - and that's wholly due to who its founder is, his unethical tactics, and him not being a creative person. Walled gardens and trying to control and extract as much wealth-value for yourself, and lazily to maximize profits and reduce effort and intelligence-skill-sophistication required, goes contrary to nature and how tribes work - where adequately sharing of resources, and arguably distribution skillfully with purpose, is necessary for [social] cohesion. Facebook was so successful solely because it piggybacked on the VC and advertising industrial complexes and was first-to-market; externalities wise though they weren't successful - Facebook and what Mark created and maintains has been net harmful to society, and arguably to a very severe degree; though he's not solely to blame, other systems and processes had to be corrupt, captured, in order for the scale of harm to be able to unfold, cascade.

Trufa 4y ago
Beyond moral/privacy reasons, I don't get why you say an app from China wouldn't work.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Culture and consumer expectation is a big part of product/market fit. It's really only the current crop of SV companies that have sometimes managed to transcend this culture gap and operate identically in every market while making a profit. (To see an SV example of this bombing, Uber did not fare well in China or SE Asia.) But traditionally, companies like Walmart, KFC, etc. have had many failures branching out of their home markets because of a lack of product market fit. China runs a risk of any sufficiently isolated economy; its consumer preferences start diverging from the rest of the world's. The intentional isolation of the Chinese economy through measures like protectionism and the Great Firewall only increase this risk. It's not limited to China though, Japan has similar issues. As an example, until the advent of smartphones Japanese phonemakers were producing increasing amounts of esoteric features that only Japanese consumers wanted.
bombcar 4y ago
Facebook could have been an "everything app" if they had bothered to really try; as it is they ate almost all small business/small group "websites", sadly.

Bud 4y ago

Brusco_RF 4y ago
Musk owns Instagram?
bombcar 4y ago
Instagram is owned by Meta unless Musk did something surprising last night.
- rosnd 4y ago
  It's been widely known for months now that Meta entered into a secret deal to sell Instagram to Musk.
jjeaff 4y ago
Umm, no, Musk doesn't own Instagram.
hall0ween 4y ago
A comment stating Musk owns Instagram and claims other people are unaware.
dang 4y ago
You have a long history of breaking the site guidelines like this. If you keep doing it we will ban you. Commenters need to follow the rules regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29916995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29916995 (Jan 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29424722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29424722 (Dec 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28934735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28934735 (Oct 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28711245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28711245 (Sept 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25177097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25177097 (Nov 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24246111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24246111 (Aug 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19107006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19107006 (Feb 2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15892823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15892823 (Dec 2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14679796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14679796 (July 2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12569702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12569702 (Sept 2016) --- Edit: dismayingly, your recent comments have been so frequently vicious that I think enough is enough at this point. I've banned your account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

selfhoster11 4y ago

I would say that if something works in China, that's a useful heuristic to know that it should be stopped from adoption in the West at all costs due to anti-democratising technology.

Bakary 4y ago
The EU is currently the only territory that is even trying to make the internet less dystopian
- hunterb123 4y ago
  No they just made it peppered with useless popups. They regulate it without innovating it.
  - happymellon 4y ago
    The Americans peppered it with useless pop-ups because they want to try and make people think that regulations empowering users is annoying. Just look at the amount of Americans that think that they have to request permission to use cookies. Disinformation is a powerful tool.
    - wruza 4y ago
      I bet on legal safeguards, not on conspiracy. Because for most companies a chance of a lawsuit is a chance of instant bankruptcy.
  - imiric 4y ago
    Is there a better effort done elsewhere? Governments have always lagged to regulate corporations, either because of conflicts of interest or plain incompetence, which is especially true for Big Tech. But at least the EU is trying to some extent, which was GP's point. > No they just made it peppered with useless popups. The popups were a workaround the web adopted due to the lack of technical details in the law, but the law itself isn't to blame. There have been many fines handed out, which is a step in the right direction, at the very least. We should celebrate any step towards protecting citizens from corporations, not scoff that it's not perfect.

dylan604 4y ago

Because teenagers will always want to rebel against the status quo. It's one of those "nobody goes there anymore because it's always too crowded" situations. It's no longer cool to listen to that band because they're on the radio now and everyone listens. It's no longer cool to post on that site because everyone's mom is there now. etc etc etc. At some point, moms will once again infiltrate TikTok to make the kids not want to be there. Something else will pop up in its place, and the process will start all over. again.

irobeth 4y ago

> we already kinda tried an "everything app". It's called Facebook Before Facebook, we had America Online, and that had vertically integrated the browser, feed readers, search, file sharing, email, async messaging, chat, social networking, and the ISP. It was so integrated with society that we used to advertise brands e.g. "Go to Keyword NBC1999" and everyone just knew that was an AOL keyword and knew how to use it. As best as I remember, AOL failed because it only offered dial-up access for the longest time, and users jumped ship to DSL. Would something like AOL survive now?

bombcar 4y ago
Wasn't the "Facebook phone" internet deals in some countries an attempt to build an AOL-like thing? If it does come around again, it'll be as a protection against spam, mark my words.
com2kid 4y ago
AOL was a mix of premium subscriber features and free features. Its main social component, AIM, was free for anyone to use. Basically they were unable to monetize the primary social component of their network! Except on mobile, where on feature phones AIM was a paid add on. In some alternate timeline AIM could have become the WeChat of the west, AOL had all the needed features, but by the time technology was ready for WeChat like apps, AOL was basically gone. They should have become WhatsApp though. Missed opportunity there. People forget how great AOL was in the 90s, it was way more powerful than the web at the time. Great forum software, good chat interfaces, and tons of original content was being generated for it.
- antifa 4y ago
  AIM is the only part of AOL that I experienced, and AFAIK was the best of the GUI instant messengers in that era. Sadly even today, it's either IRC or something written in electron, not much competition otherwise.
  - antifa 4y ago
    Sadly, I must offer a correction, my positive memories of AIM are because for later usage I was actually using alternative clients like DeadAIM and pidgin.

babyshake 4y ago

The biggest problem with Elon's "everything app" concept is AFAIK he has not explained what problem it solves, aside from capturing a lot of value for shareholders.

antifa 4y ago
Reminds me of the TV show Silicon Valley. The technology was an easily copyable algorithm, but the business plan was an incoherent and vague competitor to a giant yahoo/google type company, to be built from scratch.

com2kid 4y ago

> but also because we already kinda tried an "everything app". It's called Facebook, While WeChat was adding features, such as an independent creator marketplace, or payment systems, Facebook spent time aggressively pushing online web games that almost killed their platform. Then Facebook started going for attention metrics above all else, and it became an app that fed people stories that made everyone angry and depressed, but did a good job increasing engagement! Facebook should have started cloning WeChat features years earlier than they did. Facebook's other problem is their real name policy. Having to be friends with someone to message them seriously limits how many people I talk to through Messenger. But as it is, Facebook Marketplace is winning. Facebook events is winning. Facebook payments, no, not sure how they messed that up. Venmo and a few others are duking that one out, heck Venmo is used at garage sales. Facebook doesn't need hyper growth, they need to just keep current user's happy and coming back for things. It doesn't matter if they aren't the #1 destination for GenZ to post photos. If everyone is buying/selling used goods, and going to concerts, and arranging birthday parties, and posting a small selection of curated travel photos, then be happy with that, and keep expanding into adjacent markets. And separate out "people I want to talk to" from "people I want to show my life to".

jdhn 4y ago
Good point on Facebook Marketplace, I really think it's cut into the niche that was previously occupied solely by Craigslist.
asveikau 4y ago
> Facebook should have started cloning WeChat features years earlier than they did. I think the fact that nobody in the west has taken a WeChat like "everything app" position might be a sign that it's not necessary or inevitable. So then ... Why should they copy WeChat? As an exercise in and of itself? The best answer I could come up with is "domination" and I don't think that's a good reason to do something.
mandeepj 4y ago
> Having to be friends with someone to message them seriously limits how many people I talk to through Messenger. That's not a requirement at all. You can message literally anyone on FB, conditionally - there 'message' button is visible (exception to hackers). You can also message Zuck, even though you may not be friends with him.

Angostura 4y ago

> we already kinda tried an "everything app". It's called Facebook I think Compuserve was probably a better example. It was pretty good at being an everything app - but sadly wasn't able to adapt to the internet

kelnos 4y ago
Yeah, if I remember right, their "connect to the internet" mode was a special dial string at the end of the dialup number that selected between normal Compuserve access, and Internet access. If you used Compuserve to get on the Internet, you were unable to access the normal Compuserve services through the Compuserve app! Not a great way to integrate. The only main integration point I remember was that you could use your Compuserve login ID as a full Internet email address. (This was all back in the 90s when I was a teenager of course, so I may have gotten the details wrong, or just didn't know what I was doing when I was using Compuserve's Internet connectivity.)

Melatonic 4y ago

Facebook was also limited to JUST college students at that point which very much made it not an Everyone app. Part of the appeal originally was that Grandma couldn't comment on the photo your friend posted of you where you were passed out shirtless on a random persons couch covered in doritos

lazzlazzlazz 4y ago

iOS is an "everything app" and its power is profound.

siruncledrew 4y ago

Looking back at Wechat from how it was since ~2013, I think there’s a decent amount of recency bias influencing it as “the everything app”. It definitely wasn’t close to being as horizontally integrated until recently. On another note about Facebook, even though Facebook/Messenger is still past its prime in the US, Whatsapp is like the closest Facebook-made Wechat equivalent because that is absolutely popping off in other parts of the world like Latin America. Literally everyone (people & businesses) use it as their primary channel of interaction on a daily basis. In the US it’s still not nearly as popular.