by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m old enough to remember how before MySpace, there was Prodigy. That was the online service, back in the day, that caused itself serious problems when it decided to charge users for its most popular feature — email. The service never fully recovered.
All the talk on the part of Elon “Space Karen” Musk about charging users a basic fee to use the X / Twitter service reminds me of Prodigy. The key issue for me is social media is very much old news. Everything is about AI now. In fact, rather than charging users for X, I would suggest Musk figure out a way to organically add AI into X to the point that it’s something that users of the service use everyday.
Social media has no buzzy these days and it’s dumb to try to re-invent the wheel, or, even worse, to charge for something that plenty of other companies are willing to give away for free. It’s all very curious.
But Musk has managed to pull a rabbit out of a hat before. So, I suppose it’s possible that he’ll manage to turn X into an “everything app” like he apparently wants to do so bad. I’m just leery. If this was 2012, then, yeah, maybe he might be able to pull it off.
But it’s 2023 and everyone’s mind space is dominated by AI. Only time will tell, I suppose.
