Elon Musk’s improbable path to making X an “everything app”

X was once known as Twitter, however quickly it would turn into “the Every part App,” and that day is “nearer than everybody thinks,” X CEO Linda Yaccarino promised in one among her first X posts of 2024.

“Nothing can gradual us down,” Yaccarino stated.

Turning Twitter into an all the pieces app is arguably the explanation that Elon Musk bought Twitter. He overtly craved the success of the Chinese language all the pieces app WeChat, telling Twitter workers quickly after buying the app that “you mainly dwell on WeChat in China as a result of it’s so usable and useful to day by day life, and I believe if we are able to obtain that, and even get near that at Twitter, it will be an immense success,” The Guardian reported.

In October 2022, Musk teased that he “may very well be flawed,” however he anticipated that inside three to 5 years, he may turn Twitter into an everything app (also referred to as a brilliant app). However greater than a yr later, X nonetheless appears far-off from following in WeChat’s footsteps.

Musk’s grand imaginative and prescient has all the time been to morph the chook app—a principally unprofitable place the place customers initially went to tweet “short bursts of inconsequential information”—into one thing massively worthwhile: The one app a person would ever want in day by day life.

To Musk, this meant that customers would not simply be opening X to put up a joke or verify an earthquake simply hit, giving X a bit advert income with every login. As an alternative, the app would turn into customers’ unique vacation spot to put calls, textual content, goof off with associates, ship funds, financial institution, and, in fact, store on-line—giving X seemingly boundless alternatives to revenue extra from every login. It may even flip X right into a trillion-dollar firm, Musk has claimed.

Whereas many marvel how X may obtain this seemingly not possible dream, Sangeet Paul Choudary, a world skilled on platform economics and community results, advised Ars that X is well-positioned to turn into a brilliant app, though he stays skeptical that it’ll make all the best strikes.

If X can keep away from a number of the missteps that led different wannabe tremendous apps to fail, as Choudary wrote in his Substack final November—reminiscent of tacking on options that do not leverage the distinctive relationship between accounts and followers that made Twitter so in style within the first place—Choudary sees a minimum of one path the place X may succeed.

X’s potential path to changing into an all the pieces app

Proper now, whenever you open the X app, you see a pair of social media feeds you can toggle between—the “for you” and “following” feeds—in addition to choices to put up, search, and use Grok, X’s chatbot. When you click on in your profile within the app, you possibly can entry a separate menu to leap to different X options, like Areas or Communities, or, for those who’re an eligible creator, you possibly can try how the monetization of your posts goes.

X might merely proceed including options one after the other to no matter menus presently exist on the app. However it’s additionally potential that X may get a complete makeover by the tip of 2024—with probably extra choices to entry fee options coming quickly that may broaden its creator financial system and gas an as-yet unexplored world of X e-commerce choices. By 2030, X would possibly morph a lot—and presumably turn into so consequential to some customers’ day by day lives—that folks may lastly respect Musk’s X rebrand and cease calling his app by its former title, Twitter.

Whichever route X takes, the corporate must be strategic at each step, Choudary advised Ars, if it needs to be a brilliant app. For instance, simply including a Purchase button on X’s interface—like Twitter already tried to do with Stripe—or trying “to turn into the following PayPal embedded in a social community” would seemingly fail. However “if it will get its geese in a row, I may see X shifting within the route of a creator monetization community the place creators who’ve constructed followership on X can now monetize it,” Choudary stated. Taking that route, X may probably succeed as a brilliant app by including options that immediately assist creators after which broadly catch on with different customers.