Things haven’t been easy for Facebook ever since it changed its name to Meta.
For starters, the competition from TikTok has been quite intense. That’s a particularly vexing problem when your main cash cow is Instagram, an app that is, for all intents and purposes, quite similar to TikTok at this point.
And then there’s the whole metaverse controversy: What is it? Does it have a future? Does anyone care?
Well, if you’re Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, you care about the metaverse and so does your company.
In response to naysayers who had dismissed the company’s efforts in that area so far, the wunderkind founder doubled down on his commitment to this emerging niche.
“A narrative has been developed that we’re somehow moving away from focusing on the metaverse vision, so I just want to say up front that that’s not accurate…We’ve been focusing on AI and the metaverse, and we will continue to.”
Meta is also looking into the current hot topic, artificial intelligence.
In fact, the company credits artificial intelligence with a recent surge in audience retention on its popular Instagram app. Apparently, audiences spent up to 24% more time on average on the app thanks to its “TikTok-style AI Reel recommendations,” TechCrunch reports.
The success has given the company greater insights into the popularity of short-form videos and, hopefully for their sake, some ideas on how to monetize it in the future. Interestingly, Meta CFO Susan Li speculated that the increased popularity of Reels may have come at the expense of stories and other content on the platform.
As for the metaverse and AI as well as the future of computing, Zuckerberg outlined a vision in which the augmented reality metaverse experience is powered by an OS driven by artificial intelligence. It’s all quite heady stuff when you really think about it but, from our corner of the world, we can’t help but wonder what kind of impact the world’s largest photo and video-sharing platforms’ integration of artificial intelligence will have on photography as a medium and art.
Do you think the metaverse has a future? What role do you see AI playing in such a future? Let us know your thoughts on Meta’s latest news in the comments below.
Check out some of our other photography news headlines at this link.
[TechCrunch]