A new social media, Metaverse, and more AI

Around the same time last year, we were on the cusp of a big tech leap in India: the shift to 5G. That finally happened towards the last quarter of the year. Many of us have moved to this latest generation 5G, but maybe we are still waiting to see how that has made our life better. That is exactly how a lot of the tech shifts will be in the coming years — incremental changes that don’t seem like a huge experiential leap, but still change the way we do a lot of things, maybe without us even registering it.

The past year was not the best for tech companies around the world. It was the year which told them a lot of the shift in demand they saw during the Covid-induced lockdowns was not here to stay, and people would go back to their old ways. The year ended with near mayhem across most Silicon Valley companies, especially those in the Internet business. There is still no real redemption in sight.

There is a feeling 2023 will be a bellwether year in more ways than one. There is a lot of saturation across realms of personal tech, which is impacting user engagement. This is already forcing a rethink across companies, but it remains to be seen if these new technologies mature enough to be released to users in the new year. However, you will certainly see the first public entry of a lot of new platforms, especially those in the Metaverse and those leaning on artificial intelligence.

So what will be the big trends to look out for in 2023? Here are our picks:

More intelligent, more pervasive AI

ChatGPT has shown the world that conversational artificial intelligence is an idea whose time has come. Yes, it is intelligent enough now to start writing leave applications that are believable, but most such AI elements are now in standalone products, which is more play than work. In the new year, you will see this intelligence coming into more products that we use everyday — think of a Gmail that will not just auto-suggest but also write your next mail to the boss.

In fact, a lot of conversations we are already having are with AI bots, and these will become more intelligent and start going well beyond the formulae that have been fed into their backends. You will see a lot of online services presenting themselves as conversations, especially when you are searching for something. A boring listing page which hasn’t evolved much over the years might not be as attractive to the Instagram generation as it was to the AltaVista generation. However, as more AI flows into our lives, we will need to find ways to trust it more — or be more sceptical.

Time for post-social?

If Twitter has taught us something this year, it is that social media as we know it might soon become a thing of the past. Even if Twitter survives the storm it has driven itself into, it is a fact that Facebook too is struggling to remain relevant amid an increasingly younger and digital native audience. Their concepts of social engagement are very different, often sans text and notice-board behaviours.

Meta, for instance, knows that it will have to think beyond its present social media platforms and wants to be the social link when users move to the Metaverse, if at all. But that might not be something that will shift soon. Till then, there seems to be a vacuum emerging in the social media space, for now plugged by users sticking to short videos. But that fad too shall pass and not all platforms are good in that segment anyway.

So don’t be surprised if social media platforms lose even more relevance and conversations in 2023, slowly becoming consumption platforms where users don’t say much. This is a great opportunity for something new to emerge, but that won’t be easy, given how challenging it is to find a new hook for the young.

As Facebook’s user base becomes older by the year, younger users are preferring new platforms like Discord, where conversations happen more in closed groups than in virtual town squares. The evolution of such platforms are already challenging traditional methods of monetising social media engagement. And Twitter’s apparent implosion will not immediately benefit a not-very-easy-to-use Mastodon or a limited-location Koo. The micro-blogging platform’s role as the pressure valve of the Internet will need a completely new solution that is better and certainly not smaller.

More regional, darker social bubbles

As the Internet spreads to new users, especially in countries like India, it is also becoming more localised and multi-lingual. Across the world, the English language internet seems to have plateaued, making platforms like Google focus more on opportunities to serve smaller, regional languages. This is a tech challenge in more ways than one, but also presents an opportunity to test out new technologies that can convert the content of the internet for these new users without much human intervention.

But already in markets like India, this is leading to local bubbles with their own trends that rarely surface at the national or global level. This emerging mosaic-like structure of users will mean that new platforms will need to solve more localised problems and the success of the one-size-fits-all features will be even more limited. You will also see this spawning more dark social behaviour, where we really don’t know what the Internet is thinking, in part because a lot of it is happening in encrypted pipelines.

And what about the Metaverse?

The first usable version of the Metaverse might actually end up coming in the workplace, but it is unlikely to be Mark Zuckerberg’s cartoony version. As hybrid workforces become the norm and with travel still not as easy as earlier, extended reality (XR) could become the answer to collaborate and communicate virtually.

Since the headsets and other paraphernalia to facilitate these virtual interactions are still very expensive, it might be up to companies to make these available to their employees for regular XR meetings. The first experience of this could end up looking like an upgraded version of video conferencing, but with the ability to interact with objects in the virtual space.

Expect a few more commercial versions of the Metaverse to be accessible to regular users during the year. However, the challenge will be with the hardware that lets you access these virtual worlds without making you bankrupt in the real world. The big disruptor could be an affordable device that logs users into the Metaverse easily — maybe it will just be a smartphone.