(VRPinea, February 18) Last week, the gel app that focuses on acquaintance social networking became popular, surpassing WeChat and QQ and becoming the first in the iOS free App list. Before the birth of Gel, there have been many virtual social apps in China, Baidu's Xi'an, NetEase's Yaotai, Tencent's Super QQ Show, and ByteDance is also about to launch a party island. However, social apps like Gel, which use acquaintance socialization as the entry point of the metaverse, are still relatively rare in the mainland.
Gel App
In less than half a year, virtual Apps that are regarded by the outside world as "meta-universe concept social" have been launched. This can't help but make Xiao P wonder whether social apps for acquaintances like Gel have a competitive advantage in this social war. Can the social ecosystem it builds meet the core needs of users? Stranger socialization and acquaintance socialization, which model can dominate the metaverse social in the future?
Party Island
Stranger social apps are trapped in purposeful socializing
We all know that the advent of the iPhone 4 has enabled the Internet to leapfrog from PC to mobile. The mainland mobile Internet social field has roughly gone through three stages. In the first stage, the acquaintance social App led by WeChat has reached the current maturity period; the second stage, simple interaction and the freshness of stranger socialization have spawned the rise of stranger social platforms such as Momo, Tantan, and Blued; the third stage, for vertical scenarios, tools with strong attributes, and apps that rely on certain purposes to connect users, such as DingTalk, which focuses on office, because its core is not social, so it is not in the scope of this discussion.
Everyone may have had such an experience, offline, when we are interested in unfamiliar people or things, and then want to take the initiative to find and expand the topic, we often carefully wait and see, to guess the other party's emotional state. Some people choose to give up because they are afraid of being rejected in person, unable to withstand pressure and embarrassment. Therefore, most people in China have a late maturity of social skills, which is actually caused by the combination of cultural, educational, environmental and other factors in the mainland.
As a result, these helpless emotions or experiences have shifted online, and the social trend of strangers has surged up, but after the novelty has receded, these social apps have fallen into trouble. First of all, when the user relationship is reached, it will habitually turn to WeChat, which means that the stranger social app cannot form a long-term stable user relationship chain and cannot retain existing customers. Secondly, in China's traditional concept, strangers socializing is a sensitive area of emotional needs, and users themselves have a defensive psychology, which inhibits the growth rate of the user base.
In addition, due to the low social threshold of strangers, the stranger social app has always been inseparable from the title of low-level fun. Therefore, at present, in the mainland, the acquaintance social App represented by WeChat still occupies an absolute dominant position. In recent years, with the rise of the short video industry, stranger social apps have begun to expand new businesses, but the road to "transformation" is still difficult. For example, Momo became popular with live broadcasting on the runway, but because it was halfway out of the house, it did not have a complete live broadcast ecological chain like Douyin, and soon faced a bottleneck period.
Can the metacosm break the social dilemma of strangers?
In the case of the old batch of domestic social software struggling, a group of rising stars have received more and more attention. These social apps with the prototype of the meta-universe, with customized avatars, allow users' virtual identities to be satisfied. That is to say, it reduces the online social model of blindly looking at the face, so that a social model based on personal interests and three views can be formed. Acquaintance socialization is based on real identity and does not match it.
Gel App reloading interface
Based on the eight elements of the metaverse, metaverse social is different from traditional social, with 3D visualization, strong interactivity, immersion and other characteristics, which can quickly narrow the distance between strangers. Compared with the current instant messaging social model like WeChat, which has a high penetration rate, Meta-universe Social pursues scenario-based socialization, and users can share time and space on the virtual platform for instant interaction. Therefore, metaverse socialization is to build a social ecology composed of different social scenes.
VR social platform "Rec Room"
When users get emotional and other satisfaction in these social ecosystems, they will be willing to spend a lot of time on the platform, and user retention will increase. At the same time, as a highly open editable world, the metaverse will be dominated by users, and the reduction of content threshold will provide a more free space for expression for content creators and users.
VR Social Platform "VRChat"
Therefore, the current social app with the prototype of the meta-universe wants to promote newness, and can make more efforts in user experience, such as exploring more social gameplay, solving basic problems such as caton flashback and message delay. But when the number of users is growing rapidly, whether their servers can withstand it remains to be seen, and the rush to remove the gel reflects this problem. Looking to the future, what role will they play when the era of full immersion really comes? Although Xiao P recognizes their innovations, he is not optimistic about their ability to build "strong relationships" in social, because when the screen and software are still in a state of separation, the social barrier is always there.
Super QQ Show
Back to the gel, although a new social app like it is cloaked in the cloak of a meta-universe, it still follows the logic of the previous generation of social app overlord WeChat, and does not explore more ways to play socially with acquaintances. Users covet fresh will download it, but within a day, it will be uninstalled, because WeChat is enough.
This article is the original manuscript of VRPinea, please contact: [email protected]