Wen | Zhang Shule (Columnist of People's Daily And People's Post and Telegraph, Observer of Internet and Game Industry)
In the past month, a metaversic concept social software called "Gel" has undergone a brutal growth explosion and suddenly and silently removed from the app store.
In more areas, metaverse social has also been repeatedly mentioned, especially in the vertical track of office, some office applications have also begun to label the metaverse.
It seems that working in an immersive way makes you more productive and your employees happier.
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In this regard, Yang Xinyi, a reporter of the Daily Economic News, and Shule had an exchange, and poor Dao thought:
The lack of the core element of the metaverse, that is, the network community under the VR or AR experience, cannot be regarded as a real metaversic social platform.
As an app positioned for acquaintance socializing, Gel only allows users to add 50 close friends to build the "most intimate online space".
But in fact, this metaverse social application itself has nothing to do with VR or AR, and the only thing it can relate to the metaverse is that it can make virtual characters.
In a sense, similar to the past QQ show, it is just more 3D and manual.
In fact, this kind of social application is not unusual, but it has gone further abroad, jumping out of the broad definition of acquaintance social networking and moving towards collaborative office.
Media reports say an app called Immersive Metacosmology can provide telecommuting capabilities.
Different from previous office social applications, on this office platform, employees can set their own 3D avatars, including skin color, clothing, accessories, and brainstorm with colleagues in office spaces with similar graffiti and green decorations as offline.
But such innovations are just so-called immersive experiences that add some fun.
All in all, the current technology to build a metaversic social platform is still immature, which also makes metaverse social is still only a pseudo-proposition.
As for the industry's hotly discussed possibility that gel can replace Tencent, it is obviously still nonsense.
Without the disruptive innovation of real technology flowing and falling on experience, the social status of Tencent's social platform in China is still difficult to shake for the time being.
On another level, due to the large amount of money and technical investment required, metaverse social networking is destined to be a game of big factories, rather than a blue ocean where so-called unicorns can survive.
In fact, in the big field of the meta-universe, the big factories are running in the track.
Although there is still a distance in technology, the big factory does not need to start the king, first build and then improve.
The accurate posture of small and medium-sized factories in the track should be to occupy the creative advantage without taking advantage of technology.
It should also be clear that now all those who claim to have opened the meta-universe platform, whether giants or small heads, are basically gimmicks.
In addition, the future trend of social networking may not necessarily revolve around the metacosm, because the metacosm is only a tool, and any product is likely to cut into it.
For existing and future social products, the first thing to do is to survive.
Whether it is the social field of acquaintances or strangers, social platforms should try their best to open vertical tracks and find their own foothold in the segmentation field.