Meta is betting its recommendation systems can find the next Threads among seven new apps

The board-deck version of Meta's plan comes from Mark Zuckerberg. "AI is helping our teams speed up product development," he told investors on the July earnings call. "I expect it to become a lot easier to ship new apps, so we're planning to build out more ideas and use our recommendation systems to scale them to the people who will find them interesting, as we've done with Threads." ^[2]

That version leaves out how Threads grew. Meta moved Instagram users, and later Facebook users, onto it through a deliberate funnel, and it is pointing the same funnel at Muse now ^[7]. Forrester principal analyst Kate Winick said the company seems to be learning from earlier flops by "putting the full might of the company" behind its newest app ^[8]. A push of that size goes to one app at a time. Meta has released seven new ones this year ^[1].

The trade-off is about where the bottleneck moves. If Zuckerberg is right that shipping gets easier, the scarce input becomes promotion across a network where 3.6 billion people use at least one Meta app each day ^[6]. Speaking about Muse, Winick said the company is "figuring out how to put a very accessible, very friendly consumer-centric wrapper around technology that exists elsewhere." ^[14] Her point puts Meta's edge in distribution. In Zuckerberg's description, the recommendation systems scale apps to interested users ^[2]. Closing the apps that find no audience is a separate decision, and the report does not say how Meta will make it.

A skeptic would say Meta has run this experiment before. Facebook's Creative Labs launched a handful of apps in the 2010s. The New Product Experimentation group, announced in 2019, tested, launched and shut down several more before it was deprioritized after the late-2022 layoffs ^[9]. Menlo Ventures investor Amy Wu Martin said there have not been "a lot of winners yet" among consumer AI apps ^[10]. Meta's answer is Threads, which Business Insider describes as one of the company's first successful breakout apps in recent years ^[13]. In my view, one breakout is a thin base for a volume strategy, and the case rests on Zuckerberg's claim that each attempt now takes less effort ^[2].

None of this resolves this quarter. Threads took about three years to go from launch to carrying ads ^[1]. Instants launched in May and Pocket in August ^[3]. Anyone planning around the new apps this year is planning around products at the start of that timeline.

This quarter's decision is about what Meta gives up. A few years ago it appeared to be turning Instagram into a super app with video, photos, livestreaming and shopping; now it is spreading products across separate apps ^[12]. The consequence arrives later. Each app that fails to scale will either be closed, as the NPE apps were, or kept alive to compete with Muse for promotion inside Instagram ^[9][7].