Leadership1 publisher3 min readPublished
Meta puts a review queue between developers and Muse's users
Meta opened Muse to outside developers last week, and it will review and feature the connectors they submit. The App Store's arrangement is the model, one week into Muse's run at the top of the free chart.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Meta opened Muse to outside developers through a connector platform, so a travel service can book flights inside the agent, an email service can send messages and a calendar app can manage appointments.
- Shopify said on Monday that it supports shopping on Muse through Shop Pay, and Stripe is supplying the payment technology that lets the agent complete purchases across much of the web.
- Amazon has blocked Muse from parts of its shopping site. Business Insider says the block is resistance to handing customer relationships to another tech giant.
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Why it matters
- decision Any business with a booking or checkout flow has to decide whether to build and submit a connector on about a week of chart data, well before Meta publishes usage or retention figures.
- constraint Approval and featured placement both sit with Meta, so a company that integrates accepts an editor's judgement as the route to its own customers at the moment of purchase.
- contradiction The two commerce platforms with the most at stake priced the same product in opposite directions within days, so there is no industry default for a smaller operator to copy.
- exposure If Muse traffic holds, the companies absent from its connector directory are the ones the agent cannot route a buyer to, and the competitor who integrated takes the order.
Meta controls two steps in the connector arrangement. Both are borrowed. The first is approval: a developer builds a Muse connector and submits it to Meta's agent platform for review [6]. "We'll review your connector for functional, security, and legal requirements, and complete end to end testing," Meta wrote on the Muse developer website [7]. The second is discovery. "Once approved, users will be able to find your connector in Muse. Editors will review connectors for featured placement," the company wrote [8]. Business Insider describes that language as very similar to the way Apple guards its mobile platform [9]. The developer-site text it quotes covers review and placement and does not state a fee or a revenue share [23].
The consumer evidence under all of this is about a week old [22]. Muse went to the top of the App Store last week and was still the most downloaded free app on Monday, ahead of ChatGPT [1]. Meta's stock rose 11% on Monday, within reach of the record it hit last summer [3], and Business Insider says the rise is investors betting the company has found a new way to sit between consumers and the businesses trying to reach them [24]. That publication's own framing of the platform outcome is conditional: if enough people use Muse as their main way to get things done online, developers could flock to it and businesses may have little choice but to engage [13].
The choice in front of a business this quarter is whether to have a connector built and approved before the retention numbers arrive. Shopify said on Monday that it supports shopping on Muse through Shop Pay, and its stock jumped [10]. Stripe supplies the payment technology that lets Muse complete purchases across much of the web [11]. Amazon has blocked Muse from parts of its shopping site [12].
Business Insider says the block shows some companies may resist handing customer relationships to another tech giant, and that whether Meta gets to a real platform is far from certain [20]. It also notes that Amazon could block Google Search from its store and does not, because billions of consumers use Google to search for products [21]. Build the connector and Meta sits between you and the buyer at checkout; withhold it and the agent routes the buyer to a competitor who built one.
Meta has been on the dependent side of this bargain. In 2021 Apple made it harder for Meta to track people across apps and target ads, which Business Insider says reminded Zuckerberg how much power platform owners hold over the companies that depend on them [14]. Meta then spent tens of billions of dollars trying to build the next major computing platform through virtual reality and smart glasses [15].
"Being early could be as valuable as being early to the App Store in 2009," tech entrepreneur Greg Isenberg wrote on X [16]. "Every business will need an agent strategy, just like every business needed a mobile strategy," he wrote [17]. He thinks Muse connectors could become "the new app listings," with businesses competing for visibility inside AI agents instead of app stores or search results [18], and that a company's API could matter more than its app because agents, not people, would increasingly decide which services to use [19]. Isenberg's comparison is about the decade. The decision in front of an operator this quarter is narrower: whether to fund the engineering to build and maintain a connector, and who keeps the customer record when Muse completes the purchase.
What to watch
- Whether Meta publishes Muse retention or active-user figures. So far it has cited chart position.
- Whether Amazon extends its block to the whole shopping site or reverses it as connector volume grows.
- Whether featured placement inside Muse becomes a paid slot once the connector directory fills up.