Hello 🙂 it’s been a while.
And a happy new year, even if we are in the mid of February.
I have never been good with resolutions so for the last few years I have stopped it. I just keep doing the same things personally and professionally. However, a few years ago I came across Year Compass - a free printable booklet that allows you to reflect on how your last year was and what things you want to work on in the new year.
Life is short and we can’t predict what happens but we can always have good intentions. However every year I would take a printout and keep it for days in front of me. I never had the confidence to open it and complete it. This year I had the confidence to reflect on 2022 and plan for the year 2023. Obviously, I am in the second month of 2023 and life is already throwing bouncers at me. But again that’s life.
Give it a try. It is simple, will make you think and I am sure it will open up numerous things for you. Just give your time and attention to it and I am sure you will have something to take back. I did it in a batch of a couple of hours and finished it over the weekend.
Good luck!
Recently Meta released Q4 earnings. In the final quarter of 2022 the company near its revenue predictions. As of September 2022, Facebook’s users also managed to grow by 1.98 billion daily active users and 2.96 billion monthly active users.
During the earnings call Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg listed three things that will be the key focus area for the company:
Instagram Reels
AI recommendation engine
And being a stronger and nimble organisation
Mark also called 2023 the “Year of Efficiency” for Meta.
In my opinion, the three things will more or less define 2023.
Short form videos
As we know social media is no more the same. When Facebook was introduced it was about sharing everything with your friends and family. Then came a stage when the younger generation didn’t want to share while they had their families and relatives watching. That’s when the teenagers started leaving the platform and started looking for new spaces.
Snapchat and Instagram came into existence. One wanted to be in the moment sharing stuff and the latter wanted you to share beautiful images. There was still no video.
And then came a unicorn called TikTok that changed how we use social media and consumed content.
TikTok shows you content depending on your interests backed by the power of artificial engine recommendation. And not to forget the dead simple UI. It is a shame that TikTok got banned in India.
TikTok also brought in a new definition of social media. It was no more about your friends and family but about your interests and showing you content based on them.
According to We Are Social’s 2023 digital report: Among the world’s most-used social media apps, TikTok enjoyed the highest average monthly use per user over the course of 2022.
The rise of TikTok and the changing landscape of social media has forced Meta to change or rather just copy almost all the features of TikTok. Instagram and Facebook are all about short-form videos and it is showing videos from anywhere and everywhere. Users obviously haven’t loved it but Meta is now about short-form videos and content backed by algorithmic recommendations.
This works perfectly fine for India where TikTok is banned and the country provides the most extensive reach for Facebook and Instagram.
AI or ChatGPT
2023 = the year of ChatGPT’s growth. The artificial intelligence bot can answer questions, write songs for you, write essays and the list is endless. Every day I find something new about the tool on LinkedIn from an expert.
I played with the bot and it is smart. The best thing is that you can type in natural language prompts and the bot will give you excellent answers(in most cases) in a matter of seconds.
Seeing the growing interest in ChatGPT; Google has introduced Google Bard AI and Microsoft announced the integration of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model into Bing, providing a ChatGPT-like experience within the search engine.
All these chatbots will be part of your search and you can imagine going forward how it will benefit the giants to understand you more and serve ads. It is the initial days and the AI will get smarter as it knows you better. In this process, it will do mistakes as Bard did and it cost Google approximately US$100 billion.
A couple of years back somebody recommended an AI bot that would talk to me as a friend and from there it will grow as it learns. The app was interesting for a few days but wasn’t a human so I don’t think it can replace humans. I think humans are smarter and will tame the AI and make it work in smarter ways.
Layoffs
2023 is already the year of layoffs. Mark said they want to be a nimble organisation, which was achieved by massive layoffs of 13%(11K). Almost every other tech company is in news for layoff. Indian startups have sacked thousands of employees in the past 3-4 months. There are more that won’t be reported.
After the pandemic, LinkedIn was filled with people getting new jobs. The honeymoon is over and now it is about layoffs, pay cuts, and no hikes. On the other side everything out there has become expensive. And there is no recession?
I hope things turn better after all hope keeps us going 🙂
Enjoy your weekend!