Chapter 254: Launch Day
With s rolling out about the upcoming social media app that GAIA was working on, it became a talking point among the users of their OS. And coming from a company that could now be considered a behemoth with more than three billion customers, word quickly spread. After all, most people used a GAIA product on more than one device, leading to the s working their way through more than fifteen billion devices.
During the less than a year that the GAIA corporation had taken to rise to fame, they'd met with, and overcome, many obstacles from others, including Google and Apple.
The crackdown from two massive companies continued, both of them trying their best to hinder the growth of the GAIA OS, as each had their own operating systems that had dominated the field before the upstart company's newer, and better, OS was released. When the OS was becoming relevant at the start, they had been desperate to make it impossible to download, but failed. Each and every blockade they put up, the GAIA OS would immediately respond to and break through. Then they tried threatening, and also filed, a few lawsuits, either jointly or individually, for copyright infringement. The people in charge still wrongly thought of Aron as a kid with a lemonade stand, not as the chairman of a large, multinational corporation.
GAIA, however, responded with the same vigor. Their legal department was no slouch, having previously been its own firm that specialized in copyright and tech law prior to being acquired. The latest round of fighting had just begun, but the court had already made some initial rulings on motions in their favor despite the company itself having moved to Eden.
...
Two weeks later.
Aron had named the app Pangea. That was the supercontinent that used to exist on Earth, millions of years ago. It was a name that was meant to symbolize bringing everyone in the world closer together. Not to mention, it suited his naming tastes quite well; after all, his other two 'public' companies were named after the earth itself (GAIA) and the desire for connectivity and progress (Connect).
It had finally been released, and millions of people, whether due to curiosity or brand loyalty, created accounts. It was quite easy, since their IDs from the GAIA OS could be directly imported, allowing them to immediately begin using Pangea without having to customize it further.
And as those pioneers first opened the app, they were met with something that no social media app had had when it was first launched: an active user base. It was all thanks to the AIs that had been built to make the app look lively for the first batch of users. They were the most important ones to retain, as they would be the ones sending the initial feedback on the app.
One of the things that tied people to their current systems and prevented them from moving from one to another was the history they built up on each app. Whether it be Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or any of their smaller competitors, the time people had spent on those platforms had already built up a history for them. Thus, the social media giants weren't too worried about their apps losing relevance. Pangea had solved that issue in an ingenious way; all its users had to do was request the app move their entire history over to the new platform, regardless of where it came from.
With more and more people using that function, the app became more lively. Not to mention, much more addictive and likely to hook first-time users.
But although that made the normal users try it out, the feature's real importance was to influencers. They would have hesitated dedicating themselves to a startup—at least without being paid—but were instead moving over in droves after they realized they could migrate everything to the new platform without having to invest too much time.
Even better for them, Pangea allowed one-tap cross-posting and follower consolidation, so the influencers would no longer have to carefully craft each tweet, story, post, or anything else individually. Their followers, thanks to the cross-posting and consolidation feature, would already follow them on Pangea, if they were users. So there was no downside to the move, but plenty of benefits attracting them.
But all of those features were dwarfed by one single function that made Pangea different from any other social media app: the AI integration. AI was something that GAIA was a world leader in and they had no competitors. The AI in Pangea could be seen everywhere, and users could customize it in many different ways, making their personal experience much more fulfilling.
It allowed for things like fact checking, advanced search, and many more. The integrated AI could do it all... as long as people were subscribed to GAIA Premium. Thanks to the OS being integrated into the app, the world became nothing but one street speaking one language, and anyone could start an argument with anyone else without any nuances being lost in translation. After all, GAIA Premium included a translation algorithm that was hands down the best in the world.
With big names like pewdiepie, Cole Sprouse, Lewis Hamilton, Kim Kardashian, and others making their move to the app, their fandoms followed. And that was no small number of people.
"How many users do we have now?" Aron asked Sarah in their virtual meeting room. It was filled with holographic screens showing different data sets regarding Pangea's launch.
"With the app successfully being launched five hours ago and having faced no bugs or crashes so far, we've already reached 215 million users. And nearly half of them are still engaged. That's unprecedented, even for the current social media companies. We expect the number to continue increasing as the other side of the world wakes up, and the explosive growth should continue for more than a month before it stabilizes. Then we predict that the user base growth will slow down and be on par with other platforms' growth. But by that time, we should have about a billion registered accounts with a quarter of them expected to be daily users," she reported. She had fully prepared for the launch.
"How is the reaction, is it positive?" he asked.
"Yes. Using AI to create an atmosphere for first-time users while also using the data from their accounts to curate their personal experiences allowed us to avoid being pigeonholed into a single niche category. That would be counterproductive in the first place," Sarah replied.
Aron found himself thinking about privacy and couldn't help but smile and laugh at the situation he found himself in.
"What's up?" Sarah asked, curious as to his reason for the sudden laughter.
"I found myself counting the number of laws I think we might've just broken in that short period of time," he said with the smile still on his face.
It caught Sarah off guard, as she didn't expect that to be something to laugh at, and the absurdity resulted in her laughing as well. "Even if it's a crime, so long as they can't prove it, it doesn't matter. Certain countries might think of banning Pangea over privacy concerns, though, which would make them believe they have leverage on us," she mused, pointing out some of the disadvantages they had to accept following the successful move of the company.
"You don't have to worry about that. I'm pretty sure it won't be the first lawsuit in the saga of United States v. GAIA Technology. Hell, they might even use the same excuse to force us to show them our source code again. That'll never happen, of course, but we can expect a few subpoenas to appear before Congress in the future," Aron answered.
"And who'll be going for those?" she asked. "Me?"
"It depends on whose name is on the subpoena. It'll most likely be you, though, due to your citizenship, but my name might also be on one. Even Zuckerberg's been called before congress a few times." Aron chuckled again, amused as he imagined himself sitting before congress being grilled by politicians who knew nothing about technology, trying to provoke him into saying something they could use against him. They might even pass a law, or just completely ban the app.
...
The buzz continued, with people in Eden being at the forefront of the new platform. They all knew that the company that had released the app was from their country, and they wanted to show their support. But it didn't stop there, as the Edenian officials also immediately created the first official governmental social media accounts on the platform. They were immediately verified and had their names displayed in gold, signifying that they were official government organization accounts.
But other than Eden, no governments had registered yet, as they were waiting to see the number of users before they made a decision on whether or not they'll create accounts on the new platform.