Apps that made headlines in 2023

2023 was a year of technological marvels, marked by generative AI taking the forefront in transforming businesses, industries, and workplaces. 2023 was also the year where we have seen turbulence in the social media landscape as well, from the rebranding of Twitter to X to the birth of Threads and Bluesky. Before the year officially wraps up, let's take a look at some popular apps that have made the headlines in 2023.

Bluesky

Released in February 2023 for iOS and in April 2023 for Android as an invite-only social media app, Bluesky is a 'decentralised' microblogging platform founded by American software engineer Jay Graber, with Twitter's co-founder Jack Dorsey on the board of directors. Bluesky marked an important aspect of social media evolution in 2023, allowing users to shift from company-controlled apps to more user-centric networking.

Led by a vision of fostering open, transparent, and community-driven platforms, Bluesky's launch sparked several discussions on data ownership, privacy, and the democratisation of online spaces. Bluesky, as a platform, aims to decentralise social media infrastructure, allowing users greater control over their data and content while fostering interoperability across various platforms - a movement that has inspired many independent developers to keep building more user-friendly innovations. At the time of writing, the platform is over 2 million users strong and keeps growing.

Threads 

Launched in July 2023 as a direct competitor to Twitter, Meta's Threads offered users an alternative to the popular microblogging social media platform. While offering similar microblogging and post-sharing functions as Twitter, Threads aimed to grab users who had grown tired of Elon Musk's tumultuous Twitter - eventually renamed to X. In its first five days of launch, Threads gained over 100 million users, breaking the previously held record of ChatGPT of being the fastest-growing consumer software application in history.

However, Threads failed to retain its initial momentum, experiencing a tremendous decline in active users - up to 80% - before its first month had ended. At the time of writing, Threads is officially reported to have over 33 million daily active users, which is still an impressive number considering the platform is only about 6 months old. Nonetheless, Threads continues to foster an active community, many of whom consider it as an alternative and/or a welcome addition to the evergrowing list of social media apps.

X/Twitter

Speaking of social media apps, you can't wrap up 2023 without talking about the rebranding of the well-known Twitter to Elon Musk's X. Even though the Elon Musk acquisition of Twitter was officially completed in October 2022, it wasn't until 2023 that everyone got a taste of Musk's ideas to restructure, rebrand, and essentially recreate the microblogging platform - starting with in May 2023, when Elon placed Linda Yaccarino, former Chairman of Global Advertising & Partnerships at NBC Universal Media, LLC, as the new CEO of Twitter. 

Of course, the main change came two months later, as in July 2023, Elon announced that he was going to officially change Twitter to X, replacing the iconic blue bird logo with an 'X' in a black box. Since then, X has gone through a series of ups and downs, including adding premium subscription tiers, a job search feature, and an audio/video calling option for X Premium users only. While there has been a wave of general discontent about the direction X has been going to so far, the platform still has a large number of dedicated users, amounting to over 550 million active monthly users at the time of writing.

ChatGPT

The app that made the most headlines this year - ChatGPT transformed, in many ways, the way we conduct everyday professional tasks. Marking significant advancements in the field of natural language processing, the large-language model (LLM)--based AI chatbot offers users a robust and responsive platform that is not only capable of understanding complex queries but also generates intuitive and often creative responses in response. The web version of ChatGPT was released in November 2022, while the iOS and Android versions launched in May and July 2023, respectively. 

The company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI, was also at the forefront of many news headlines this year, particularly last month when CEO Sam Altman was suddenly fired by the board of directors. This led to OpenAI shifting from one interim CEO to another, having a 3rd CEO in 4 days, until ultimately deciding to hire back Altman due to most of the employees threatening to quit otherwise. From ChatGPT to ChatGPT Premium to DALL-E and many more iterations of different forms of generative AI still to come, OpenAI has solidified itself as one of the most talked about companies in 2023.

Google Bard

While ChatGPT continues to dominate the field of publicly available generative AI, the chatbot is not without its competition. There have been a plethora of AI models that have emerged after ChatGPT's popularity, and Google Bard warrants a mention as perhaps the closest competition to OpenAI's most successful brainchild. Launched in March 2023 on a limited basis and later worldwide in May, Google Bard is a conversational AI-powered chatbot that functions similarly to ChatGPT. 

However, even though Bard was launched to be a direct competition to ChatGPT, the Google chatbot failed to garner the same kind of response from its users, with many claiming that the initial versions of Bard provided less intuitive and less creative responses when compared to the OpenAI wonder AI. Earlier this month, Google announced they are integrating a mid-tier version of Gemini, the tech giant's powerful LLM, into Bard, with further plans to turn the chatbot into an 'advanced' version in 2024. The chatbot currently has an average of around 220 million monthly users, but with Bard Advanced coming soon, perhaps the numbers will rise. The jury's still out with Bard.