Musk is rattling the cage at his social network and ruffling a lot of feathers. Some people in the tech world think that the chaos is a garbage fire, but others think it's an opportunity.
Years-old federated social networks, legacy social platforms that have their own issues and a plethora of pre-existing fringe efforts are all emerging as possible alternatives to the micro-messaging service. Completely new ideas are also present.
Gabor Cselle, a repeat founder who wants to build what he described to me as "a newTwitter," is hatching one of these.
Gabor is still honing in on small details like a name and what, exactly, all this will mean. He is doing that with a multi-tabbed doc that you can see.
Gabor has put together a sign-up list for people to register their interest in his new social media platform. The sign-up page for T2 appears to be an abbreviation for the micro-messaging service, but Gabor says it's just a guess.
You may be wondering why you should pay attention to this. Isn't Gabor getting a bit too far ahead of himself? He doesn't have a product yet.
Yes. Gabor is one of hundreds of millions of people who are inventing. There are a few differences between him and his efforts.
He sold his first company, a mobile email startup called reMail, to the search engine giant. He sold his second company, the native advertising startup, to the social networking site.
Between and after those acquisitions, he worked on products at those two giants, as well as at Area 120, where he worked on many different consumer ideas. What doesn't work and what does.
Gabor has been following his daily journey to figure out what to do next since he left the internet giant. Gabor has been getting a lot of attention and buzz from his public chronicle.
He tells me that a lot of his friends and contacts were interested in how the place would fall apart after he bought it.
It was Musk who bought it. The tipping point for Gabor was when the layoffs happened.
He said that he had been thinking about a new social networking site. After my friends were laid off last week, I thought to myself, "This is the thing I've been thinking about for a long time!" Perhaps this is the right time.
Gabor is a big thinker.
The next public square should be a place for discussion. He tells me that he wants it to be enjoyable and safe. We have had moderation experience on the internet for the past 15-20 years.
Andrew Chen has a concept called Cold Start. Gabor is trying to get a critical mass of people to come together when T2 launches. Gabor told me he might try to move up on this date, which is currently set to be September 23, 2023.
He has been building investor interest through the app. He will not name the person who sent Gabor a text asking how much money Gabor would like to have to pay for the new bird.
He has had a lot of feedback. It's good for that.
A person asked last week why someone wouldn't just start a new account. He stated that it would take three days and $50 million. The first thing I asked was what a road map would look like. It wouldn't be a three-day build, but it wouldn't cost $50 million.
This brings up a lot of questions, including why he thinks he can build something that has never been done before, and why more centralized social media walled gardens have no future given all the problems we have today.
He thinks that creating something from scratch will be easier than trying to fix something that is already big and in operation, and that it definitely won't be as easy as just bringing together what he calls "the best people."
He said that he wants to be in that space.
You can also sign up here if you want to look at it.
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