The Story Behind the “What Would I Say?” Facebook App
Am fond of Seinfeld, and I disparage the value of baseball arguments.—That was the first phrase generated just for me this afternoon by What Would I Say?, a new app that runs users' old Facebook status updates through a text-generating bot …
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook had already seen a rush of third-party apps, and its own 2013 experiments included more structured ways to express feelings and activities. What Would I Say? redirects that expressive material into a bot that produces a new phrase from a user's status-update archive.
Same-day pickup by outlets including TIME, USA Today and Slate suggests the app's appeal extends beyond a narrow developer-platform story: it makes the accumulated Facebook profile feel like usable personal media.
First-order effects
- For Facebook users, old status updates become input for a bot-generated phrase, reframing the profile archive as material for a new form of self-expression.
- For Facebook's app ecosystem, the product establishes personalized text generation as a use for the platform's store of user-created posts.
Second-order effects
- Competing Facebook app makers gain an incentive to differentiate through how they transform accumulated posts, rather than by offering another prompt for a fresh update.
- Facebook becomes the gatekeeper for apps whose usefulness depends on historical user expression, making the platform's data-access boundaries commercially consequential.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern takes hold, social profiles may be treated less as publication feeds and more as source material for software that produces personalized output in a user's apparent style.
The trend: Consumer social platforms are becoming sources for tools that turn accumulated self-expression into automated, personalized output.