Muse's killer feature is being user-friendly

With Meta's Muse agent shooting to the top of the App Store charts, I'm reminded of something Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this year.

The Meta CEO said the company was willing to tinker until it had an AI agent "more polished and dialed and easy" than the competition. Something that "just works." Something that would pass his "mother" test.

Nearly a half a year later, that strategy is paying off, with Meta's Muse agent overtaking ChatGPT as the top free AI app.

People seem to like Muse! Like, really like it! I've been playing around with it myself, and am pleasantly delighted by some of the tasks I've asked it to do (to be fair, it's also failed a bunch of tasks I asked it to do).

we built muse from scratch, but it is definitely heavily inspired as a product by openclaw. After I used openclaw in january I bought hundreds of mac minis for the MSL team and lots of us fell in love with using openclaw (and other personal agents). @steipete is a genius and his…

But neither Instinct nor OpenClaw has the sheer power of Meta's massive user base, where it can cross-promote its apps. Nor do they have Meta's knack for creating a normie-friendly, easy-to-use consumer app.

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Say what you want about Meta, but you have to concede they are very good at making apps so easy to use and popular that your mother (or even grandmother) can — and loves — to use. They make apps that are so easy and compelling to use that their biggest criticism is that their apps are addictive and people — kids, even! — spend too much time using them.

But finally, Muse is the thing that clicked. It's impressive enough it's won over the tech crowd, but easy enough to use that regular people are playing around with it. The biggest hurdle of an AI agent for normies is figuring out what kinds of things you can ask it to do — and nudging people in the right direction for how to start using a product is something Meta is great at.

As one former Googler summed it up: "User experience matters. Design matters. Making products easy to use matters."

It's not hard to imagine how Muse could become lucrative for Meta — a company that mainly runs an ad business — as a shopping app. Amazon has already blocked it, but other services like PayPal and Shopify are partnering with Muse, happy to let Muse connect shoppers through their payments.

It's the game plan Zuckerberg described to Wall Street back in April, while bemoaning how complicated the AI agent OpenClaw was to install and set up.