San Francisco, Apr 29 (IANS): As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg makes big plans around the metaverse by spending billions of dollars, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel has criticised the new technology, saying the concept is "pretty ambiguous and hypothetical".

Spiegel told The Guardian that the word metaverse is never spoken in Snap's offices.

"The reason why we don't use that word is because it's pretty ambiguous and hypothetical. Just ask a room of people how to define it, and everyone's definition is totally different," he was quoted as saying in the report on Thursday.

According to him, people would rather spend time in augmented reality (AR) rather than a totally virtual one.

At its annual Snap Partner Summit, the company on Friday announced an array of new features across its platform and demonstrated how the AR experiences it has built alongside its partners seamlessly weave into the daily lives.

Snapchat now reaches over 600 million monthly and more than 332 million daily active users around the world, the company informed.

"Snap also now works with over half a million partners, creators, and developers to provide its community with innovative products and services," it added.

The social media platform Snapchat is growing faster than Facebook and Twitter and in its latest quarterly report, the platform said last week that it grew its daily active users (DAUs) 18 per cent to 332 million (year-on-year).

While Facebook (now Meta) had reported its first loss in the number of DAUs last quarter, Twitter's monetizable DAUs grew only by 2 per cent in the US and 15 per cent globally.

Snap grew its revenue 38 per cent year-over-year to reach $1.06 billion for the quarter that ended March 31, 2022.

"Our first quarter results reflect the underlying momentum in our business through a challenging operating environment," Spiegel had said.

Since January of last year, more than 250 million Snapchatters have engaged with AR shopping Lenses more than 5 billion times.