Month: January 2016

  • Twitter troubles

    You can read elsewhere about Twitter troubles, I have linked to some of the best analyses I found out there at the bottom of this article.
    Twitter
    If you don’t have time to go through the the analyses around Twitter troubles, here’s the ‘CliffsNotes’ version:

    • Management turnover. Three different heads of engineering in 18 months, five different product leads in the past two years, three CFOs in 18 months and 2 COOs (mainly because the role was left vacant for over 12 months)
    • Growth in user numbers has been stagnant in the U.S.. The three published quarters of 2015 showed U.S. active users at 66 million. The last two quarters of 2014 were steady at 64 million
    • Growth in user numbers globally has been a modest 11 percent. Growth outside the U.S. was just 13% year on year in quarter three of 2015

    James Whatley and Marshall Manson called the user number plateau ‘Twitter Zero’.

    There have been product-related Twitter troubles:

    • The ‘Promoted Moments’ advertising option is confusing to look at
    • Will it, won’t move beyond 140 characters
    • Algorithmic filtering of the timeline
    • Utility of the news feed is becoming diminished for the digerati
    • Likely reduction in user engagement
    • Likely uptake in bot content publication
    • Inability to deal with community issues like #Gamergate
    • Twitter’s auto-playing videos are barely more than a rounding error in the battle between YouTube and Facebook for video supremacy

    What less people are talking about is what Twitter troubles means beyond Twitter.

    Advertising purchases are a near-zero sum game. Facebook and other high growth native advertising platforms gain from Twitter troubles. But for marketers this is not all good news. Facebook is poor at giving marketers actionable insights and intelligence. There is no Facebook firehouse of data. Facebook only provides aggregated data.

    The OTT (Over The Top) messaging platforms (WhatsApp, WeChat, LINE, KakaoTalk, Kik) are data black holes. Commercial dashboards on some accounts allow you to see how your account is doing. There is no insight of what is happening across accounts. There is no measure of influence beyond follower numbers and click-throughs.

    Twitter troubles with declining relevance, has a direct effect on social media monitoring and analytics platforms.

    Social media analysis of Twitter data is widespread. From consumer insights / passive market research to brand measurement and financial trading models.

    I had seen data which showed a direct correlation between brand related market research conducted by respected market research firms and social media analysis using Twitter data. The implication of this was that Twitter data could provide a more cost effective alternative.

    All of these research benefits are moot if Twitter is in decline or becoming irrelevant.

    Twitter data has its use beyond market research. It is the source of breaking news for the western media. Twitter’s firehouse also goes into making smarter phones. Apple’s Siri sources Twitter content to answer news-related requests.
    Siri using Twitter as news
    A poor performing Twitter has implications across the tech sector beyond online advertising. There are no obvious substitute solutions for its data waiting in the wings.

    Perhaps Twitter’s earning’s call on February 10 will give a hint of improvements at the company. But I wouldn’t bet on it. More related content here.

    More information

    Twitter Inc. quarterly results
    How Facebook Squashed Twitter – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
    Can Twitter turn stagnation into progress, or has it hit the wall? | Technology | The Guardian
    Twitter’s Fiscal 2015: Up, Flat, And Down | TechCrunch
    Twitter is teetering because it has turned into one big pyramid scheme | Andrew Smith
    Twitter Might Ditch The 140-Character Limit: What This Means For Marketers | SocialTimes
    Daily Report: The Tough Realities of a Twitter Turnaround – NYTimes.com
    Next Twitter boss faces complex challenges, says departing Dick Costolo | The Guardian
    Twitter data show that a few powerful users can control the conversation – Quartz
    Twitter’s Jakarta office is now open. Here are 6 reasons why Costolo is focusing on Indonesia | Techinasia
    Inside Twitter’s plan to fix itself
    How efficient is Twitter’s Business Model?
    Black Widow | Dustin Curtis – interesting analysis of Twitter and a warning about APIs

  • Susan Kare + more things

    Susan Kare

    Things that made my day this week included mac pioneer Susan Kare, Luxxury, Greg Wilson and JG Ballard:

    Great interview with Susan Kare. Susan Kare is famous for her icon designs that appeared in the first nine versions of the MacOS. Even now veteran Mac users will have a reaction to the ‘Dogcow’ that Susan Kare used to illustrate orientation of paper in a printer. More Mac related topics here.

    Luxxury

    Luxxury have cut a new slice of post-disco, pre-house 1980s dance music that Maze or Hall & Oates would have been happy with. Take it Slow is out on iTunes

    JG Ballard

    JG Ballard’s High Rise makes it to the big screen alongside some great late 1960s / 1970s set dressing and a great Kraut Rock soundtrack that Daft Punk would love.

    Apple Watch

    Finally, an Acceptable Use of the Apple Watch | Hackaday and 3D printing for that matter. A lovely Mac Classic homage as watch stand. You can now find this in silicone on Amazon, if you don’t want to 3D print your own version.

    Greg Wilson & Francois K

    Great interview with Greg Wilson and Francois K talking about the early days of modern dance music. From DJing to production and everything in between. What becomes apparent is something that Robert X Cringely, pointed out in his book Accidental Empires. That the same set of (48) names keep cropping up again and again in the development of something. In Cringely’s case, this was the personal computing revolution. Watching this video; you ge the same sense in the development of dance music.

    Greg Wilson helped develop the culture at the Hacienda and  brought beat and scratch mixing to UK television in the early 1980s. Francois K’s impact was as a DJ and producer since the early 1980s. The career longevity of these pioneers is fascinating.

  • Safari suggestions + more things

    Safari Suggestions bug causes browser crashes in iOS and OS X | Ars Technica – I noticed this first thing in the morning with Safari Suggestions my Mac, goes to show how dependent we are on network based services. Safari Suggestions are a great concept, let’s hope that Apple gets it right. More Apple related posts here.

    Apple is preparing for a future where individual iPhone sales don’t matter | Quartz – but what about how the investors see it? I think this is about growing average revenue per user (ARPU), but make no mistake individual sales of devices will still be very important. Services revenue is directly tied to device sales.

    Chinese billionaire Wang Jianlin takes aim at the global credit card system, promising to become No 1 | South China Morning Post – Dalian Wanda think their internet finance business will upset global credit card payment system. …Dalian Wanda Group, China’s largest commercial property company, told the Asia Financial Forum in Hong Kong on Monday that he hopes to issue 500 million Feifan cards, a type of credit and payment card for Wanda merchants and customers, in the coming five years (paywall)

    Meizu set to layoff 4000 staff | Gizchina – Despite seeing a surge in sales by as much as 350% last year, Meizu are planning to slash its work force by 5%.

    No other tech company spends more on lobbying than Google, new stats show – GeekWire – and it doesn’t seem to be doing that much good. Apple needs to up its spend, as does Uber

    Spotify Ready to Introduce Video Product – WSJ – tough going up against Netflix, iTunes, Amazon etc (paywall)

    Censorship in the social media age – Columbia Journalism Review – news published on third party platforms like social has platform level editorial control on top of the journalistic process. What are the ethics?

    LaMem Demo – how interesting is a visual?

  • Dish network + more things

    I, Cringely Final Prediction #10: Apple will buy Dish Network – I, Cringely – bit of a reach. Dish Network has a customer base that is full of the wrong demographic for Apple. Dish Network has a legacy infrastructure that will be a cost, not an asset

    Hurt by China economic slowdown, luxury sector can recover if… | South China Morning Post – Chinese customers still have wealth from their equity market holdings and are still travelling (paywall)

    Jack on Twitter: “Was really hoping to talk to Twitter employees about this later this week, but want to set the record straight now: https://t.co/PcpRyTzOlW” – staff changes

    Apple cut iAd ‘to starve Google’s core business’: column – Business Insider – an interesting theory that the iAd downgrade was part of a much bigger, bolder Apple strategy to crush Google

    Yale psychologists have built a mathematical model for selfishness – Ever wonder why some people have a tendency to be nice—even in situations where it costs them—while others are constantly out for themselves?

    Streaming-music listeners really don’t care about missing out on CD-like sound quality – Streaming-music listeners really don’t care about sound quality. A recent survey by MusicWatch found that few music fans would pay more to listen to music with better audio quality. Which is interesting when one thinks about how CDs were marketed. Instead streaming media is more like the convenience sales pitch previously made for cassette tapes

    Amazon’s strategy for Europe expansion includes armchair grocery shopping – Amazon is gearing up to expand its European footprint, taking several services deeper into the continent, including one that’s already seen success in the UK: online grocery shopping and delivery. More Amazon related posts here.

    ★ Daring Fireball | Anywhere but Medium Dave Winer If Medium were more humble, or if they had competition, I would relax about it. But I remember how much RSS suffered for being dominated by Google.

  • Yahoo! – how did we get here?

    Understanding who Yahoo! is today means understanding changes in the technology and media sectors. These changes occurred over the past 20 years.
    Jerry, Liam & David celebrate the new Yahoo! Mail

    The Fear

    Yahoo! started off as a hack. The directory grew from a list of sites catalogued by Jerry Yang and David Filo. They did this as students in Stanford. This was back in the early 1990s, Microsoft was the dominant technology company. It is hard to understand the power that Microsoft had at the time. Apple was on a fast track to oblivion. This power was later clipped in the Judge Jackson trial of 2000.

    The Media Company

    At the time, investors and founders were reluctant to go into business against Microsoft. Even the idea that Microsoft may enter a sector was enough for others to stay clear.

    The technology sector was full of casualties: Digital Research, Borland, Go and Stac Technologies. Microsoft’s approach to competition of embrace, extend and extinguish was already well known.

    Yang and Filo would have had this in mind when they positioned Yahoo! as a media company that happened to be online. Yahoo!’s early business deals such as Yahoo! Internet Life magazine and display advertising are symptomatic of this media thinking.

    The advertising display model that Yahoo! operated was reminiscent of print magazine and newspaper businesses. It even went ahead and hired a traditional media sector CEO in 2001. Terry Semel was a former chairman of Warner Brothers. He was brought in following a 30% collapse in online advertising sales. Semel’s efforts to build a media business at Yahoo! didn’t succeed.

    The Technology Company

    Yahoo! has a history of contributing to key open source technologies including:

    • Debian Project
    • PHP
    • Hadoop
    • Oozie

    The work done on Hadoop lead to a spinout technology company called Hortonworks. Hortonworks customers include eBay, Spotify and Expedia. Not bad for ‘media company’.

    Panama, was to drive quality and profit in advertising by increasing click through rates. Yet it took too long to develop, many other projects ended up being canceled.

    Despite of the technical expertise at Yahoo!. The company bought in many key technologies rather than building themselves. Yahoo! Mail came from acquiring the 411.com directory service which owned Rocketmail in 1997. The modern mail web application has its roots in Oddpost, acquired in 2004.

    Failure To Make Big Bets

    Yahoo! bought video and audio streaming company broadcast.com in 1999 for $5.7 billion. This was the most expensive thing Yahoo! every bought. By comparison Tumblr cost $1.1 billion dollars in 2013. Yahoo! ended up with little to show for it’s $5.7 billion. This meant that Yahoo! developed a culture which made it hard to make big bet the farm kind of changes.  Terry Semel rejected the opportunity to buy Google in 2002 for $5 billion. It also failed to buy DoubleClick. Google bought it instead, and used DoubleClick to speed up growth beyond search advertising.

    A secondary effect of not being able to make big bets was a constantly changing set of priorities. Insiders have gone on record talking about the missed changes with aborted projects. This also made it harder to develop and pursue a vision.

    The Google comparison

    Google started some five years later. Google came into a world where Microsoft looked weaker. The US government filed charges against the company and Linux started to gain momentum. Google’s original business model was to be a search engine provider for web portals. There were other competitors in this space like Inktomi. It wasn’t until 1999 that the company started selling its own advertising. Google waited six years to go public. The size and profitability of its business masked from competitors and customers until 2004.

    Google hasn’t been afraid to make big bets or have a big vision:

    • Search
    • Enterprise search
    • Personal productivity
    • Enterprise productivity
    • Mobile operating system

    It has thought carefully about focus and vision – which is part of the reason why the Alphabet conglomerate was formed.

    More information

    New Panama Ranking System For Yahoo Ads Launches Today | Search Engine Land
    A Cyber-Arsenal for Road Warriors | BusinessWeek
    Reflecting on Yahoo!’s Q2 2015 progress report on product prioritisation
    The Yahoo! Post-Bartz post and the perils of Microsoft Excel
    Inflection Point | renaissance chambara