Month: July 2013

On Mobile Ads ⇥ nytimes.com

Yesterday, Flurry Analytics released a report which showed a significant increase in the number of apps supported by ads in the past four years. Most mobile apps have always been free; in recent years, however, the proportions have shifted against paid apps.

This led Marco Arment to comment:

Compared to traditional web-browser ads, mobile-app ads so far have been much more intrusive to users, less effective for advertisers, and less profitable for developers. And despite ads being the norm for both low- and high-quality websites, apps with ads are perceived as profoundly cheap and low-quality.

I think this conclusion was borne out by Google’s Q2 results, also released yesterday:

Google reported second-quarter results that missed analysts’ expectations for revenue and profit. They showed that its desktop search business continues to slow and ad prices continue to fall as it struggles to make as much money on mobile devices. […]

Mobile ads, [analyst Colin W. Gillis] added, are inexpensive yet “overpriced because the conversion rates are so low.”

As of today, an app with ads will provide users with a crummier experience, and won’t generate the same kind of revenue for developers. Due to unreliable business models by some apps, however, they will be increasingly shoehorned into apps for which the developer could have charged a buck for.

Microsoft Fiscal Year 2013 Earnings ⇥ microsoft.com

In some unique language:

For Microsoft’s fiscal year 2013, the company’s revenue, operating income, and diluted earnings per share were $77.85 billion, $26.76 billion, and $2.58 per share. These financial results include a $900 million charge, or a $0.07 per share impact, related to Surface RT inventory adjustments.

Translated, Surface RT sales cost Microsoft $900 million. No compromising, indeed.

Why Is Netflix Secretly Cropping Movies? ⇥ flavorwire.com

Jason Bailey, Flavorwire:

Basically, as those comparisons from What Netflix Does illustrate, they’ve been cropping off the sides of 2.39:1 images to fit them into a standard 16:9 widescreen image. It is, at its essence, the same thing as “pan and scanning,” but they’re not telling you that they’re doing it — and most viewers, without the obvious visual cue of black bars on the side of their TV, have no idea.

Not a good day for my views on streaming media.

Thom Yorke’s Spotify Protest ⇥ theatlantic.com

Spencer Kornhaber, the Atlantic:

Atoms for Peace is nobody’s favorite band; it’s more a curious side project from the leader of a lot of peoples’ favorite band (plus Flea). By opting out, Yorke and Godrich won’t shatter the illusion of comprehensiveness that Spotify thrives on. But they’ll dent it.

Another of the many reasons I don’t stream my music.

What Colour Is Surprise? ⇥ theatlanticwire.com

Philip Bump, the Atlantic Wire:

As an aside during testimony on Capitol Hill today, a National Security Agency representative rather casually indicated that the government looks at data from a universe of far, far more people than previously indicated.

No shit.

You Know What’s Half-Cool? ⇥ techcrunch.com

Billy Gallagher, TechCrunch:

Path is raising a $50 million Series C round at a $500 million post-money valuation. Sources tell us the company is still seeking a lead investor, the round is currently oversubscribed, and one of the investors in the round is “a strategic private investment group in Asia.”

Well, it’s not a billion dollars, but it’s sure a lot for a company with the current monetization strategy of selling images of “stickers”.

Betteridge’s Law on the Verge ⇥ curiousrat.com

Nobody — and I do mean nobody — writes takedowns these days quite as well as Harry Marks does:

Topolsky can complain all he wants, but “sheep” don’t invoke Betteridge’s Law, they ask stupid questions in their headlines.

Apple’s Answer on Upgrade Pricing ⇥ david-smith.org

David Smith:

I wouldn’t expect anything like upgrade pricing to appear in the Stores. It seems like the message is to either give your upgrades to your customers as free updates or to launch a new app and charge everyone again.

It’s not perfect; there’s no way to offer different prices for people who are upgrading an app versus those buying it fresh. But I think Smith is right — this is how Apple will be offering upgrades, and this is how they expect developers to offer upgrades.

A side effect of this is that some developers will discount an upgraded app with a new SKU for about a week in the store. This gives existing users a chance to upgrade for less, offers an incentive to new users, and may ultimately drive the app further up the Top 100 lists, further increasing downloads. It might — and that’s a big might — be beneficial all around.

Ghost Town

In the two years since its launch, a number of studies have been released to try to quantify Google+’s user base. This is of importance to marketing departments, and for people on the internet to argue over. But I’m interested in it because I don’t buy any of the results of these surveys.

Recently, for example, Burst Media claimed that Google+ was the second most popular social network in the US. In the same time period, GlobalWebIndex claimed that Google+ was being used by around a quarter of all internet users — a staggering 700 million users1 — but was more popular internationally than in the US. If these two studies are taken together, it essentially means that Google+ is popular in the US, and very popular internationally.

Why rely on third parties for this information? Well, it turns out that Google has been cagey as of late with disclosing its user base. The last time they publically gave a numerical figure was in December, where they claimed to have 235 million active users. This seems inflated when you consider that it includes people using chat in Gmail, or those searching for their friends’ names; the 135 million active Stream users seem to be those actually using Google+ as a social network. Since this press release, however, Google hasn’t released any user statistics. Furthermore, these stats aren’t very clear: are these active users per month, or per day? Google’s Vic Gundotra explained to CNet:

“You have to understand what Google+ is,” he said. “It’s really the unification of all of Google’s services, with a common social layer.” […]

“We really mean anyone using a Google property, signed in as a Google+ user, and taking advantage of the social graph. It’s pretty stunning number.”

No timeframe, and a nebulous explanation.

For comparison, in December 2012, Facebook reported 1.06 billion active monthly users, with 618 million active daily; in May 2013, it was 1.11 billion, with 665 million daily.

If we use this as a benchmark and assume that people on Google+ or Twitter are at least as technically-inclined as those on Facebook — and I think that’s very generous, considering that the large Facebook population is almost certainly, as an average, less technically-savvy than the smaller populations of Twitter and Google+ — they should probably be sharing at a similar rate. This is a little fuzzy, admittedly: sharing isn’t a comprehensive analysis by any measure. But it should give a comparative assessment of the state of social networks right now. And, at any rate, it’s exactly how Google wants to think of social, per the above CNet article:

Google execs see Google+’s features as a layer of social functionality on top of Google’s services. More specifically, users’ social signals, like those from the +1 feature, don’t just show up on Google+. Rather, the [sic] change Google’s core function, search — at least for people you’re socially connected to.

With that in mind, I set out to find stories and count the number of shares for each of these three social networks.2 This table shows the results of my informal survey, in alphabetical order of the publication title.

Story Facebook Twitter Google+
Egyptian Protests, Atlantic In Focus 2k 580 403
Statue of Liberty, Atlantic In Focus 895 288 1.1k
Phone Metadata, Business Insider 3.2k 692 193
Drone Pilots, The Economist 174 17 0
Asiana Crash, The Guardian 217 113 11
Snowden Brazil, Jornal O Globo 28k 2,397 707
Bieber Janitor, LA Times 167 18 3
Hunger Strike, LA Times 3.5k 493 20
Bolivia/France, Le Figaro 935 179 17
Euro, Greece, Le Figaro 66 41 0
Canada Day Trafalgar, Ottawa Citizen 68 3 0
Magna Carta Holy Grail, Pitchfork 895 375 3
Mexican Activist, Plumas Libres 5675 829 6
Cassazione, Repubblica 9.9k 167 10
Despicable Me 2, Rotten Tomatoes 1.2k 638 58
Bolivian/Snowden, SBS 70 13 2
Australian Gay Rights, Sydney Morning Herald 8.8k 326 17
Bieber Bucket, TMZ 38k 19.1k 223
Orwell Birthday, The Verge 1k 615 500
Portlandia, Wired 3.2k 346 56

There are several observations that you can derive from this table:

  1. Google+ is almost always third amongst these three networks, and by a big margin, too.
  2. The sole instance where Google+ was not third in the stories I found, the “Statue of Liberty” photo gallery, suggests a US-centric audience.
  3. Conversely, international pages, such as the “Mexican Activist” article, leaned heavily towards Facebook and Twitter, with Google+ in a distant third. (An aside: it actually reported the full number of Facebook shares, not a truncated version. It was the only page to exhibit this behaviour.)
  4. The Brazilian Jornal O Globo article has Google+ in third, despite Orkut, a Google property, being extremely popular there — the only country, in fact, where Orkut is popular.
  5. TMZ gets insane amounts of traffic.

Now, a caveat: you shouldn’t take these findings as gospel. It’s just twenty pages popular during ten days at the beginning of July, 2013. But for most of these pages, Google+ was in a very distant third. Why the giant gap? If people aren’t sharing links over there, what are they doing?

In May at Google I/O, the company introduced several updates to Google+. Heather Kelly of CNN:

During Wednesday’s Google I/O developer’s conference keynote address, Google+ played a big part in many of the more exciting product announcements, even though it wasn’t always called out. The redesigned version of Google Maps will recommend restaurants based on what your Google+ friends have reviewed and visited. The new Google Music All Access service will also use your social graph to hone in on music you might enjoy. […]

One feature demonstrated on stage was a voice search for a person’s recent vacation photos. If you are logged into Google Search under the same e-mail you use for Google+, and if you also use Google+ to upload and share your personal photos, you can get these types of customized search results.

This month’s Maps for Android update also provides deeper, more seamless Google+ integration:

The friend-tracking features of Latitude are being moved to Google+ (and the Latitude stuff will be removed from Maps on August 9), as are business reviews. This means that in order to get accurate recommendations, you need to actively build your Google+ network. It also means that if your favorite foodie doesn’t use Google+ on a regular basis, you’ll miss out on that tiny Thai place they love. Without real use amongst your friends, the recommendations become almost moot — unless you trust the tastes of the masses.

Lots of deep integration with other Google services, but this doesn’t seem to be driving increased interaction with Google+ as a social product. Sharing is far more popular amongst Facebook and Twitter users; before it was shut down, Google Reader drove more traffic than Google+.

Google doesn’t want you to think of it as its own social product, though:

Google+ isn’t an answer to Facebook or Twitter, Google says. It’s the connective tissue that more and more is tying Google’s most popular products together — and it will not be ignored.

It’s a layer on top of (or underneath, depending on your perspective) the rest of Google’s offerings. But if that’s the case, why do the Stream, the Profiles, the Circles, and so forth exist? These are what I think of as Google+, in the plus.google.com sense. Clearly, people simply aren’t using their Google+ profiles in the same way they would use Facebook, otherwise Google would be making regular announcements about how many photos are uploaded daily, or how many people are actively using their Google Music recommendations.

Only Google knows how well their layer-based strategy is playing out. Judging by their silence since December, it’s a ghost town.

  1. According to the ITU, an estimated 39% of the world’s population will be using the internet by the end of 2013, or about 2.7 billion people. Math was done. ↥︎

  2. I found twenty popular stories on a variety of websites; stories about or favouring a particular social network tend to be shared more on the network concerned. This survey was conducted on July 16, 2013; the stories chosen were dated between July 1 and July 10, for more settled numbers (if I chose stories from July 15, their sharing counters would likely be significantly different by the time you read this). The stories were selected by finding the most popular stories in the time period from certain domains on Reddit, and by guaging popularity with a quick Google search. The stories were from websites where sharing buttons from all three networks were available, and showed a counter. Finally, all figures are as reported by the sharing widgets; if it said “1.2k”, it’s shown that way. I don’t know how these widgets round their numbers, so I didn’t assume it would be safe to write “1,200”. ↥︎

Apple Unveils Logic Pro X ⇥ apple.com

Apple PR:

Apple today unveiled Logic Pro X, the most advanced version of Logic Pro to date, featuring a new interface designed for pros, powerful new creative tools for musicians, and an expanded collection of instruments and effects. Logic Pro X includes Drummer, a revolutionary new feature that provides a virtual session player that automatically plays along with your song in a wide variety of drumming styles and techniques, and Flex Pitch, which provides integrated pitch editing for audio recordings.

It’s alive. Colour me surprised.

The demos look really impressive; Flex Pitch, in particular, sounds very natural, and should enable any idiot like me to have a great pop music career. The guitar plugins are equally great.

I love the excessive detail, too. While iOS 7 is getting cleaned up, Apple’s going berserk with the finish of Logic, with impeccably rendered amps, drums, and keyboards. I don’t like the circular knobs — trying to rotate things in a mouse- or trackpad-driven space is a gigantic pain in the ass.

There are some nice improvements to Mainstage, too.

Survey Shows Apple and Google Are No Longer America’s Tech Sweethearts ⇥ qz.com

Rachel Feltman, Quartz:

Gadgets like Chromebooks and iPhones have become so commonplace that Google and Apple have lost their edge.

Chromebooks? Commonplace? They do quite well for sub-$300 laptops, but that’s a small slice of the overall notebook market. Wouldn’t Android phones be a better example?

While Google may have slipped off the top five, Apple’s sitting at number two. In fourth place is LG, and in fifth is Skype — all of these companies are implicated in the PRISM controversy. I do wonder how that will affect all of them.

Detroit Is Coming Back ⇥ buzzfeed.com

Mariah Summers and Emily Orley, Buzzfeed:

Detroit’s evolution from motor city to recessionary wasteland to hipster hotbed is taking place before our very eyes — documented in commercials over the last few years. Google, for instance, just released an ad for its new Maps app that features the city’s edgier side.

Though I despise the use of the word “hipster” in this article, its premise is accurate: Detroit is back on an upswing. Shitty neighbourhoods get gentrified, so why not a city that’s in the dumps? It’s one of the most beautiful cities in the United States.

Trayvon ⇥ davidsimon.com

David Simon:

You can stand your ground if you’re white, and you can use a gun to do it. But if you stand your ground with your fists and you’re black, you’re dead.

The Coming Public Freakout About iOS 7 ⇥ joelhousman.com

Joel Housman:

Remember people do not like change. People are superficial and vain, and thus react more loudly to things they can’t avoid seeing. The changes being made in OS 7 are easy to see, and thus the reaction will be loud.

Facebook just rolled out Graph Search for most profiles. One of my friends — who happens to be more tech-savvy than most — reacted with the typical annoyance at a third party for moving things around.

Another friend of mine was irritated when Apple joined the rest of the browsers by unifying the URL and search fields in Safari 5. She’s proficient with technology, but wasn’t happy with being coaxed to accommodate change.

These are relatively minor changes. Housman is right: this is going to be a massive shift for a lot of people who are not ready for it. I’m bracing for the inevitable emails, text messages, and phone calls from those struggling to adapt. But it’s also important to remember that none of these people have to update. If you like iOS 6, you are free to keep using it.

Apple Pitches Ad-Skipping for New TV Service ⇥ jessicalessin.com

Jessica Lessin:

For more than a year, Apple has been seeking rights from cable companies and television networks for a service that would allow users to watch live and on-demand television over an Apple set-top box or TV.

Talks have been slow and proceeding in fits and starts, but things seem to be heating up.

In recent discussions, Apple told media executives it wants to offer a “premium” version of the service that would allow users to skip ads and would compensate television networks for the lost revenue, according to people briefed on the conversations.

A successful negotiation would be a major win for Apple. No doubt people will complain about the extra cost to enable ad skipping, but it will be worth the price for some. But it does introduce the inevitable question of just how many people are willing to pay a little extra for commercial-free viewing.

Also, notice that this is a software feature. Once again, this points to Apple continuing to produce a box, not their own television hardware.

The Essential Design Texts ⇥ twitter.com

Jonas Wisser asked on Twitter:

Web designers: what text or texts on design most influenced you? What would you recommend to a noob?

I’ve culled some of my favourites from the replies (including, I must admit, from my own reply to his question):

These are just a few suggestions; there are plenty more great design books out there (and some not so great ones). These I highly recommend, however.

Post-Scarcity Economics ⇥ lareviewofbooks.org

Tom Streihorst, in an essay published in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Ask any entrepreneur, and he will tell you making stuff, be it specialty steel, a low budget movie, saltimbocca a la romana, a collateralized loan obligation, a back massage, or an oil tanker is the fun part. It is selling it that keeps you up at night, breaks your heart, drives you into bankruptcy. That is why salesmen get paid more than engineers. Our problems today are purely problems of demand.

Flickr and Instagram ⇥ shawnblanc.net

Shawn Blanc:

In short, my Instagram snapshots spark far more feedback, interaction, and conversation than my Flickr photos do. And I bet anyone reading this who has an Instagram and a Flickr account would say the same thing.

The conundrum, for me, at least, is that my Flickr photos — my best photos and the ones I am most proud of — are the shots I want to share with people so we can both appreciate them together. These are the ones I most want conversations to spark around, and yet these are the ones which get the least interaction.

The problem is rooted, I think, in perceived effort; Flickr feels like more work, both to browse it and to post to it. It’s highly technical, and it isn’t suited to casual consumption. To extend a metaphor, Flickr is like an article, while Instagram is like a tweet. I’d wager that Blanc sees far more interaction by others with his personal Twitter than with his website, despite focusing far more time and effort on the latter.

Flickr is markedly less popular — it has 87 million users posting 3.5 million images per day against Instagram’s 130 million posting 40 million photos every day. It’s coming back, but it’s still the email to Instagram’s text message.

In the face of dwindling Flickr interaction, I’m trying to use Instagram in a way that’s more explorative; treating each photo as something more significant than it really is. The increased interaction on my Instagram account feels warranted, even while I remember how dead my Flickr account is.