Day: 9 August 2017

The Touch Bar After Ten Months ⇥ tidbits.com

Josh Centers, TidBits:

Alas, closing in on a year later, I’ve found that I don’t use the Touch Bar much. I was forced to confront this unhappy fact when Adam suggested that I write an article about interesting uses of the Touch Bar. After some research, we agreed that there wasn’t enough there to warrant an article. Although there was a flurry of fascinating developer projects after launch, nothing significant ever shipped.

I’m not saying the Touch Bar is useless, because that isn’t true. At least in theory, it’s more capable and more flexible than a row of physical keys. And Touch ID is fantastic for logging into my MacBook Pro and authenticating 1Password. But if you were to ask me today if you should spend the $300–$400 extra on a MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar, I would say no for two reasons.

It’s revealing that many reviews I’ve read of Apple’s latest generation of MacBook Pros point to Touch ID alone as the most significant feature of owning a Touch Bar-equipped model. Perhaps the Touch Bar is primarily designed to be something that allows consumers to access lesser-known application features and shortcuts. If that’s the case, though, why did it ship in the MacBook Pro first, to the chagrin of that product’s core user base?

Facebook and Google’s Ad ‘Duopoly’ Seems to Be Going Nowhere ⇥ buzzfeed.com

Alex Kantrowitz, Buzzfeed:

The brand safety episode illustrates just how hard it is to stop the Google and Facebook freight train. Google and Facebook attained duopoly power specifically because of a super-compelling value proposition: Both platforms stand out by providing advertisers access to enormous amounts of people, and enabling them to slice and dice audiences with unparalleled precision and accuracy. Spending money with them can be formulaic for advertisers: X dollars in gets Y dollars out. Nothing else online even comes close. “There was a lot of saber rattling, a lot of alternatives, alternatives, alternatives,” Racic said. “In the digital realm, there is no other alternative.”

Google and Facebook have truly set themselves up to be indispensable. Many of our favourite websites are directly tied to the success of Google and Facebook; their success is, in turn, related to how many ads they can sell, which is — in part — dependent on how accurately-targeted their advertising products are. And that, of course, is driven by how much we use their ostensibly free services. Nobody else has a network of data generation and ad distribution comparable to either Facebook or Google.

It doesn’t have to be like this, of course. There are alternatives — direct ad sales, “native” advertising, and affiliate shopping links, for example — but those solutions tend to work a lot better for bigger publishers than smaller ones. There are smaller ad networks that handle the difficult business of selling and maintaining ad inventory, but they come with some of the same problems as any network of advertising not controlled by the publisher: the majority of sidebar ads here, for example, are for products and services I don’t use; a few might be for things I’d actively recommend against. But that’s the nature of advertising aimed at generalized readership demographics rather than specific targeting. So far, though, the trend is towards more targeting and more data collection — an ongoing amplification of the power held by Google and Facebook.