101 million of Facebook’s 128 million daily U.S. users are on mobile devices
My headline says it all.
If you still had any doubt about the importance of mobile to anyone doing anything on the Internet, this stat should disabuse you of that uncertainty.
Amazing.
Facebook To Reveal “Home On Android”
I predict Facebook will announce a custom Android launcher — a “home” screen.
Update April 4, 2013: I was right.
Darrell Etherington, reporting at TechCrunch:
OUYA forum admin and owner Ed Krassenstein said in a post on his site that EMUya, a NES emulator, has been submitted to OUYA for review and should definitely be available at launch, and a couple of SNES emulation options are confirmed, including the SuperGNES and the Mupen64Plus Nintendo 64 emulators. The Mupen64Plus project is also said to be available at launch, with the developer behind it posting that it has already been approved by OUYA for inclusion in the official store.
OUYA would do well to backtrack on this, and fast. If they mean to make themselves a legitimate part of the console landscape, the encouragement of unlicensed emulation, which amounts to copyright infringement, is not the way to go.
TechCrunch’s John Biggs on how to cover the Consumer Electronics Show
John Biggs, in a great post at TechCrunch about how they approached their CES 2013 coverage:
But when you take a step back and look at CES from an innovation standpoint, and with the expectation that the big money here makes the most noise but the small guys here make the most sense, then you’ve got a different show. There’s some really cool stuff here. We tried to celebrate that.
Go give it a read.
Facebook Makes A Huge Data Grab By Aggressively Promoting Photo Sync
Josh Constine at TechCrunch:
There no big launch event yesterday because Facebook didn’t need one. In fact, it probably didn’t want one, considering it didn’t even notify bloggers like me as it usually does.
This isn’t going to end well. I predict that a backlash will build over the next couple of weeks, nothing dire, but familiar fare by now for Facebook. They should have come out with PR about the easy privacy controls they have implemented to allow seamless and secure photo uploading. Instead they tried to sneak it in on the weekend.
It’s one of my favorite services, and the first I decided to pay for on a monthly basis. I think Libin, despite his transparent business style and easy-going manner, is genius of the caliber of any CEO at a company ten times Evernote’s size. He built something awesome, gives most of it away, and amplifies the magic for a small monthly fee.
You don’t get to 45 million users without being awesome.
MG Siegler finally gets a Surface, despite Microsoft’s best efforts
In hindsight, I now see why Microsoft did not want me to review the Surface. That was probably the right call from a PR perspective. It’s simply not a good product.
Mr. Siegler found the Surface very wanting, but this bit from his intro is the most damning part of his review.
EFF’s pre-emptive prior art defense of 3D printing
It’s a great idea, and I hope it yields some useful results.
Twitter and Two-Factor Authentication
Two-factor authentication is a pain in the ass. Just ask my Google account or my Dropbox account. But it’s a no-brainer. Savvy users will flock to it, seeing the value in the headache. Less-than-savvy users don’t need to be forced into it, but Twitter is as good a platform as any to explain to folks why it’s worth the additional steps to log in sometimes.
Verizon Activated 3.1 Million iPhones In Q3 2012, But Only 651K Were iPhone 5s
MG Siegler, commenting on the TechCrunch post by Chris Velazco, linked above:
In other words, the iPhone 5 was on sale for just nine days before the quarter ended. And it was supply-constrained the whole time.
Mr. Siegler and Mr. Velazco pointed out the nine-day sales window the iPhone 5 had before these quarterly numbers were announced, but neither came right out and said what I find to be the most impressive expression of it:
Verizon activated over 72,000 iPhone 5s per day during the nine days ending the quarter.
Tumblr Puts More Focus On Photos With Photoset, Its New Standalone iOS App
Drew Olanoff, at TechCrunch:
By not forcing you to log into your Tumblr account, the company could attract a brand new set of users who just want to pull photos together without the hassle of creating a page, tagging things or worrying about how to share them.
Maybe this will work, maybe not. But I like Tumblr’s people because of stuff like this.
US Is Bleeding High-Skilled Immigrants
Gregory Ferenstein, writing at TechCrunch about Vivek Wadhwa’s latest research:
Nearly a quarter (24.3 percent) of engineering and technology companies had at least one foreign-born founder; in Silicon Valley, it’s nearly half (43.9 percent). Nationwide, they’ve helped employ more than half a million workers (560,000) who contributed $63 billion in sales just in 2012.
Those numbers demand superlatives: they’re staggering. The common assumption is that immigrants do jobs US citizens don’t want to do. This research would seem to turn those assumptions upside-down: immigrants often do jobs for which US policy, educational institutions, and deeply-ingrained social strictures simply leave our young people unprepared.
My Citizenship and Immigration class meets twice weekly, on Monday and Wednesday evenings. It really is a fascinating class, and offers a broadened perspective on a hot political issue this election season.
One thing I’ve learned from Professor Peter Spiro (of Opinio Juris and much scholarship), and from research like Mr. Wadhwa’s, is that immigration policy is not as amenable to applause-worthy one-liners as political candidates would prefer it to be.
The angle on Mr. Wadhwa’s recent research, and Mr. Ferenstein’s TechCrunch post, is that immigrant participation in US entrepreneurialism may have peaked already. I wonder, not cynically or rhetorically, but genuinely wonder, whether the US will be able to replace them with adequately-inspired and prepared citizens of its own, and whether the nation wouldn’t benefit from incentivizing continued and increased opportunities for citizens and immigrants alike.
I don’t know what that policy direction should look like, but I think it’s worth thinking, and most importantly, talking about.
The Problem With Early Reviews
John Biggs, writing at TechCrunch:
In the end, the real reviews are the ones that percolate up out of the forums and blogosphere.
That’s absolutely true in my experience. Reviews by 20-/30-/40-somethings blogging from their basement or posting on their favorite forum are almost always more useful to me than the popular reviews. I still read the latter, but I rely far more on the former.
Twitter continues to value advertiser utility above user experience
Romain Dillet at TechCrunch explains it like this:
Now when you land on a company profile page, you will see a big brand name with a small @username below, a gigantic header photo, a small logo next to every tweet, photos of new products in the sidebar without having to scroll, a pinned tweet at the top of the timeline for a current promotion, and finally the traditional flow of tweets.
Twitter is not hiding the ball on this one: their advertising blog post makes it hard to see the new profiles as motivated by anything but improving advertiser utility.
Twitter’s downward spiral into user-neutral (at best) and user-hostile (at worst) changes suggests their ignorance of the operating principle I mentioned last week.
That’s a shame, because the company-first-via-users-first approach is serving Amazon and Apple, and their partners and users, very well.
Robins Wauters interviewed Seesmic founder Loïc Le Meur at The Next Web today on his company’s sale to rival HootSuite.
I have always thought Seesmic was the best multi-profile app for Twitter and Facebook on mobile, and I always preferred their web interface to Hootsuite’s. But Le Meur is a brilliant fellow, and, as long as his team is taken care of, via either jobs at Hootsuite or decent compensation, I can only be happy for Seesmic.
Frederic Lardinois, writing at TechCrunch:
The web app, says Pulse, is “designed for discovery” and while it’s still a very visual experience, Pulse did away with the row layout it uses in its mobile apps. Instead, your list of sources is now on the left and stories appear in a beautiful dynamic grid layout. The design is responsive, so the layout will automatically adapt itself to the size of your browser windows.
I’ve only tried it out for a few minutes, but it’s beautiful and functional, and it’ll be much easier to manage sources on the web than it is on mobile.
I cut a parenthetical in Lardinois’ headline referring to Microsoft’s part in bringing Pulse to the web. The end result certainly does look great for touchscreen devices generally, and like it fits right into the Windows 8 design aesthetic specifically.
I have turned off comments here at Constant & Endless. I have had only one comment since I started writing here, from Mr. Scott Carpenter. He left a good link, and I certainly don’t want to alienate him or anyone else who wants to tell me something in response to what I’ve written.
But I trust that Scott and anyone else reading this will find it easy to reply to my posts using the avenues listed on my Contact page, or described in the posts by others I have linked to later in this piece.
I won’t turn off comments at Fiction By Joe Ross (where, it turns out, Scott has also contributed valuable comments) because it’s good to have proposed revisions or critiques right there on the page. This site, however, is a different beast. I could write a long post about why I think this is the right move for most if not all personal small (from one to a few authors) commentary blogs, but the decision is already well-defended by people with bigger audiences (for now…muhahaha) than I.
iOS and Mac OS X developer Matt Gemmell wrote on his popular blog in November 2011 what I consider a bullet-proof reasoning for keeping comments out of personal blogs. He also has great suggestions for different (and, in his opinion and mine, better) ways to respond to something someone has written on their blog. If you don’t understand why I turned off comments here, read his initial post and his follow-up.
MG Sielger, a general partner at CrunchFund, a columnist at TechCrunch, and purveyor of parislemon and Massive Greatness, chimed in on Gemmell’s posts with some thoughts of his own. If you still want some more explanation after reading Gemmell’s posts, read Siegler’s initial post and his follow-up.
So, if you want to reply to this post, have a look at my Contact page or write a blog post of your own.
Howard Mittman, VP and publisher at Condé Nast property Wired Magazine, told Ad Age's Nat Ives:
I’m interested in ways to bring advertisers in front of our community. When Flipboard becomes that, I would love to reengage and reinvigorate our product. Until then, we have to wait and see and not allow intermediaries to build their own platforms without direct monetizable benefit back to us.
This is somewhere between a rock and a hard place. People who consume solely through Flipboard — a group I suspect is growing all the time — might not bother clicking through. The friction meant to induce users to view Wired.com might end up dramatically cutting the number of folks reading Wired’s content. I don’t know what the right answer is, but I don’t think it’s “teaser” sentences.
The ad experience on mobile is already dismal for the user — I only interact with mobile ads by accident. There must be a better way. I know Wired and other content creators need viable revenue streams, and that traditionally the primary stream has been advertising.
But the web, particularly the mobile web, doesn’t even allow for the glossy full-pagers that magazines do. Those full-pagers can be compelling, and what’s more, they can be blended with the magazine itself.
A glossy full-page ad about the newest gaming laptop would be well-received in an issue focusing on gaming hardware, consoles, and next-generation systems. The same connection is much harder to make on mobile, where space is as precious to the publisher selling the ads as it is to the reader teaching himself how to visually avoid them. Flipboard is so popular because it involves us in the content consumption beyond merely staring at a screen. It’s subtle, but that flip is oddly engaging.
If the platform won’t accomodate your advertising, it’s time for your advertising to accomodate the platform. A headline and a single teaser sentence make for bad user experience: either find a way to participate in full, or get out altogether. Half-measures suggest a lack of innovation and a willingness to make user experience secondary to revenue, when user experience is what brings (and keeps) the eyeballs that bring (and keep) the advertising dollars.
Why can’t an advertisement be “Flipboard-ized?” Why not include in Wired's Flipboard stream an article entitled “Ad: Alienware M18x Moves Gaming Laptops into the 21st Century,” accompanied by stunning images of the inner workings and outer design of the machine? This offers the same “unified experience” of which a full-page print magazine ad is capable, but maintains the user experience that makes Flipboard so popular.
Updated 8:30pm: Alexia Tsotsis briefly interviewed Flipboard CEO Mike McCue about the New York Times’ integration into Flipboard. All digital subscribers to the Times can access the newspaper’s full array of online content via Flipboard. More interesting is the fact that the paper’s Flipboard content will also include advertisements described by McCue as “full page, print style advertising.” I respectfully request some credit for at least independently coming up with the model used by the Flipboard/NYT partnership (I somehow missed Tsotsis’ headline while writing this post), but I’m happy to see someone is at least trying it out.
Something like this seems to be working for Facebook on mobile, according a story by Josh Constine at TechCrunch. Facebook’s formidable data farm social network struggled to find a viable advertising solution to massive uptake in mobile use, and they appear to be on to something.
Maybe organic inline advertising isn’t the solution for every mobile advertising problem, but it’s an example of the fact that this problem is solvable. My Flipboard/Wired suggestion probably has weaknesses, but let’s have that conversation. Let’s argue about how the interests of publishers, users, and adverstisers, for all of their apparent conflict, often converge on great value propositions: content and ads that are well-built, well-tailored, and complimentary to one another, rather than shoe-horned next to one another in a way that damages the user experience and decreases all forms of value for everyone.
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