Jake Levine

Nobody Knows That I Use These Apps

April 5, 2013 | Comments (30)

More and more, I’m finding myself using mobile apps without ever opening them. I use apps like Moves and Dark Sky every day, but the app developers don’t know it.

Dark Sky sends me a push notification with a custom sound whenever it’s about to rain. I’ve become so accustomed to it that I no longer need to even take it out of my pocket when I receive an alert. The custom sound is enough.

Moves sends me a push notification every morning, telling me how many steps I took on the prior day. I don’t really need to open the app to learn more. A quick glance at the notification tells me what I need to know, and I am free to continue on with whatever I’m doing.

Moves and Dark Sky have no idea that they are providing value to me, since I typically do not take any action on the notification that is visible to the developer or even the OS.

The business impact is that companies are evaluated and funded on the basis of metrics like Daily Active Use, Monthly Active Use, Impressions, Visits. Notifications happen prior to all of these metrics.

The product impact is that if the goal is to deliver value in the notification itself, then these apps have no way of knowing whether or not their notifications are successful.

My hunch is that, for these two reasons, push notifications are an under-explored interface. Imagine an entire suite of apps with which you interact without ever opening. Imagine if app developers could send more data (images, videos) through push notifications, or even receive simple responses (“Yes” / “No”) from users without requiring users to launch the application itself.

Our phones and the apps within them are with us at all times — they are starting to feel more and more like extensions of the brain, augmenting its inputs with sensors that don’t come pre-installed in humans.

I’d love to see some forward progress in notification interfaces from the major mobile operating system. That’s the type of change that could unleash a massive wave of innovation in app development.

Don’t Learn How To Code, Learn How To Make Things

March 12, 2013 | Comments (48)

There’s a lot of chatter and hype around normals learning how to code. I’m fully in support of the hype because I (like many others) believe that understanding how machines work is an increasingly important skill in a world where human relations are increasingly dependent on networked applications.

As a result of that hype, if you sit down with an MBA interested in technology — with due apologies to MBAs for using them as the ultimate barometric gauge of hype — they will tell you that they are learning how to code. The typical evidence provided at this point in the conversation is an account at Codecademy (and all credit to the awesome team at Codecademy for this being the case).

Here’s how it goes: Before you even get started you’ve decided that you don’t want to be an engineer. You convince yourself that you provide enough value as “the business gal/guy,” and that you just need to know enough to call bullshit on the engineers. You, after all, know how to raise capital. You sign up for Codecademy. You spend 3 months deciding between Python and Ruby, because you heard Django was more powerful or something but Rails had better community support or something. You in fact have no idea what that means. You maybe do a tutorial or two. Oh wait, I should be learning Node.js. It’s the future. Then… hey what’s that shiny thing over there?

I’m allowing myself to move into snark:overdrive because I’m being self-deprecating. Yes, I, like many other business dudes and dudettes before me, have fallen into the abyss of half-assery.

Here’s how you manage to crawl out of it. Stop trying to learn how to code. Stop it right this instant. Doesn’t that feel nice? You didn’t really like it anyway, did you? Because it’s not really that fun. Syntax errors, terminal commands, servers, consoles, frameworks, libraries, gems, classes, models, views, controllers, fml.

You know what is fun? Making things. Turning a spark of creative insight into a thing that you can show people — a thing that people can use and from which they can derive some iota of pleasure or utility. Start with a simple website. Basic HTML and CSS. No product is too small. In fact, the opposite is true. If you don’t know how to build the first version of your product in a weekend — a usable working version, don’t try to build it. Programming is a means to an end, not an end in itself. You should be trying to do as little of it as possible to make the thing that you want.

Use tutorials like this one for Rails and this one for Python to introduce you to new concepts (and read this post while you’re at it), but as soon as it starts to feel like work, stop what you’re doing and use that newly-gleaned knowledge to build something cool.

Here are some other tools that I recommend:
Google

As you build, you will actually begin to find that programming can in fact be fun! You’ll struggle for hours to solve a problem and literally clap out loud when you find a solution. Then when you realize that that single solution enables a whole set of user-facing features, you’ll pee yourself a little with joy (or because you’re so engrossed that you just couldn’t bring yourself to go to the bathroom. Go to the bathroom guys, that’s gross). The moment I discovered caching? zomg. The moment I discovered, while building an application, what MVC actually meant? Fuggetaboutit.

Here are some things I built in the last few months:

VinylStore.me
A personalized vinyl store based on your data from Rdio and Last.fm

TumblrMonkey
See what your friends are liking on Tumblr

LastGreatThing
We asked 20 people in 20 days about the last great thing they saw on the Internet (made w/ @jvanslem).

Twordsie
A word cloud generator for your most frequently tweeted words (made w/ @alexmr).

Name10ThingsThatArentSkrilex
What the name says…

Kittygif
No description needed.

Fuckitship.it
i.e. the alternative title for this post.

This isn’t rocket science. The only thing getting in the way is your commitment to programming as an end in itself, and your ambitions to build the next great social network for pets or nothing at all. Start small, make things, and then when you’re done, make some more things.

How Technology is Making Us Stupid and Destroying Everything Good

May 3, 2012 | Comments (2)

Yawn. Yawn. Yawn.

I’m so tired of these awful headlines.

“Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”

“Does Facebook Turn People Into Narcissists?”

“Is technology x making us negative human characteristic y?”

Must we play into the fear and self-doubt of those who feel lost in today’s primary medium of interaction? Must we rely on a false nostalgia to defend against the scary new and unknown? My god, were you guys even paying attention during Midnight in Paris???

But worry not, ye demagogues of Internet-phobia, you’re in good company.

Books of 2011: History, Theory and Application

December 25, 2011 | Comment (1)

Inspired by Tony Haile’s “2010 in Books,” I thought I’d take a look through my Amazon Kindle purchase history and put together a short post on the books that I read in 2011. I found the retrospective useful, and hopefully my comments and recommendations are useful to others as well.

This year, I was lucky enough to have Findings to organize all of my Kindle highlights. Where available, I’ll include the link so you can skim through my favorite moments from each book.

The Social Web is Splintering (ftw)

August 28, 2011 | Comments (5)

This past week, Facebook released a series of changes to the way it manages sharing and privacy controls. You can read more about them here.

The short story is that they are giving their users finer control over their sharing and how others tag them in photos and updates, and building the concept of friend lists more fully into the experience. One other interesting change, which made its way into the blog post as little more than a “by the way,” is that Facebook has removed the places feature from its mobile applications.

In response to these changes, Matthew Ingram over at GigaOm wrote a great piece asking, “Are Facebook and Google Splintering the Social Web?” His analysis focused on the much-talked-about Circles feature from Google, along with the similar changes from Facebook, and questioned whether or not people would actually use these features.

Are people really going to spend the time it takes to create groups or lists or Circles and then choose from a pull-down menu every time they want to share a piece of content? I don’t think so (even Mark Zuckerberg once said that people hate lists). And my fear is that people will share less as a result, or will turn away from these networks in confusion, or because the settings are too cumbersome.

I’m less concerned than Ingram is on this point, but to answer the question in his title: Yes, the social web is splintering, but it is not Facebook or Google doing the splintering – it’s Instagram, it’s Foursquare, it’s any network that is purpose-built for a specific behavior, a specific community, and a unique set of privacy expectations.

Facebook and Google are merely responding to the “splintering” that they are seeing outside of their walls. My friend Nina Khosla wrote a great post that neatly elucidates why this might be happening:

“Therein lies the paradox of the social network that no one wants to admit: as the size of the network increases, our ability to be social decreases.” – The Social Network Paradox

Size is one reason why these communities might be losing value in the eyes of users, but I think something else is at work.

Last year, when Facebook’s Places feature was released on mobile phones, I wrote that they would ultimately “lose location” to Foursquare, since on Foursquare we had the opportunity to rebuild our networks with location-sharing in mind.

Speaking more generally, I believe that social networks built with a purpose in mind have two distinct advantages over larger catch-all networks like Facebook:

1) Functionality: it’s easier to do one thing well than to do many things well (just ask Yahoo)

2) Social context: every type of sharing has a unique privacy expectation associated with it, and unique social context in which that sharing makes the most sense

Users have shown that they prefer the switching costs of rebuilding their networks elsewhere to the costs of managing their existing networks in order to make them more suitable for the kinds of sharing they want to do. In other words, users would rather build a network from scratch, with a particular use case in mind, than mold an existing network to make it fit one additional use case.

The bottom line: Users are going elsewhere to share their location. Users are going elsewhere to share their photos. Facebook will continue to do a few things well (birthday messages?), but they will more and more find themselves unable to compete with these smaller “splinter networks.”

Yes, the social web is splintering, and we should celebrate.

It’s Time for a Social Network Neutrality

July 17, 2011 | Comments (13)

The network neutrality / common carriage debate is one of the most important debates of our time. At stake is the freedom to innovate, the freedom to listen, and the freedom to speak. To date, arguments for or against common carriage have focused largely on the relationship between Internet service providers and content creators, but a new threat is emerging.

Companies like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have unlocked new ways for people to connect, curate, and consume. They have changed and continue to change how we interact with the web – how content is distributed, discovered, and delivered. But with the emergence of this new social layer comes a threat that rivals that posed by the great information monopolies of the 20th century – AT&T, the Radio Trust and the Motion Picture Patents Company, companies known for price gouging, anti-competitive behavior, and the stifling of innovation.

I recently finished Tim Wu’s “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empire.“ For anyone interested in network neutrality, this book is an incredible primer. Beyond presenting a thoughtful analysis and historical review of the information industry, Wu provides a compelling read – one might even call it a page-turner! If you haven’t yet, go buy it, and read it.

Network Neutrality

If you’re familiar with the basics of network neutrality, feel free to jump to my main argument below. If not, let’s start with a definition for common carriage.

At the heart of common carriage is the idea that certain businesses are either so intimately connected, even essential, to the public good, or so inherently powerful—imagine the water or electric utilities—that they must be compelled to conduct their affairs in a nondiscriminatory way.

As a simple example, if a man operates the only ferry over to town, that simple boatman is in a position of great power over other sectors of the economy, even the sovereign authorities. If, for example, he decided to charge one butcher more than another to carry his goods, this operator could bankrupt the one who didn’t enjoy his favor. The boatman is thus deemed to bear responsibilities beyond those of most ordinary businesses.

Wu, Tim (2010). The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (p. 58).

Reflecting on Wu’s review of information monopolies, one can extract two primary tendencies manifest in countless examples throughout history. First, like all institutions they follow a law of self-preservation. If the ferry owner senses a threat to his monopoly in an innovation outside of his control, he will do everything in his power to acquire or squash it.

See:

AT&T blocking third party innovations like Carterfone and Hush-A-Phone
RCA blocking the emergence of FM Radio
NBC and the FCC blocking the emergence of television

Second, information monopolies will always act to maximize profits, and will often do so at the expense of their “riders.” If a passenger on the network is seen to reap significant profits on the back of the network, it is in the short-term interest of the monopoly to ransom network access for a share of those profits.

See:

The Motion Picture Patents Company consolidating control over film production and distribution by ransoming access to patent licenses and buying up independent theaters, ultimately leading to the independents’ flight to Hollywood.
RCA buying up nascent radio networks to create a single national content creator and distributor.

The tenuous relationship between distribution channels and that which is being distributed is summarized neatly by Wu:

You cannot serve two masters, and the objectives of creating information are often at odds with those of disseminating it.

Ibid., p. 306.

Social Network Neutrality

So what does this have to do with social networks like Facebook or Twitter?

Distributors, owners of “the pipes,” will always have an incentive to maximize profit by way of price discrimination, or, if they choose to produce their own content, to prioritize their own goods ahead of or instead of those of their competitors.

Social networks are a critical layer of infrastructure for a wide variety of applications and content. Unlike physical networks, opportunities for lock-in emerge not at the physical layer but at the social layer: our connections. In other words, they do not wield monopoly control by dint of massive up-front fixed costs but rather by the accumulated value contributed by users in the form of the social graph!

Without access to our social connections, applications like Zynga, Turntable, and Spotify face significant barriers to entry – both in terms of the product experience that they are able to deliver and their path to adoption via access to social promotional channels.

But will these social networks really exert their platform authority at the expense of competitors and users? The answer is that they already are.

Take the social gaming company Zynga, for example. The pace of Zynga’s growth has been mind-boggling. A significant portion of Facebook’s users spend a significant portion of their time on Facebook within Zynga’s games. When Facebook sensed a competitive threat emerging on their platform, they chose to reduce that threat by exerting their platform authority. Zynga was forced to give up 30% of their revenue to Facebook so that Facebook’s users could “benefit” from one standardized currency experience. How’s this for a Risk Factor, from Zynga’s S-1:

Facebook is the primary distribution, marketing, promotion and payment platform for our social games. We generate substantially all of our revenue and players through the Facebook platform and expect to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Facebook and other platforms have broad discretion to change their platforms, terms of service and other policies with respect to us or other developers, and those changes may be unfavorable to us.

Facebook has even gone to battle with Google over data portability. The most recent challenge coming by way of a Chrome Extension that allows you to import your Facebook friends into Google’s new social network, Google+.

Playing the white knight (or social underdog), Google has tended to act in the interest of data portability, but Google’s policy of “we’ll let you import our contacts if you let us import your contacts,” reeks of data protectionism, and should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism, given Google’s own checkered past.

Google and Facebook are not alone. LinkedIn recently shut off API access to third party developers that they deemed competitive, including Monster and BranchOut, among others.

Not to be outdone, Twitter recently called on all third party developers to stop building Twitter clients. Said Twitter platform lead Ryan Sarver:

We need to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way. This is already happening organically – the number and market share of consumer client apps that are not owned or operated by Twitter has been shrinking.

A “less fragmented world” sounds like code for “consolidation.” Can Twitter really innovate faster than thousands of third-party developers? Can LinkedIn replace the value that companies like BranchOut and Monster were planning on providing to businesses and users? We’ll never find out, because Twitter and LinkedIn can respond to any such emergent innovation by shutting down access to their API.

What happens when an information monopoly attempts to centralize innovation? No organization has done it better than Bell Labs. They were so successful that they invented magnetic tape, used to power the computer revolution, as early as 1934!

“The impressive technical successes of Bell Labs’ scientists and engineers … were hidden by the upper management of both Bell Labs and AT&T.” AT&T “refused to develop magnetic recording for consumer use and actively discouraged its development and use by others.” Eventually magnetic tape would come to America via imports of foreign technology, mainly German.

But why would company management bury such an important and commercially valuable discovery? What were they afraid of? The answer, rather surreal, is evident in the corporate memoranda, also unearthed by Clark, imposing the research ban. AT&T firmly believed that the answering machine, and its magnetic tapes, would lead the public to abandon the telephone.

Ibid. p. 106.

As a result of AT&T’s coverup, magnetic tape would not be “discovered” until the 1990′s. Holy crap! Anyone else terrified?

So what happens next?

Certainly these companies should be able to reap the rewards of the network that they’ve built, but when those rewards come at the expense of the user experience, the troubling effects of lock-in become apparent.

This is just the beginning. What happens when Facebook or Twitter decide that it is too ‘confusing’ for users to see photos from Instagram posted to their network, instead of through Facebook Photos? What happens when Facebook decides that Foursquare check-ins next to Facebook Places check-ins are detrimental to the user experience? Or that Groupon’s daily deals shared through the Facebook platform are confusing for users who are most eager to find Facebook’s deals?

As these networks settle on and begin to expand their business models, the definition of “competitor” will expand commensurately. Monopoly power of these large networks, as owners of our now primary channels for distribution and communication, will only increase as they become an ever larger part of our lives.

It’s time to stop seeing these companies as mere applications. They are the 21st century version of AT&T, of RCA, of the Motion Picture Patents Company. The infrastructure of the social web has been consolidated into the hands of a few. With consolidation comes control, and with control comes an incentive to wield it over those deemed competitive threats to the ultimate prerogative: preservation of control.

Government agencies responsible for policing antitrust clearly have these companies on their radar, but history has shown that government is as capable of enabling information monopolies as it is of squashing them. Users must stand and be counted. We must demand portability, and we should vote with our attention when it is not delivered.

At stake is the future of the Internet, and if the Internet is social, then there is no less at stake than the future of social.

A Look at the Language of PIPA

June 24, 2011 | Comment (0)

I’m inspired by Brad Burnham’s post about the Protect IP Act that is about to go to the US Senate for its first vote. Brad and fifty-three other venture capitalists, representing forty firms, rightly recognized the threat that this Act poses to innovation and economic growth in one of our Economy’s most important sectors. Together, they drafted and signed a letter stating the reasons for their opposition, and encouraging the Senate to vote against it. You can (and should) read the letter.

Before joining Brad and company in opposition, I spent some time going through the text of the Act. Regardless of your position on Copyright, one cannot ignore the extent to which certain language in PIPA significantly expands the scope of responsibility for infringement. Even if this expansion of scope helps Copyright holders re-capture a greater proportion of the economic value that is rightfully theirs, it will do so only with serious collateral damage.

I thought it might be helpful to share some of the more egregious clauses (bolding is mine):

(7) the term ‘Internet site dedicated to infringing activities’ means an Internet site that–

(A) has no significant use other than engaging in, enabling, or facilitating the–

(i) reproduction, distribution, or public performance of copyrighted works, in complete or substantially complete form, in a manner that constitutes copyright infringement under section 501 of title 17, United States Code;
(ii) violation of section 1201 of title 17, United States Code; or
(iii) sale, distribution, or promotion of goods, services, or materials bearing a counterfeit mark, as that term is defined in section 34(d) of the Lanham Act; or

(B) is designed, operated, or marketed by its operator or persons operating in concert with the operator, and facts or circumstances suggest is used, primarily as a means for engaging in, enabling, or facilitating the activities described under clauses (i), (ii), or (iii) of subparagraph (A);

I wanted to call out the text above in bold, as this is the type of language that puts at risk the protective measures included in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. In their letter to the Senate, Brad and his colleagues explain:

Online innovation has flourished, in part, because the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), though flawed, created clear, defined safe harbors for online intermediaries. The DMCA creates legal certainty and predictability for online services — so long as they meet the conditions of the safe harbors, including an appropriate notice-and-takedown policy, they have no liability for the acts of their users. At the same time, the DMCA gives rights-holders a way to take down specific infringing content, and it is working well.

But the suffering doesn’t end with the accused. Payment providers, advertising services, and “location tools” (defined broadly as “including a directory, index, reference, pointer, or hypertext link”) – in other words, countless internet services – would be required to shut down all payment capabilities, advertisements, and hyperlinks to the “offending” site:

(B) FINANCIAL TRANSACTION PROVIDERS- A financial transaction provider shall take reasonable measures, as expeditiously as reasonable, designed to prevent, prohibit, or suspend its service from completing payment transactions involving customers located within the United States and the Internet site associated with the domain name set forth in the order.
(C) INTERNET ADVERTISING SERVICES- An Internet advertising service that contracts with the Internet site associated with the domain name set forth in the order to provide advertising to or for that site, or which knowingly serves advertising to or for such site, shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures, as expeditiously as reasonable, designed to–

(i) prevent its service from providing advertisements to the Internet site associated with such domain name; or
(ii) cease making available advertisements for that site, or paid or sponsored search results, links or other placements that provide access to the domain name.

(D) INFORMATION LOCATION TOOLS- An service provider of an information location tool shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures, as expeditiously as possible, to–

(i) remove or disable access to the Internet site associated with the domain name set forth in the order; or
(ii) not serve a hypertext link to such Internet site.

The Protect IP Act promises to unleash a torrent of law suits, which, successful or not, will stunt innovation.

If you value the free web, if you recognize it as a tremendous force for growth in a country slowing slipping behind, if the Internet is your Religion, TAKE ACTION.