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Truthiness, the Web, and the Web as an App

I recently gave a “lightning talk” at Úll, an Apple-centric conference “about building great products”. It was given a day or two before some recent discussions about Google’s experiment with deprecating the URL in the newest Canary build of Chrome. I’ve attached most of the slides and a slightly-edited version of the talk, which was well-received in that I at least got into several arguments about it afterwards with people smarter than me.

Hey, I’m Amit Runchal. I’m building a couple mobile apps right now — one’s a tiny little bootstrapped app we built for fun — basically a really nice way to see movie showtimes and trailers and buy tickets called Movieswing that should be coming out in a month or so. The other one’s a bit bigger and we’re in stealth mode so I’m going to be a douche and not talk about it. Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about the web and apps and related technologies recently and I’ve basically got an unsubstantiated polemic in the form of a lot of questions for you.

So I need to define a word real quick before I begin: Truthiness. Truthiness was something coined by Stephen Colbert back in 2005, and it basically means statements that feel true, but are completely unsupported by facts, logic, or reality.

It’s effectively bullshit. And it’s dangerous bullshit, because it doesn’t feel like bullshit. Anyway, I just wanted to throw that word out there.

So let’s talk about the web for a second.

Well, let’s quickly break down the things we’re usually talking about when we talk about the web:

Web browsers, that recognize open web standards. 2. Open source web technologies that power all this stuff.

Now “open” has basically “won” which is why when we talk about the web we’re usually appending the word “open” to it in our heads. The fears of Microsoft implementing their closed standards and protocols are thankfully over. The good guys won. Open standards everywhere! Right?

Wellllllll….I’ve been thinking that maybe what happened is a little more nuanced than that. That we shouldn’t be so quick to hear the word open and stop thinking past that. And the fact that I’m saying that here — well, I’m probably preaching to the choir.

So let’s talk about open source technologies. Well, let’s talk about who’s committing code to these things. Some dude named John Siracusa found a couple charts that showed who was pushing code to WebKit. And the answer shouldn’t have been shocking but it was eye-opening. It was basically Google, Apple, and then a bunch of others (which, by the way, seemed to be roughly correlated with the market size numbers for mobile devices).

So when Google decided to fork WebKit, for whatever reasons they publicly stated at the time, they were effectively forking the future capabilities of a browser in order to implement their strategic vision.

Blink was described as an “inclusive open source” project — which of course, I mean you can smell the bullshit coming off that a mile away, because “inclusive open source” project? What else is open source? Exclusive? And what’s their mission?

This is politics.

Anyway, Google now effectively “owns” Blink. How do you own “open source”? Well, you push the most code to it. Who gives a shit if it’s open or closed if you’re driving the development of a technology in a way that no one else can influence?

And browsers have started to get weird as a result of their ownership. They’re WAY more complicated than they used to be — it’s not just a matter of supporting open web standards any more. We don’t really give a shit about that. They’ll all do that. But Blink was very openly a way for Google to get the rendering engine in line with their strategic vision for Chrome and Chrome OS.

Which is…weird. Because, sure it powers Chrome, the browser, but what about Chrome OS is something that impacts those of us that don’t use Chrome, the browser? And Google wants you to install “apps” using Chrome. They don’t want you navigating to a URL. They want to abstract all that away — because URLs suck for users, they’re garbage. What about that is open? What about that is standard?

It’s not that Apple’s any different. I mean, if you click on a Passbook link…on Safari…on a Mac…logged into iCloud you get something very weird and beautiful happen. This weird modal thing pops up that flies into the cloud and onto your iPhone. It’s gorgeous. That’s not a plugin or an extension or a standards-supported behavior — but it’s an important part of the browsing experience and the Apple ecosystem. And think about the fact that there are essentially two browsers we use in iOS. There’s Safari, and there’s the slightly shittier version third-parties are allowed to use. The reasons Apple did that are completely arguably valid — largely due to security — but they reflect Apple’s long-term strategic vision.

So….the core experience of browsers are starting to feel completely different. It’s great that “open standards” won, but that was last century’s battle.

I think something slightly more interesting is happening this time.

I think what’s happening is this: browsers are starting to reflect the fact that we’re beginning to reduce them, conceptually, to an “app” that’s part of a larger ecosystem. If the “web is an app,” that’s really interesting because it allows us to start asking a bunch of questions. Questions like:

1) What happens when this happens? When the browser starts to be reduced conceptually to an app? A very important app, way more important than “maps” as an app ever was, with a core experience controlled by a single company built for a platform that is part of a cohesive ecosystem and absolutely integral to the long-term success of that ecosystem?

2) How do browsers evolve given that knowledge? How do the owners of the ecosystem want to influence the web to develop? Chrome wants websites to treat themselves like apps. And so does mobile Safari in iOS 7, based on what we’ve seen from Jony Ive. But they’re doing that in totally different ways.

And once you realize that the open source technologies that power the web have been effectively controlled by the companies that benefit most from it, you start asking other questions. Like, what has the “open web” given us? Well, how many search engines are there that matter? How many social networks are there that really matter? How many online book — I mean everything stores — are there that really matter? Who has profited the most from the open web, and how have those profits been distributed?

It seems like there should be more participants than there are, but they’re not. Now, we are immeasurably better of because of Google, but I can’t shake the feeling that I’d like it more if we were immeasurably better off because of search qua search. Is search a solved problem? I look at my Google results, and I think…well, it used to be! The information utilities that the web has created seemed to have stifled competition by the very nature of what they effectively seem to be: natural monopolies.

Soooooo….what were the recent arguments against app stores again? When and why did Facebook have to spend ten percent of their market value to buy a potential threat? When and why did Google embark on a corporate freakout of truly epic proportions? When and why have all these massive companies started to feel a little bit shaky?

Look, I’m building mobile products so it seems like this leads to some denouement about where I talk about how mobile is the future and my products are awesome (which, yeah, duh!). But I don’t think that, and that’s not what I want to say. I want to talk about the one true god.

TCP/IP.

It’s TCP/IP all the way down. I’d argue that if you’re working in tech and you’re a product person, keep that in mind first and you’ll start building some interesting and potentially powerful stuff, whatever medium or platform you’re developing for. We’re largely at the mercy of giants. If we can understand their motivations, we can understand how they move. And if we can understand how they move, we can determine attack vectors, and try to route around them or even take them down — if we want.

I mean unless something else happens that stops us from doing that.

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Dennis Johnson in the company blog of Melville House, an independent publisher: >Hovering over the entire story, meanwhile, is the innate weirdness of the DOJ’s decision: not only to fly in the face of the Leegin decision, but to charge Apple, and not Amazon, with an antitrust violation. After years of flagrant and public predatory pricing and behavior on the part of Amazon, not to mention its refusal to obey tax laws, the fact that it’s Apple being charged — Apple, the company that’s so good at fixing the price of books that it, er, hardly sells any at all — is a travesty of justice. The ["Leegin decision](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leegin_Creative_Leather_Products,_Inc._v._PSKS,_Inc.)" that Johnson refers to supposedly allows companies to set price wars that had to be respected by retailers. But everything about the antitrust case against Apple seems to be about the alleged collusion between Cupertino and the publishers.

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The hammer that's been hovering for the last few weeks has finally dropped. Bob Van Voris in Bloomberg: >Apple, Penguin and Macmillan want to protect the so-called agency model that lets publishers -- not vendors -- set e-book prices, said the people on April 5, who declined to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. > >The government is seeking a settlement that would let Amazon and other retailers return to a wholesale model, where retailers decide what to charge customers, the people said. A settlement could also void so-called most-favored nation clauses in Apple’s contracts that require book sellers to provide the maker of the iPad with the lowest prices they offer competitors, the people said. This whole thing seems bizarre. To wit: * What is the substantial anti-competitive difference between this and the way Apple has handled negotiations and pricing with music labels? Is it entirely to do with the agency pricing model? Or that Apple apparently had a discussion with the publishers? * How has this had a negative effect on consumers? * Publishers are screaming bloody murder over the way Amazon is treating them — and they're doing that because of the enormous amount of influence that Amazon has over the book industry * Amazon's whole model is highly dependent on [predatory pricing](http://blog.authorsguild.org/2012/02/16/amazon-innovation-and-the-rewards-of-the-free-market/). Laws against predatory pricing are difficult to enforce, but they have gotten [dinged on it](http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_002570DE00740E18002573AF005B04A4.html) before. UPDATE: Here's the [PDF of the suit](http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/ebooks04112012.pdf). The evidence presented seems laughable, but I'm not a lawyer.

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Rick Webb in Betabeat: >But Zynga and Facebook? They seem more able to be toppled. It seems possible to knock them off of their throne. Two companies, OMGPOP and Instagram, came out of nowhere and became viable competitors. That’s kind of amazing. It’s amazing to me that Instagram got 30 million users in no time at all. It’s crazy that Draw Something can get 50 million downloads in 50 days. It’s mind blowing that Pinterest went from nothing to 10 million users in the blink of an eye. It’s amazing how fragile it all is. Facebook may be the first viable threat to Google, but its own market dominance is by no means assured. This is what fascinates me about all these deals. Ultimately I question not the price or whatever net present value some analyst has Exceled out. It's about the sheer speed with which these competitors have arisen. If Webb's point holds true — that Facebook and Zynga could be toppled seemingly overnight — what's stopping that from happening to Instagram and Facebook? Besides the money, that's the only question that matters. How ultimately sustainable are these overnight successes? If Instagram is like YouTube or Twitter it means that Instagram has become a public commons. Is it there yet? That no viable competitors have emerged since it's creation seems to point that way. But one thing to keep in mind: app users seem to be much more fickle in their usage patterns.

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Do a search for "mobile".

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John Paczkowski in AllThingsD: >In a post to the BlackBerry Developer Blog this morning, RIM VP of Developer Relations Alec Saunders [denied that the company is dropping sideloading from the PlayBook](http://devblog.blackberry.com/2012/04/side-loading-and-piracy/), though that is exactly what he said just a few days ago. According to Saunders, there is a more “nuanced” interpretation of the statement he made on Twitter.

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On Instagram and the Facebook Phone

Here's one thought that occurred to me that I haven't seen yet. It's in the speculative fiction territory, but it seems to pass the smell test. What if the Instagram acquisition isn't about advertising or defense, as almost everyone — including me — seems to think it is? What if it's bigger than that, and an acquisition à la Apple's of Siri and Lala? Something that hints at Facebook's broader mobile strategy? The one thing that's been clear from the Instagram deal is that Facebook is struggling in mobile, and it's not just because they haven't been monetizing it. They clearly haven't cracked the mobile nut. Even though their app is one of the most popular in the world, there's a sense of staleness there as they've struggled to capture mobile mindshare. Check-ins didn't work. Neither did competing with Instagram. Plus they've got threats like Path, or Highlight, or the dozens of other venture-backed companies that smell weakness here. More than that, Facebook [needs a platform](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_real_mobile_question_post-instagram_can.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29) in the mobile world. Five years ago, when people talked about apps, they meant *Facebook* apps. That's not the world Facebook inhabits anymore. And they can feel their major partners like Zynga wriggling away. And I think they can feel their users starting to slip through their iron grip. It's increasingly possible to imagine a world without Facebook being a major part of it. They've been beating the HTML5 drum but it's doubtful that many will heed the call in a meaningful way. And even then they're still at the mercy of the handset manufacturers and OS developers. Which is one of the reasons that the rumors that Facebook is building a phone make too much sense to ignore. So here's where the sci-fi kicks in: Instagram isn't an app for Facebook. It becomes a part of the phone, in the same way that the native camera app is for the iPhone. But it's not just a camera app. In the world of Facebook it's an order of magnitude better. It's not about megapixels. It's not about filters. It's an entirely different way of thinking about the camera app. Sharing could be built in. *The camera is the feed and the feed is the camera*. It's not for everyone. There are definitely major privacy and usability concerns. But a camera that pushes everything to Instagram? A camera that *is* Instagram? It's a crazy amount of sharing, but that hasn't held Facebook back. It is a dramatically different way of approaching what a phone is. And that goes further than cameras. Check-ins. Nearby friends. All the apps that compete with Facebook become features on their phone. Users, as they almost always do, will use whatever defaults are set up. Social as a differentiating factor is something that Microsoft has been kinda-sorta pushing by claiming that it's easier to share with Windows Phone 7. But that still sees sharing as a multi-step process. It's something you do on top of something else. This would be completely different. It's been said that if you're going to build a product it can't be just as good as what's out there. It's got to be an order of magnitude better. And better means more compelling. So far, the iPhone has been the gold standard against which all others are measured. Nothing has stacked up yet. But there's been enough discussion among the early adopters and even Apple fans that they want to see something new. Hence the buildup of anticipation for the Lumia 900 — and Microsoft and Nokia seem to have whiffed that. But this — this is a strategy I could see competing against Apple in a very real way. And social is definitely something that Apple does not have a handle on.

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Hiroko Tabuchi in the New York Times: >Another challenge will be reaping the benefits of a long-elusive strategy at Sony of bringing together its entertainment properties — which include the music of the late Michael Jackson, the blockbuster Spiderman movie franchise and popular video game titles like Gran Turismo — and its electronics. Company executives have long said that strategy would help differentiate Sony gadgets in an increasingly commoditized industry.

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I love me some Paul Ford.

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What Am I Not Seeing About This Instagram Deal?

Here are the main arguments I've seen for why the [Instagram deal](http://www.interactioned.com/post/20791110312/on-instagram-facebook-and-the-business-model-of-casual) makes sense for Facebook: * Instagram was a threat to Facebook, primarily in that it was taking away time spent on Facebook. * Photos have been a core part of Facebook and Instagram was no longer owning that space. * The data that Facebook gets off Instagram is incredibly valuable. * Remember when Google bought YouTube and everyone thought they were crazy? I've been confused by the apologia of long-time tech pundits like Robert Scoble in this case as their arguments are presented as easily assumable truths, when, in fact, they're anything but. Scoble recently posted an [answer to a Quora thread](http://www.quora.com/Facebook-Instagram-Acquisition-April-2012/What-was-it-about-Instagram-that-made-it-worth-a-1B-acquisition-by-Facebook?srid=OQY) wondering the exact same thing. It has 318 upvotes, so it's worth looking at line-by-line: >Facebook has a problem. After its IPO completes it needs many quarters of strong revenue and profit growth to report to convince investors to stay put and convince new ones to buy the stock. No argument here. >Zuckerberg is aiming at turning the $80 to $100 billion valuation that will happen at IPO into a $500 billion to $1 trillion company. How will he do that? >Look at mobile. That's what. Alright... >Today Facebook has NO revenues from mobile. None. That's amazing, since so many people, hundreds of millions of us, use Facebook on mobile clients. Alright... >That will change very quickly after the IPO. Instagram will play a huge role here, plus Facebook gets a very talented mobile development team that has built world-leading mobile apps on iOS and Android (which got a million users in its first day). Whoa. So the company that also brings **zero revenue** to the table will play a huge role here? More than Facebook's apps? How? It's not that I'm entirely dismissive of this argument, but I've seen zero examples of how this actually shakes out in a compelling way. Inserting ads into a photostream is one obvious example — but how huge? Not to take away from the team behind Instagram, but Scoble also ignores that Facebook already has a very talented mobile development team. They've been buying them left and right for the last few years: Gowalla. Sofa. Push Pop Press. The problem with Facebook isn't a lack of talent — it's that they've been unable to nail a product in a compelling way. >Let's say that Facebook can turn on monetization on mobile clients. That could mean $500 million in revenue on first quarter, $700 on second, $900–$1 billion on third. Looking at it this way paying a billion for Instagram makes a LOT of sense. I'm *sure* it's going to be this easy. It's unclear what part of the hundreds of millions in these hypothetical revenues are going to come from Instagram, but let's do some rough math for a second, using these numbers from [Flurry](http://blog.flurry.com/bid/71285/Mobile-App-Inventory-Hungry-Enough-to-Eat-Internet-Display-Ad-Spend) as a jumping off point: * Assume Instagram has 100 million users by the end of next year * Assume that they're able to get CPMs of $3.00 * Assume that they're able to show 10 ads per user per day That's a run rate of $1 billion per year — a significant portion of the money that Scoble outlines above! With that math of course the Instagram deal makes sense. But look at the assumptions we've made: what're the odds that they're going to fill that inventory at a $3.00 CPM? And what are the odds that they're going to be able to show 10 ads to each user each day? Think about it another way: Google made $2.5 billion in mobile advertising this past year. And that's off of hundreds of millions of devices. Of course mobile ad rates are expected to go up, but it's not going to be as easy as turning the imaginary switch labeled "REVENUE" that Scoble presumes the existence of. Back to Scoble: >Especially when you consider that the mobile team Facebook just acquired is going to be able to build a range of apps. So you're going to take the team that built a half-finished product and put them on other things? >But that's just the beginning. Remember, Facebook is a new media company: one where the media comes to you based on what it knows about you. >Instagram adds some important new pieces of data to the Facebook databases: > * It knows who you like seeing photos from. That gets Facebook a dramatically better photo "graph." That keeps it ahead of Google+, which wooed photographers strongly in its first seven months on the market. Where's the data on what this has been worth historically? I've been looking and can't find it. >* It knows where you are when you shoot the photo. That is very important info for Facebook to know about you. Where's the data on what this has been worth historically? I've been looking and can't find it. >* It shows a range of passions that you have. If you are a skiier, you take pictures of snow and skiing. If you are a foodie you take pictures of food at high-end restaurants. If you are into quilting, a lot of your photos will be of that. If you are into mountain biking, the same. Facebook's databases need this info to optimize the media it will bring to you. This data is WORTH SHITLOADS! Imagine you're a ski resort and want to reach skiiers, Instagram will give them a new way to do that, all while being far more targeted than Facebook otherwise could be. Where's the data on what this has been worth historically? I've been looking and can't find it. Granted, I've been googling "shitloads" all morning so maybe I'm doing it wrong. Also: how is this more targeted? Once again, people have been uploading massive amounts of photos of the exact same types of things to Facebook for the last few years. Oh, and kudos to Facebook for building the technology that allows computers to detect if you're eating at a high-end restaurant or not. >* Instagram will let Facebook develop a new kind of Open Graph advertising. One where Facebook will be able to offer mobile developers a lot of money in return for opening their apps up to Open Graph. Venture capitalists in Silicon Valley are slobbering over this new potential revenue stream, so having lots of VC buy-in (they just got a nice payday) will be very important. Imagine that Benchmark now "asks" all of its member companies to support such a new advertising scheme? This could result in billions of revenues for Facebook and member companies. I don't even know what this means. >And, there are probably a few more things elsewhere that this acquisition will do for Facebook. Don't stop now! Things were just getting interesting. Look, the collective IQ of these companies — as a friend put it — is very high. I'm entirely aware that I may not be seeing the forest. But none of the arguments I've seen have made much sense to me. But here's one interesting thing. Zuck himself seems to have some amount of skepticism of these types of deals based on his [thoughtful comments](https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10100318398827991) about the purchase: >This is an important milestone for Facebook because it's the first time we've ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don't plan on doing many more of these, if any at all.

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Ruth Curry, co-founder of Emily Books, with an essay in paidContent about the e-book market: >Certainly some sort of system is necessary to prevent unlimited distribution of copyrighted material and to be sure authors are paid a fair price for their intellectual property. But the current approach, which makes piracy E-book Enemy #1, misses the real threat. The real threat is the near-duopoly publishers are imposing on themselves and their customers by making e-book sales easy for Amazon and Apple and almost impossible for everyone else. I think Curry is wrong in thinking the primary motivation behind eBook DRM was for piracy. This has [always been about lock-in](http://www.interactioned.com/post/18614656626/why-dont-consumers-seem-to-care-about-drm-in-ebooks).

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The Economist: >Giving a child a computer does not seem to turn him or her into a future Bill Gates—indeed it does not accomplish anything in particular. That is the conclusion from Peru, site of the largest single programme involving One Laptop per Child, an American charity with backers from the computer industry and which is active in more than 30 developing countries around the world. [Yep](http://www.interactioned.com/post/17379154228/the-not-so-great-impact-of-the-olpc).

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Alan D. Mutter: >In fact, publishers since 2005 have lost $26.7 billion in print advertising revenues while gaining only $1.2 billion in new digital revenue. Thus, the true ratio of print loss to digital gain is 22 to 1, not the 7 to 1 reported by Pew in March. I see this as a failure on the part of advertisers and their middlemen. Does anyone, at this point, seriously think these dollars are coming back?

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Nick Bilton, in the New York Times: >Apple, no paragon of communication, has been publishing reports of the practices of its vendors since 2007, and it eventually, after numerous requests by advocacy and news organizations, shared the names of 156 direct suppliers. > >It has pledged to go “deeper into the supply chain” in its own published audits. > >In the last week I have asked Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, Microsoft and others about their reports on labor conditions. Most responded with a boilerplate public relations message. Some didn’t even respond. Cowards.

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Matthew Yglesias, in Slate: >According to the BLS, about 2 million more people were working last month than were working a year ago. But we have 10,000 fewer people working in general merchandise stores. We have 20,000 fewer people working in electronics and appliance stores. We have 17,000 fewer people working in "sporting goods, hobby, book, and music stores." Now the overall BLS retail trade category includes other stuff including things like health and personal care stores that seem healthy. But the point is that over the course of a year in which the level of economic activity has clearly risen, certain major categories of big box retail have shed jobs. Given a few months in a row of torrid overall growth, presumably some of that would stabilize. Amazon is going to continue to Walmart Walmart. Related: [Best Buy CEO resigns](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303815404577335551794808074.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories).

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Mike Masnick, in TechDirt: >While I'm incredibly sympathetic towards Twitter's position here, and the goal of stomping out spammers, I still find it troubling in a few ways. Twitter can and should (absolutely) look at ways to kill spammer accounts and to block spamming tools through technological means. It's when things go legal that it could get tricky. While my heart wants them to win -- I still fear that the arguments that the service provider itself is guilty because their tools are used for spamming floats a little too close to arguments about whether or not Twitter is responsible for how its users use Twitter.

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On Instagram, Facebook and the Business Model of Casual Social Networks

So Facebook just [bought Instagram](http://allthingsd.com/20120409/breaking-facebook-to-acquire-instagram-for-1-billion/?mod=tweet) for a $1 billion dollars. Reaction has ranged from WTF to WTF but here are some things to note. Instagram has roughly 30 million users. That means an Instagram user is worth $33 to Facebook — presumably including future revenues. Of course, that amount goes down by the day — Instagram's meteoric success will likely continue and Facebook was in effect buying Instagram early and before it became even more of a threat to Facebook. Facebook isn't just buying new users — they're buying users they already own. The Venn diagram between Facebook users and Instagram users likely shows a lot of overlap. And they're not buying into a new space. Facebook already did photos through their mobile apps. So this doesn't seem like a play to add more value — this is a defensive play against Facebook users spending less time on Facebook properties. But it also seems to signal just how shallow Facebook's moats are in mobile. And just how easy it is to threaten Facebook. It's remarkable, too, that Instagram has only been around for 551 days. In that short amount of time, and without any real revenue, they've managed to make themselves one of the most valuable companies in the world, having generated almost $2 million in value per day. It's way too early to be a nay-sayer for these types of deals, even though I'm mildly skeptical of [Facebook's mobile strategies](http://www.interactioned.com/post/17153493296/facebook-economic-surplus-and-a-brief-gunpowder-simile). Here's two more questions: * If Instagram can build a significant product that Facebook feels threatened by in less than two years, what's stopping any other product from doing the same? * Are switching costs high enough to make it impossible for another photo-sharing competitor to come around and try to take Instagram's place? That's been the case so far as Instagram has easily fended off all competitors, but the switching costs of mobile certainly seem a lot different than those of desktop web services. Here's the thing: mobile social networks like Instagram *feel* different than social networks like Facebook. Let's call them for what they are: **casual social networks**. There's something different about everything involved, much like the form and function of casual video games dictated different business models than traditional video games did. Could this mean less of a reliance on advertising and more of a reliance on revenue streams like in-app purchases? I wouldn't bet against it. Between OMGPOP and this deal, very few consumer-facing companies hoping to be huge — i.e., no venture-backed company — are going to be chasing desktop anymore. And what's even more remarkable is that this deal happened largely because of one platform — Apple's. Facebook's efforts to try and push for HTML5 to escape the Cupertino yoke are looking lamer and lamer by the day.