Lean Back Reading

Dave Winer wrote an interesting blog post a couple of days ago on the app vs the web debate, entitled “Why apps are not the future.” The post was written as a rebuttal to various declarations that the web is dead and apps are the future. Dave’s thesis was that the web will triumph in the end because apps don’t have hyper-linking.

This got me to thinking about my own consumption of written content. I am a voracious consumer of the medium formerly known as “print.” I read the print versions of The Economist, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and Time Magazine every week; I read the print version of Foreign Affairs monthly. I read the Android app versions of the New York Times and PaidContent daily, and I skim through Twitter, News.me, Facebook, etc, which generally refer me to TechCrunch, various startup and digital media bloggers (such as Dave), and the web sites of various news organizations. Between my primary interests of digital media and international relations, I seldom run out of material.

I’ve been noticing recently that I prefer my written content sans links. The lack of links inside of apps is a feature, not a bug. I think content creators understand this, and so did Steve Jobs. Paul Graham certainly gets it; you'll never see a link in any of his essays except to the footnotes at the bottom. For lack of a better term I’ve taken to calling the experience of old-fashion, non-hyper-linked written content lean-back reading. 

Like everyone else I was seduced by the idea of hyper-linking to adjacent or background content when the web first started, and I confess to continuing that infatuation until recently. I hadn’t even considered the possibility of digital content without links until I started reading the NY Times on their app instead of their web site. However I’m coming to the conclusion that in-content links are a never-ending rabbit hole of distraction that actually prevent me from mentally engaging with the writing and seriously considering the thesis or opinion being expressed, rather than just linking through. Links also keep me from enjoying the quality of a journalist’s or author’s writing, which for publications like the New York Times is often very high, especially for features. Note that I am talking about aesthetics, not technology. I’m perfectly content to have the same lean-back reading experience on my smart phone as in print.

Links were great for the web when it was all early adopters who were really excited to link to each other, like Twitter @ reply shoutouts, but they were adopted wholesale into richer writing by bloggers, journalistic feature pieces, and other content they were never intended for. Blogs and online news have become so link saturated that as a writer the pressure I feel to link to the sources my ideas has reached the point where it has become a distraction and interference with my writing.

In the obsession with the provenance of ideas rather than their content, we are missing the point. Once upon a time links made sense as a way to show where other relevant information lives. However now that we have Google, there is no need to link to everything that explains each term in our writing. See something you don’t understand? Look it up. Want to read the post that inspired this piece? I’ve included enough information for you to find it pretty easy on Google. Too lazy to look it up? It probably wasn’t that important anyways. 

You get the idea.

Personalization and Online-to-Offline, Not "Mobile, Local, Social"

The technology buzzwords of the day are “social, mobile, local“, but personalization and online-offline better describe the broader trends.

Personalization

Personalization technology can be roughly fit into a few groups - targeting, collaborative filtering, social, and customization of creative, although in the real world these are often integrated and inseparable. If the internet started with the contextual and broad-based targeting of the offline world, and then moved to backlink-based search, personalization has long been taking market share from search as the mechanism to drive the online world from advertising to content to commerce (although search itself is becoming ever more personalized than more or less deterministic PageRank-style algorithms). The shift was enabled by the vast and accelerating rate of data online services collect about their users, but it only succeeds because of entrepreneurs who can figure out how to turn this data into information and then to action.

In ad-tech this has taken the form of behavioral, demographic, psychographic, and semantic targeting, in rough chronological order. My recommendation to premium publishers is to create halo and valence data to integrate into ad targeting ASAP to monetize the incremental value of their own brands vs. lower quality sites, and I think this represents an interesting void for ad-tech startups to fill. Collaborative filtering is invading the ad-tech world, with AdKeeper recently telling PaidContent that “The way to understand the ‘good’ ads from the ‘bad’ ones is to let consumers actually come out and tell us what they are.” Social ad-targeting is on everyone’s radar but cultural barriers remain as illustrated by LinkedIn’s misstep with social ads in August. Opt-in social recommendations have been far more successful, primarily in the form of Facebook likes and Twitter mentions, but this is not quite advertising. Personalization of creative is taking ad-tech beyond the question of what product to advertise where and to whom, but also what that ad should look like as the where and to whom vary. Companies such as SundaySky and EyeView customize video creative on the fly on a per-user basis, while Dapper and Tumri do the same for display. 

In content personalization has primarily taken the form of collaborative filtering by companies such as Netflix, Taboola, Outbrain, Sailthru, and nRelate, with some recommendations from the social graph although this again raises privacy issues.

Online commerce is increasingly personalized, with Amazon leading the way in applying collaborative filtering to suggest purchases, and practically every e-commerce site of any scale following in their footsteps. FourSquare is lead the way towards location-based analytics for brick and mortar merchants, while niche sites like BirchBox and Fitocracy can offer incredibly rich data to such mammoth industries as beauty and fitness, respectively.

Online-to-Offline

I have long postulated that online-to-offline is a basic axiom of media, whose appearance in digital media and the mobile web are the natural evolution of these technologies rather than a paradigm shift. Every form of mediated human communication, from the printing press through the telephone to the various incarnations of the internet (Web 1.0, Web 2.0, mobile Web) has been about facilitating and optimizing real world results, rather than some sort of masturbatory self-referential information exchange (jokes about internet pornography aside). As technology matures it ceases to be technology per se but rather becomes just another tool to enable the satisfaction of our eternal human needs: food (Yelp, Menupages, Zagat), shelter (AirBNB, HomeAway, HotelTonight), transportation and navigation (ZipCar, GetAround, Garmin), in-person social interaction (Meetup, Evite, Paperless Post), work (LinkedIn, TheLadders.com, Indeed.com), sex and intimacy (JDate, HowAboutWe, PlentyofFish) and finance (Mint, BankSimple, LearnVest), sports (RunKeeper, Fitocracy, DailyBurn), entertainment (Netflix, Hulu, CollegeHumor), etc. Email and sms are no more intermediated than letters and telegrams, and the technology of previous generations such as airplanes, ATMs, and microwaves were no less wondrous or disruptive when they were launched than the internet, smartphones, and tablets. This concept is neatly summed up by the Alan Kay quote that “Technology is anything invented after you were born. Everything else is just stuff.” It is true that the pace of disruption has accelerated, but I don't believe this represents a discontinuous break with the past.

The long-term trend in the world of digital media products or services – be they apps, software, hardware, etc. – is therefore not determined by feature sets or tech specs but by utility as a tool for solving a real-world problem, defined as effectiveness in creating real-world results with the least real-world effort. The digital media companies that succeed in transforming their “technology” into everyday “stuff” will be those that heed the above. Apple is the pinnacle of this transformation, but there is room for plenty more companies to get this (if they can).

Mobile, rather than distancing people from the real world, makes them more effective in dealing with it. Mobile has taken the utility of media to its natural conclusion, by bringing the media (“online”) to the physical location in which its consumption is most effective ( “offline,” aka “the real world”). Printed guide books and handwritten travel directions are perhaps the original forms of mobile media, but required far more effort while producing far inferior results. Their replacement by digital mobile media was therefore inevitable.

Groupon's International Acquisition Strategy and Its Long Term Future

When it comes to acquisitions, Groupon has been most widely questioned for its rejection of Google's $6Bn offer (Facebook, which is five years older, has 2-3x the revenue, and is, well, Facebook, is probably the only VC-backed company to reject a larger offer, in absolute terms, since the dot-com bubble).

Tuesday they announced a trifecta of acquisitions enabling their entrance into India, South Africa, and Israel.  Clearly they wasted no time putting their $950M round to use (of which the firm probably only pocketed ~ $525M - but what's $425M among friends?).  What surprised me most though as someone who apparently was not following the fastest growing company in history closely enough, is that this was not even close to Groupon's first international acquisition and that in fact they've been on an international acquisition tear since last May, just after the last round of gargantuan fundraising.  In fact I'm not sure if Groupon has entered any international markets organically.

To me this raises some questions:

Facebook Messaging: Do You Really Want to Use a Messaging System Based on a Focus Group of Teenagers?

Seems everybody is predicting that Facebook Messaging is going to revolutionize communication (http://nyti.ms/dz3qtF, http://tcrn.ch/9STaBp, http://wapo.st/cwD3OJ, etc.). So I figured I'd throw my predicting hat into the ring and say, "Meh." There are three reasons for this: Facebook's choice of focus group for developing the new product; Facebook's prior design failures in building messaging systems; and the inherent conflict b/w Facebook's "social," sharing communication model and email's private, recipient-only model. And finally, for anyone who would underestimate the difficulties of making grand change to people's methods of communication, I have two words for you: Google Wave.

The product may be revolutionary if you are a modern teenager, Zuckerberg's apparent focus group for the project (if I read another article quoting Zuckerberg as saying that the idea for Messaging "came out of talking to current teenagers" ...). But for the rest of us? Do folks in the real world really want to use a product designed with the communication styles of high schoolers in mind? (and I'm not going to try to mock those communication styles since I'll probably just get it wrong, but we all went to high school once and how many of us want that experience rehashed in our inboxes every day? The occasional Breakfast Club or Ferris Bueller screening should be enough to remind us that *those are not days we want to go back to*)

At the same time, every one of Facebook's attempts at a communications fool so far has been to my taste unbelievably kludgy (think about the existing Facebook Messaging and IM systems compared to their competitors, or Michael Arrington's comment that the previous iteration of Facebook Messaging was "completely unusable as a personal or business productivity tool"). Even the demos of the new Messaging demos I've seen continue much of this kludgy-ness, and my predictions of adoption by the post-high school crowd are extremely low. Do I really want all of my communication to be sorted exclusively by who it's with? And subject lines may be an unnecessary formality in rare cases, but generally they serve to let me know what the rest of the message - and the entire conversation thread - is about, and to separate conversations accordingly.

Finally, there is an inherent conflict of interest b/w the use of private messaging systems like email, in which conversations are designed to be seen only by their recipients, and the kind of public conversations that Twitter and Facebook (through wall posts) encourage. Facebook wants all your conversations to be out there in the open, wants as much public sharing as possible, and email fundamentally represents the opposite of that. Therefore it's hard to see a company like Facebook seriously committing to the development of a private messaging system of any kind, over the long term.

But then again maybe at 31 I'm just an old fogey who doesn't "get it" when it comes to "modern messaging" (as Zuckerberg puts it). I just requested my Messaging invite and may end up eating my words if it promises to be the biggest revolution in modern communication since Twitter. But somehow I doubt it. Communication paradigm shifts happen organically, not by declaration from on high. Just think back to last year when to buzz was all about Wave, another promised revolution in social communication. We all know how that went ...

The iPhone and the Dark Side of Korea's Mobile Leadership

Much has been made of second-place Korean mobile carrier KT picking up the iPhone, as the world waits to see whether the smartphone prodigy can cut it in a famously competitive wireless market.  However the really interesting question is not whether Koreans will take to the iPhone, but what they will do with it.  Korea's dark technology secret is that for most Koreans this will be their first time on the mobile internet.

The world knows South Korea, rightly, as leaders in wireless and internet technology.  South Korea was the first country to have mobile 3G, mobile TV, and pretty much everything else mobile, and is first in the world in broadband rankings.  But the country remains woefully behind in mobile content, due to shockingly high walled gardens and byzantine data plans.

In a sort of quid-pro-quo for the massive capital investments the carriers made to build the world's first 3G data networks, the South Korean government and public have not pressed for an open mobile ecosystem as they have in the West.  The leading South Korean mobile operators - KT and SK Telecom - have complete control over Korean mobile content, and almost everything has to go through the carrier deck.

As a result, only 1% of Korean cell phone users have smartphones according to Korean paper the Joon Ang Daily, compared to the US where smartphones made up of 31% of new phones in Q3.  These are not old phones either - half of all Koreans replace their phones every two years.

Korean phones may have super high-end features, but they are still feature phones.  For the uninitiated, feature phones are basically everything that is not a smartphone, which is to say everything without its own operating system and the ability to install third-party applications like a computer.  Feature phones tend to have limited web browsing abilities.   They have lots of cool features - or what could be called "apps" - but these features are pre-installed by the operator and can not be expanded or modified.

Thus we find that in 2009 the South Korean mobile internet is one of the most backward and underdeveloped in the world, despite their world-leading infrastructure and handsets.  Korean carriers have been deathly afraid of a mobile internet that they could not control.  In 2008, when LG Telecom offered OZ, its unrestricted mobile internet service, this was considered a revolution in the South Korean market, while SK Telecom first announced unlimited data service plans in April (2009!!!).

The true impact of the iPhone on the South Korean market will be to introduce the real mobile internet to South Koreans, much like the iPhone did in the US (where mobile internet was available for years before the iPhone but never caught on).  As in the US, the ripple effect on competitors has come quickly.  While market leader SK Telecom declined to pick up the iPhone, it made a preemptive strike at KT by opening up its own app store, T-Store (I don't speak Korean so I hope this is the right link ;-).  Perhaps because of the harsh criticism the T-Store received, SKT has just announced plans to introduce the Motorola Droid and HTC phones to continue the fight.

The clear winner in all this is the Korean consumer, who will have access to unlimited mobile applications for the first time.  Based on what the Koreans have already come up with for mobile phones and broadband Internet, I can't wait to see what they come up with once they put the two together.