Notes on the impending influencer relatability crisis – Underwire
Netflix and Video Games — MatthewBall.vc
A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps | Ars Technica
The Myth of a Superhuman AI | WIRED
Why RSS still matters - The Verge
Ghosts - Believer Magazine
Why I had to break up with the famous F-pattern in UX and move on? | by Aryan Indraksh | UX Collective
The slow collapse of Amazon’s drone delivery dream | WIRED UK
New Productivity — Benedict Evans
On bundling and rebundling services
The main takeaway from this is that we are now seeing a new wave of productivity companies that are unbundling and rebundling spreadsheets, email, and file shares into a new, more structured workflow. This is being done through vertical two-sided marketplaces that connect service providers with their customers, as well as through collaboration-first web applications. Additionally, we are seeing LinkedIn unbundled in the same way as Excel, creating a new wave of company creation. All of this is being driven by the fact that everyone is now online and expects to be able to do everything with a smartphone.
there are dozens of companies that remix some combination of lists, tables, charts, tasks, notes, light-weight databases, forms, and some kind of collaboration, chat or information-sharing. All of these things are unbundling and rebundling spreadsheets, email and file shares.
LinkedIn tried to take the flat, dumb address book and turn it into both structured flow and a network of sorts. But by doing that for everyone, it has the same problem as a spreadsheet, file share or email - it’s a flat, lowest-common-denominator canvas that doesn’t capture the flows that many particular professions or tasks need.
There’s clearly a point in the life of any company where you should move from the list you made in a spreadsheet to the richer tools you can make in coolproductivityapp.io. But when that tool is managing a thousand people, you might want to move it into a dedicated service. After all, even Craigslist started as an actual email list and ended up moving to a database. But then, at a certain point, if that task is specific to your company and central to what you do, you might well end up unbundling Salesforce or SAP or whatever that vertical is and go back to the beginning.
every application category is getting rebuilt as a SaaS web application, allowing continuous development, deployment, version tracking and collaboration. As Frame.io (video!) and OnShape (3D CAD!) show, there’s almost no native PC application that can’t be rebuilt on the web. In parallel, everything now has to be native to collaboration, and so the model of a binary file saved to a file share will generally go away over time
an entire generation now grew up after the web, and grew up with smartphones, and assumes without question that every part of their life can be done with a smartphone. In 1999 hiring ‘roughnecks’ in a mobile app would have sounded absurd - now it sounds absurd if you’re not. And that means that a lot of tasks will get shifted into software that were never really in software at all before.
Safari isn't protecting the web, it's killing it | HTTP Toolkit
Theses on Techno-Optimism | LibrarianShipwreck
Well, These New Zuckerberg IMs Won't Help Facebook's Privacy Problems
Indie Film and TV Studio A24 Seeks Buyer – Variety
Miranda July Explains How To Make Art Out Of Everyday Emails
In Defense of Design Thinking, Which Is Terrible + Subtraction.com
Audio’s Opportunity and Who Will Capture It — MatthewBall.vc
Apple, Its Control Over the iPhone, and The Internet — MatthewBall.vc
The NFT Funhouse Mirror - NOEMA
We replaced rental brokers with software
Yale Law Journal - Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox
Although Amazon has clocked staggering growth, it generates meager
profits, choosing to price below-cost and expand widely instead. Through this
strategy, the company has positioned itself at the center of e-commerce and now
serves as essential infrastructure for a host of other businesses that depend upon
it. Elements of the firm’s structure and conduct pose anticompetitive
concerns—yet it has escaped antitrust scrutiny.
This
Note argues that the current framework in antitrust—specifically its pegging competition to “consumer welfare,” defined as
short-term price effects—is unequipped to capture the architecture of market
power in the modern economy. We cannot cognize the potential harms to
competition posed by Amazon’s dominance if we measure competition primarily
through price and output. Specifically, current doctrine underappreciates the
risk of predatory pricing and how integration across distinct business lines
may prove anticompetitive.
These concerns are heightened in the context of
online platforms for two reasons. First, the economics of platform markets create
incentives for a company to pursue growth over profits, a strategy that
investors have rewarded. Under these conditions, predatory pricing becomes
highly rational—even as existing doctrine treats it as irrational and therefore
implausible.
Second, because online platforms serve as critical intermediaries,
integrating across business lines positions these platforms to control the
essential infrastructure on which their rivals depend. This dual role also
enables a platform to exploit information collected on companies using its
services to undermine them as competitors.
The Future of Design Tools | (Not Boring) Software
A Tale Of Two Ecosystems: On Bandcamp, Spotify And The Wide-Open Future : NPR
Spotify Payouts, YouTube Users: The Music Business's Biggest Myths - Rolling Stone
Reimagining Design Systems at Spotify | by Spotify Design | Spotify Design | Medium
Objects of Power — Pixel Envy
Daring Fireball: Facebook’s Unknowable Megascale
What comes after smartphones? — Benedict Evans
Mainframes were followed by PCs, and then the web, and then smartphones. Each of these new models started out looking limited and insignificant, but each of them unlocked a new market that was so much bigger that it pulled in all of the investment, innovation and company creation and so grew to overtake the old one. Meanwhile, the old models didn’t go away, and neither, mostly, did the companies that had been created by them. Mainframes are still a big business and so is IBM; PCs are still a big business and so is Microsoft. But they don’t set the agenda anymore - no-one is afraid of them.
We’ve spent the last few decades getting to the point that we can now give everyone on earth a cheap, reliable, easy-to-use pocket computer with access to a global information network. But so far, though over 4bn people have one of these things, we’ve only just scratched the surface of what we can do with them.
There’s an old saying that the first fifty years of the car industry were about creating car companies and working out what cars should look like, and the second fifty years were about what happened once everyone had a car - they were about McDonalds and Walmart, suburbs and the remaking of the world around the car, for good and of course bad. The innovation in cars became everything around the car. One could suggest the same today about smartphones - now the innovation comes from everything else that happens around them.
LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe - Divinations
Every platform has its royalty. On Instagram it's influencers, foodies, and photographers. Twitter belongs to the founders, journalists, celebrities, and comedians. On LinkedIn, it’s hiring managers, recruiters, and business owners who hold power on the platform and have the ear of the people.
On a job site, they’re the provisioners of positions and never miss the chance to regale their audience with their professional deeds: hiring a teenager with no experience, giving a stressed single mother a chance to provide for her family, or seeing past a candidate’s imperfections to give them a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. These stories are relayed dramatically in what’s now recognizable as LinkedIn-style storytelling, one spaced sentence at a time, told by job-givers with a savior complex.
Make it Personal | CSS-Tricks
Since When Was 'Escape Room' a Genre?