I had a random idea earlier today: What if I held open office hours via text on Telegram? I'm thinking it could be a low-pressure way for founders to get feedback on their product or idea. Would anyone be interested in trying it out sometime? If so, let me know via the contact form -- or ping me on Telegram.
Freelance Event Producer for The Mobile Augmented Reality Summit
I'm working with a small group planning a half-day summit for May 15th in San Francisco and we're looking for a freelance event manager/producer to help us out. Our ideal candidate is someone organized and detail-oriented who can assist with the following tasks (among others):
Interfacing with the event venue
Scheduling speakers
Coordinating technical and A/V needs for the event
Managing the day of the event (badges, check-in process, speakers, catering, etc)
This is a part-time role, we’d expect just two or three hours a week of your time in the weeks leading up to the event and full days the day before and day of the event. This will be an especially fun project to work on if you’re interested in augmented reality!
Send your resume/background and hourly rate to me here and we’ll get back to you!
A News Feed Without News
The day nearly every digital media company has been fearing has finally come: Facebook is going to change the way News Feed works. In a post last week Mark Zuckerberg announced that over the coming months Facebook will begin showing users less "public content from businesses, brands, and media," and instead prioritize updates and content shared by friends and family. For publishers who have become addicted to the free traffic which has flowed from Facebook users clicking and sharing articles which have populated their News Feeds, this is bad news (especially given that the amount of traffic Facebook sends publishers has already been dropping steadily since last year). For those who have built their entire readership acquisition strategy around social distribution through Facebook, it may well prove fatal.
For media companies, relying on Facebook for traffic was seductive. While the good times rolled, it was easy to overlook that despite being called "News Feed", anyone getting their news via Facebook is a side effect of the platform, not its intent. News publishers, who often put a considerable amount of effort into optimizing their content and websites to maximize Facebook shares, became accustomed to thinking of that traffic as "theirs." They mistakenly believed that the distribution of their articles and videos via News Feed was a natural extension of Facebook's core functionality -- or even the point of the platform in the first place. But Facebook's purpose is not to deliver the news, or even more broadly, "information." At the end of the day, Facebook doesn't care whether anyone becomes better informed by using Facebook. What ultimately matters to Facebook is that you continue to use it, which is why News Feed has been a machine designed to show you more and more of whatever it is that you will look at, click on, and share.
Up until this announcement it largely didn't matter whether that content was your friend's cat photos, a story about Yemen in the New York Times, or a recipe from AllRecipes. I can't tell whether Mark Zuckerberg is being disingenuous when he wrote in this past Thursday's announcement about the changes that he expects, "the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down," but that also the time spent "will be more valuable" and that in the long term such changes will be "good for our community and our business." You can bet that Facebook has already done plenty of A/B testing of these changes. It's entirely possible that they've determined that time spent will actually go up. Or that even if the amount of time the average person spends using Facebook goes down, it won't negatively impact revenue because engagement with ads improved and/or those brands and publishers which can afford it will pay for distribution they previously enjoyed for free.
Zuckerberg also said in his announcement that what content from businesses, brands, and media users see, "should encourage meaningful interactions between people." Sounds great, right? What worries me is that this may have the unintended consequence of making the fake news problem even worse. Strong engagement is why deliberately fabricated articles have done so well on Facebook in the first place. If you don't care much about being accurate -- or the damage you might do by misleading people -- it's all too easy to create content which will strike just the right kind of emotional nerve to drive clicks and shares. Today's polarized climate has made it especially easy for anything which inflames political passions to get shared, regardless of how true it may be. All that clicking and sharing is just the kind of big fat engagement signal the NewsFeed algorithms have looked for when calculating what to show users. Making things worse, these false stories didn't just have the effect of crowding out legitimate, but less engaging, content from your News Feed -- a situation which will likely be exacerbated by these changes. They also had a knock-on effect of diminishing the authority of articles which did surface in your News Feed from more established publications. How? Putting every piece of content, one after the other, in a single undifferentiated, uniformly-designed feed effectively flattens any distinctions between. You can't put a spurious site like Infowars next to a reputable publication like the New York Times in someone's News Feed and not expect the authority of the latter to rub off on the former. (This is a problem Google has as well with respect to ranking of search results.)
I don't know exactly how the new News Feed will handle issues like this. It's reasonable to assume that once publishers have some sense of what signals around engagement the algorithms are looking for, they will optimize their content for the new algorithms. Misleading content may actually be more likely to surface in users' feeds than informative content from legitimate sources as a result. It is also worth noting that most publishers won't be able to afford to pay to promote their content in order to drive click-thru. The cost of doing so will usually exceed their ability to monetize via advertising, potentially giving an advantage to anyone (including a state-sponsored actor with malicious intent) who has the resources to pay to promote misleading content into users' News Feeds but has no need to generate revenue from that traffic.
The solution to all this could be to have Facebook "do the right thing" and just show us dispassionate, authoritative, high-quality news articles anyway, right? Well, that kind of news may be better for us, but would likely lead to people using Facebook less and that would be bad for business. We don't necessarily want to admit it, but news, or at least the kind of news that we want people to read so they'll be better citizens, isn't necessarily what they want to look at online. There's nothing stopping anyone from just going directly to places like The Washington Post or Economist or New York Times to get their news (or better yet, subscribing to them). However, most people are casual consumers of news in whatever form is most convenient, whether it's via whatever they see in their Facebook feed, headlines at the top of the hour on the local FM station, or CNN when they're flipping channels. When they do actively seek out news by going directly to a source it is often to read or watch about a specific topic or area of interest, like sports, celebrity gossip, or tech (something I tapped into with Gizmodo and Engadget - during my time at each site the majority of traffic came from direct visits).
Even if social platforms like Facebook and Twitter disappeared, would any of that change? Before the rise of social media, most internet users who consumed news online did so via big portals like Yahoo and AOL (which is why getting on those homepages was a key strategy for digital media business at the time). Plus, it's not like the era immediately preceding the web was exactly a golden era of journalism producing a well-informed citizenry, either. Daily newspaper subscription rates began falling decades before the advent of the web, supplanted mainly by broadcast and then cable news. Yes, we had fewer debates over what was true and what was false, but this was because we had a media ecosystem which was largely closed to bad actors. And over time, consolidation via mergers and acquisitions meant that a relatively small number of gigantic media companies determined most of what we consumed. As damaging as Facebook has been for our political discourse, the sad reality is that most people don't go out of their way to become better informed by seeking out quality journalism about the state of national and international affairs. News Feed has been good at giving us what we want, not what we need.
For a while everything seemed great. Users who weren't naturally inclined to seek out news ended up consuming it because it showed up in their feeds. All that free traffic from Facebook masked two problems for publishers. First, a big platform which doesn't care much whether you live or die essentially controls access to your readers. Second, readers that only visited you because they clicked on a link in their News Feed probably don't have a strong connection to your brand -- or possibly even much awareness of which sites they were reading what articles. Getting them to go out of their way to find you when those links stop showing up is going to be difficult.
Could you address both of those problems by having a group of publishers come together to create a new platform for distributing their articles and videos via a News Feed-like newsreader app, perhaps one including options for monetization via ads, subscriptions, and micropayments? Yes, but simply offering an app for people to read the news and calling it a day won't be enough, especially if you want to get more people reading high quality, informative journalism and not celeb-driven clickbait. Aggregating a large audience is key, remember that all these websites flocked to share their content on Facebook in the first place because of its potential to deliver massive amounts of free traffic. Anything which doesn't move the needle in terms of audience (and hence revenue) is not going to be worth the effort. I don't pretend to have the answer here, but there would have to be something distinctive and compelling about the way news is consumed and shared on a platform like this if there's going to be any hope of attracting audiences at the scale for which publishers are looking.
That said -- and without minimizing the challenges inherent in building sustainable news businesses -- I am hopeful that in the long-run breaking publishers' addiction to Facebook traffic will free them from having to create so much pageview-driven clickbait (something even prestigious publishers engage in), allowing them instead to focus more on audiences who seek out journalism and pursue subscriptions and other non-advertising based sources of revenue. It's why I'm definitely in favor of more experimentation with how people discover and consume news; publishers have to become less reliant on big platforms like Facebook (and Google, for that matter) for distribution if they are going to survive and. For my part, I've opted out of Facebook (I quit almost eight years ago and never looked back), use an RSS reader to get most of my news (which lets me decide what sources of news I read), and am a paid subscriber to publications I value. These may be small steps, but they feel like the least I can do to help foster a healthier ecosystem around news.
My History Podcast Finds for 2017
It's been almost exactly a year since I shared the list of my favorite history podcasts. It was an extensive list, but if you thought having so much to listen to meant that I'd stopped my search for new shows, well, you were sorely mistaken, because I found a bunch more this past year that I loved. Here are my favorite history podcast finds for 2017:
Tides of History started out as The Fall of Rome, a podcast exploring the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, but after a name change morphed into something bigger and more ambitious by tackling not just why Rome fell, but also how urban society got back on track in Europe a thousand years during the late medieval and early modern era. Host Patrick Wyman does a masterful job of weaving together strands from history, archaeology, sociology, religion, politics, and even climate change in order to tell a remarkably nuanced and complex story that can tell us a lot about why the world we live in today is the way it is.
If you're a fan of history podcasts you already know Dan Carlin, host of the insanely great Hardcore History. Hardcore History Addendum is a spin-off where Dan plans to fit in episodes that don't have the ambitious scope of a regular Hardcore History episode, which are now usually several hours long and part of multi-episode series. His first episode was an extended tangent from his series on World War I, and the second was an interview with History of Rome and Revolutions host Mike Duncan, having those two legends on a podcast together was sort of like when Al Pacino and Robert Deniro finally appeared in a movie together.
I sort of have a conflict here, since betaworks ventures is an investor in Gimlet, the podcast network which produces Uncivil, but I hope it's clear that given my insatiable appetite for history podcasts I'd be listening to this anyway. Anyway, Uncivil is a show about the American Civil War that busts persistent myths about the conflict as well as uncovers little-known stories that I'm embarrassed I didn't know before.
A ten-part series on the Heaven's Gate cult, which committed mass suicide outside of San Diego back in 1997. I was initially reluctant to dive into this one, I remembered this when it happened and questioned whether there was enough there for more than an episode or two. Not only was I wrong -- the story of Heaven's Gate is deeper and more nuanced than I'd thought -- but host Glynn Washington (who also created and hosts the excellent Snap Judgment podcast) grew up in an apocalyptic cult himself, giving the series added depth. (There's a fascinating episode where the show's producer interviews Glynn about his own experiences.)
A podcast by New Yorker writer Maria Konnikova, The Grift goes deep into the stories of con artists, hoaxers, art forgers, and impostors. My favorite episodes have been the ones that go a little further back in time, like the one about Cassie Chadwick, who convinced people she was the illegitimate daughter of Andrew Carnegie.
The History of Exploration is a hidden gem of a podcast tracing the history of our earliest voyages into the known, so far covering ancient explorers like Hanno the Navigator, Pytheas, and Polybius. Last update to the series was this past May, so it's unclear whether it will continue, but the episodes that have been released so far have been excellent.
Slow Burn is a show from Slate that isn't just about Watergate, it tries to convey just what it was like to experience the scandal as it was unfolding, when no one knew it would bring down Nixon's presidency (and yes, the echoes of our own time are intentional). This is another area of history that I thought I already knew decently well (or at least thought I did after having read All the President's Men), but turns out there was SO much more going on that I'd known nothing about.
Hosted by Andrew Jenks, What Really Happened? picks an event, usually from the past few decades and tries to figure out whether the story we're told is the one we should believe. Episodes range from an incident in 1981 where Muhammad Ali supposedly talked a man out of committing suicide, Michael Jordan's first retirement from basketball, and the death of Princess Diana.
Ok, The Heritage Podcast isn't just about a history -- host Will Webb's goal with this show is to offer a comprehensive liberal arts education and as such also covers philosophy, literature, and anthropology (with more topics to be included I'm sure as he works his way to them). It's a great resource for learning about all sorts of things that used to be a mandatory part of a person's education, like the differences between Plato and Aristotle, I wish I'd had this around twenty years ago (I'm only just now reading The Iliad, for example).
Other history podcasts I added to my list this past year, but haven't listened to yet:
The Assassination - A BBC series about the assassination of Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto
Cults - A series about, you guessed it, cults. They have a two-part episode on Heaven's Gate that I'm going to check out soon.
The History of the Early Church
The Thread - Season one of this show promises to "connect the dots between John Lennon's murder and Vladimir Lenin's revolution 63 years earlier."
Kingdom, Empire, and Plus Ultra - "Conversations on the history of Portugal and Spain, 1415 - 1898."
Opening the camera
Cameras in phones were treated mainly as an afterthought or weird novelty when they first started showing up in handsets in the early 2000's. One response to a BBC article back in 2001 about cameras being added to phones in Japan was, "Infinite uses for the teenager, not entirely sure what the rest of us would do with one though." Sixteen years later it is virtually impossible to find a mobile phone without one. The camera is now a critical -- possibly even defining -- feature of the smartphone, and yet there is still a remarkable amount of friction to doing more with the default camera on your phone than capturing a photo or a video.
That will need to change if the camera is going to be the starting point for so much of what we do with our phones and become a sort of visual browser that intermediates and augments our experience of the world. One way for that to happen would be for Apple and Google to allow developers to add lightweight extensions to the OS's default camera app, like lenses, filters, AR objects, or specialized image recognition capabilities that wouldn't necessarily justify building a full-blown app. Yes, iOS and Android developers have been able to take advantage of the phone's camera forever, but they've never been able to hook into or add onto the phone’s camera itself.
Making the camera the place where these experiences live would help overcome context switching, which can be a remarkably high hurdle when it comes to getting users actually to engage with an app. This says nothing of getting them to install one in the first place -- something that is going to be especially important with the addition of ARKit to iOS and ARCore to Android this year. It should be as easy as possible for users to point their camera at the world and then augment, enhance, or recognize it. We should be able to have the camera open and then decide what we want to do with it, not the other way around.
There is already a precedent of sorts for this. Apple’s iMessage now has an App Store that goes beyond stickers to offer all sorts of contextual applications for enhancing chats, like Square for sending cash, or games like Crosswords with Friends. The latest figures I was able to find were from March of this year, when the iMessage App Store was estimated to have over 5,000 apps. That number has surely grown. And while Apple could do a lot to improve the experience here, being able to pull apps directly into the messaging experience makes a lot more sense than forcing users to jump out of what they're doing and into something else.
We might see something along the lines of what I'm thinking come from Google first. Earlier this month they announced AR Stickers (basically 3D objects which can be inserted into scenes) for the camera of their line of flagship Pixel phones. They also unveiled Lens, which adds a number of computer vision-driven experiences to the Pixel's camera, like translating text written in other languages, identifying flowers, or pulling up ratings and reviews of a business simply by taking a photo of a storefront. Right now these are first-party, not third-party apps, but it’s not difficult to envision developers being able to augment the Lens experience in a variety of ways. Lens will be rolling out to Pixel phones soon, but it's expected to trickle down to other Android phones sooner or later.
Apps which offer their own camera experiences won't go away, but opening up the camera as a sort of platform-within-a-platform would offer greater flexibility and intelligence to our devices than we have today. It would allow developers to add specialized image recognition capabilities, giving us phones which are better at knowing what they're looking it. It would also reduce the friction involved with using lenses, 3D objects, and other contextually-driven and location-based AR content and experiences, which wouldn't have to be siloed into their own apps (or only usable within Snapchat, Facebook, etc.). But perhaps most importantly, it would take us a step towards better understanding and defining the future we are headed towards, where screens themselves become secondary to the augmented view of the world we will have through smartglasses. Even if that future is still a few (or more) years away, we are approaching a time when a handheld screen with a field of icons will no longer make any sense when our expectations will be to have interfaces and experiences which surface intelligently within our field of view. Building great UX and UI for the post-smartphone world will take time, but opening up the camera would help us begin to figure this out.