Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 02/26 – Twitter Does ALL The Things (Even $$$ For Tweets)

Starting point is 00:00:00 On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Friday, February 26, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Twitter just wants to give us everything all of a sudden, including charging for tweets, sort of groups based on interest, and even blocking and muting accounts. Google gives devs a sleep API.

Starting point is 00:00:51 Why has last past decided to piss everyone off all the sudden? Why, Zhaomi is the up-and-comer to keep your eye on? And of course, the weekend long-range suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. As the great Ashley Mayer tweeted last night, quote, it's like Twitter had its entire product roadmap in drafts for years and finally hit Send All, end quote. Twitter last night announced SuperFollow, a feature to let users charge for tweets, and a community's feature to let users create and join groups based on specific interests. So monetizing followers a la Twitch or any number of things like Patreon and Facebook groups

Starting point is 00:01:34 but for Twitter, basically. Quoting the Verge. The payment feature called SuperFollow will allow Twitter users to charge followers and give them access to extra content. That could be bonus tweets, access to a community group,

Starting point is 00:01:48 subscription to a newsletter, or a badge, merely indicating your support. In a mock-up screenshot, Twitter showed an example where a user charges $4.99 per month to receive a series of perks. Twitter sees it as a way to let creators

Starting point is 00:02:01 and publishers get paid directly by their fans. Twitter also announced a new feature called Communities, which appear to be its take on something like Facebook groups. People can create and join groups around specific interests like cats or plants, Twitter suggests, allowing them to see more tweets focused on those topics. Groups have been a huge success for Facebook and a huge moderation problem too, and they could be a particularly helpful tool on Twitter, since the services open-ended nature can make it difficult for new users to get started on the platform. There's no timeline yet for when either of these features will launch,

Starting point is 00:02:34 Twitter listed them as what's next for its platform during a presentation for analysts and investors this afternoon, end quote. As Jasmine Watkins tweeted, quote, y'all tweeted, how is this app free one too many times? End quote. These are, we should say, literally features anyone, anyone of us could have seen as likely and possible for Twitter even a decade ago. Like, I know that I saw this angle years ago and I'm by no means some sort of product guru, but I guess better late than never. A fire has been lit inside of Twitter, so let's not look a gift horse in the mouth, right? And it's not just on the product front. Twitter says it's also planning a safety mode that would let users automatically block and mute accounts that, quote,

Starting point is 00:03:19 might be acting abusively or spammy, quoting the verge again. It appears this feature will be a toggle. You can turn on in a new safety mode, according to a slide in the analyst day slide deck. Here's Twitter's description of how the toggle will work if you flip it on, quote, automatically blocks accounts that appear to break the Twitter rules and mute accounts that might be using insults, name-calling strong language, or hateful remarks, end quote. With the new safety mode, Twitter will automatically detect accounts that, quote, might be acting abusive or spammy, and limit how those accounts can engage with your content for seven days, according to the slide, end quote.

Starting point is 00:03:57 So, feature iteration, product iteration, and attempts at moderation and giving users greater control to allow them to hopefully stem the tide of trolling. Insert your hell freezing over joke here. Google has debuted what it is calling Sleep API, which uses a phone's light and motion sensors and on-device AI to generate data which developers can then use to build wellness apps. So devs, as I said, revs your engine, quoting 9 to 5 Google. Part of the broader Android activity recognition API,

Starting point is 00:04:35 Google's new Sleep API analyzes your phone's light and motion sensors with on-device AI models to generate two pieces of information, a sleep confidence, which is reported at a regular interval up to 10 minutes, and a daily sleep segment which is reported after a wake-up is detected. In offering this new tool, Google wants to save developers from having to spend valuable engineering time to combine sensor signals to determine when the user has started or ended activities like sleep, noting how these detection algorithms are inconsistent between apps and when multiple apps independently and continuously check for changes in user activity, battery life suffers. And users will have to grant the physical activity recognition runtime permission before apps can get access to this data. Google Touts features similar to the bedtime mode in Android's clock app and partnered with

Starting point is 00:05:25 the Sleep as Android app for today's launch, available with the latest version of Google Play services on Android 10 and later, the Sleep API can be used by developers now, end quote. This is sort of wild. A security researcher has said he's found seven embedded trackers in the LastPass password manager Android app. He says that one password doesn't have any trackers, that KeyPass doesn't have any trackers. So why does LastPass suddenly have trackers, quoting the register? German Infosec Mike Kuketz spotted last pass's trackers in an announcement. produced by Exodus, which describes itself as, quote, a nonprofit organization led by hacktivists whose purpose is to help people get a better understanding of the Android applications

Starting point is 00:06:15 tracking issues, end quote. The Exodus report on LastPass shows seven trackers in the Android app, including four from Google for the purpose of analytics and crash reporting, as well as others, from Apps, Flyer, Mix Panel, and Segment. Segment, for instance, gathers data for marketing teams and claims to offer a, quote, single view of the customer, end quote, profiling users and connecting their activity across different platforms, presumably for tailored advertisements. LastPass has many free users. Is it a problem if its owner seeks to monetize them in some way? Kouquet says it is.

Starting point is 00:06:50 Typically, the way trackers like this work is that the developer compiles code from the tracking provider into their application. The gathered information can be used to build up a profile of the user's interests from their activities and target them with ads. Even the app developers do not know what data is collected and transmitted to the third-party provider, says Kukets, and the integration of proprietary code could introduce security risks and unexpected behavior, as well as being a privacy risk. These things do not belong in password managers, which are security critical, he said, end quote. We missed covering this because it broke late last Friday, but last pass has been

Starting point is 00:07:28 pissing people off a lot lately. For instance, they announced that LastPass free users must choose between mobile or computers for unlimited device access starting March 16th, and that email support would be limited to paid plans starting May 17th. As Dan Seaford tweeted at the time, LastPass is severely limiting its free service starting next month, effectively making it useless. Details to come, but this sucks for basically anyone that used LastPass instead of one password because it was available for free, end quote. And as Tron tweeted, quote, this is the same tactic Evernote took and it's a failing one. You're not incentivizing users to upgrade. You're cutting the value of your service in half, prompting them to leave you,

Starting point is 00:08:12 end quote. Yeah, obviously, I'm sympathetic to developers and entrepreneurs trying to eventually find a profitable business model for their apps, but doesn't it feel like last pass is being extra clumsy about this. More marketplace numbers that I'm sharing for a specific reason today. The European smartphone market basically had a major reset last year. The market shrunk by 14% over 2020. 14% less smartphones were sold, but Apple actually increased its market share to 30%, a record for their market share in Europe. Huawei's sales were down a whopping 62% while Zhaummy is the big up-and-comer, apparently, with sales up 85% year-over-year. Quoting Counterpoint Research.

Starting point is 00:09:03 Huawei's inability to produce competitive smartphones thanks to U.S. sanctions means the vendor has all but exited the European smartphone market. Yes, it briefly overtook Apple to become the region's second largest vendor behind Samsung in May, but that was more to do with the premium end of the market taking the brunt of the COVID-19 impact and Apple being midway between launches at that point. Over the year, Huawei's share has fallen from 15% in January to 5% in December, and there's no reason to expect the trajectory to change in 2021. Jaume was the major success story in Europe in 2020, becoming the third largest OEM in the region at the expense of Huawei. Strong performance in both Spain and Italy resulted in significant share gains over the year, reaching 28% and 17% of smartphone sales in Q4, 2020, respectively.

Starting point is 00:09:51 Driving overall annual growth of 90% for the year, Xiaomi's challenge is now to replicate this growth in other areas, particularly more premium markets like France, Germany, and the UK. The launch of its flagship Me 11 in February 2021 should help, end quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestions, and I said that I was sharing that European market share story for a specific reason, and it was because of this. I already had in the Longreed's queue this piece from Wired about how

Starting point is 00:10:30 Xiaomi is well, to quote the title, Xiaomi is undercutting the whole tech industry and it's working. Xiaomi has been launching low-cost, occasionally half-baked tech for years. Now it's time for everyone to take them seriously, quote. Xiaomi's shifting some serious product, having had greater year-on-year growth than any other top five global smartphone maker between Q4-2019 and Q4-2020. Diving into specific territories, it climbed to the number one spot in Spain in May 2020, overtaking the established leader Samsung, and hit number two in Russia with 23% of the market in Q3 2020. Big in India,

Starting point is 00:11:08 Jaume's excellent value-to-performance balance found in devices like the Redme-8-A duel has ensured. It's held over a quarter of the Indian smartphone market since January 2020, having shipped a staggering 13.1 million devices there. in Q3. As for its standing on home turf, it was the only major smartphone maker to achieve positive year-on-year growth in China in Q3 in 2020. In a statement to Wired, Owen, General Manager of Zhaomi Western Europe is perhaps understandably jubilant. Quote, it's hard to believe how far Zhaomi has come in little over 10 years. We are now the third largest smartphone maker globally and in Europe, he says. When attributes Ziammi's success to its core values, quote, amazing products, honest prices, and of course, are means.

Starting point is 00:11:51 fans, end quote. But there's a lot more to the Jaami story than traditional growth, end quote. Next, Eugene Wei has his long-promised third analysis essay out about TikTok. Remember, I shared his second TikTok essay as a rebroadcast of his Andresen Horowitz podcast interview a couple, I don't know, months ago. The third essay is just as enlightening as you'd expect, quote, When I first joined the Amazon Web Services team in 2003, it was still a small Jeff Bezos-sponsored project. There were only some 15 people or so on the team at the time under the leadership of now Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. A book Jeff had us read, one which he said should serve as an inspiration for how we design AWS, was creation, life, and how to make it by Steve Grand.

Starting point is 00:12:41 It's a book about programming artificial life, but the core principle that Jeff wanted us to take from it was the idea that complex things like life forms are built from very simple building blocks or primitives. It's the same thesis as that in Stephen Wilfrum's A New Kind of Science. The key implication for AWS from the book was about how to design the first AWS primitives. Jeff urged us to include only what was necessary and nothing more. If you were designing a storage service like S3, you'd need functions like get, write, delete, but you wouldn't want to layer in things that weren't part of storage like security. That should be a separate primitive. The reason to design your primitives with the utmost elegance is to maximize combinatorial optionality. This is one of the

Starting point is 00:13:24 most elegant things about TikTok's design. It includes a ton of primitives, and they are almost all ones you can combine or link. More than that, every element in a TikTok is a building block you can replicate and use in your own TikTok. The most important of these is the soundtrack or sound of your TikTok, end quote. And this is right up our alley, isn't it? The New York Times asks why every friggin' streaming service is a plus. Quote, tacking on the plus sign to the name of a well-known movie studio might be a very effective way to tell customers that the platform offers movies and something else, or it could be a disaster, said Mike Carr, the co-founder of the branding company, Namestormers. The plus is a great idea short term and a terrible idea long-term, said Mr. Carr,

Starting point is 00:14:09 who has helped come up with names for thousands of clients, including CarMax, the used car company, and Angry Orchard, the hard cider label. It's cool and hip now, Mr. Carr continued, but you can't own or define a generic term like Plus, because all of your competitors are out there doing the same thing, end quote. The piece mentions that this trend with the plus sign goes back to Canal Pluse in France back in the 1980s. Remember, I briefly was calling it Apple Pluse as a joke until enough of you yelled at me to stop. But also, I will cop to the fact that I named it Ride Home Plus as a sort of tongue-in-cheek joke because I'm consciously trying to ape how played out this very convention obviously is. Next, if you've seen those Tom Cruise deepfakes

Starting point is 00:14:57 making the rounds on social media, the Daily Beast has a brief look at the phenomenon, though it didn't manage to uncover who is behind the Tom Cruise ones. And finally today, I wanted to share this piece from the Atlantic about how we're just now rediscovering a 19th century pandemic strategy. Basically, open your windows. Basically, go outside. Basically, ventilation is your friend. The first way to fight a new virus would once have been opening the windows, and we just all collectively forgot that. Quote, I'm writing this now at my desk, which is in front of a radiator, which is in front of a window. For apartment buildings like mine, built in the early 20th century, this is by design. The radiator runs too hot so that residents can keep

Starting point is 00:15:42 the window open for ventilation. I am indeed too hot. The window is open. This quirk of old building design went viral months ago in a collective aha moment. This thing that never made sense actually makes sense. Like many old buildings, my apartment has pipes that somehow always need to be repaired. I remember going downstairs one day to find a giant trench dug out in the lobby where a steam radiator had exploded. And in the past year of working from home, I have cursed the lack of central AC and the overwhelming heat of the radiators. But the window is open today, and the air is good. This is a building designed in a time of airborne pathogens, end quote. I was thinking a lot about this piece and thinking that what's happened here is a combination of obviously air conditioning

Starting point is 00:16:27 becoming a thing. And, you know, we were all brought up by dads that were yelling at us to close the door, you're letting the AC out, we're not paying to cool the whole neighborhood. But also, you know, like the last, what is it, 30, 50 years of pollution, air pollution being a thing, I think we all got indoctrinated in this idea that outdoor air was dirty air and somehow indoor air wasn't, which actually, if you know anything about air quality inside, is completely bass-acwards. Anyway, I'm sharing this piece because I think it's a good metaphor for how institutional knowledge can be lost and especially be lost inside companies or startups. Like, if you're on a startup and your team is so successful that it goes from 20 people to 20,000,

Starting point is 00:17:12 not only can your culture get lost, but think of how much of the learnings that actually led you to success may not be being passed down. So for this weekend, Ride Home Plus listeners, you've got the second interesting gadgets episode coming your way, among the things we're looking at this week. Hyundai's new Ionic electric car are there hints there as to why Apple might be so interested in working with them. Also, Samsung's new camera sensor that might revolutionize smartphone picture taking. The new world's lightest laptop with an actual powerful processor. The best cheapest smartphone you can buy right now.

Starting point is 00:17:57 The latest in electric bikes. And thinking ahead to the summer and barbecue season, smart grills are a thing. We look at the latest from Weber. As always, if you don't want to be able, want to miss out on that. Sign up for Ride Home Plus at tech.combe.combe. There should be a link at the bottom of today's show notes that will let you sign up right in the very podcast app you're listening to me on right now. You can be subscribed and listening in like two minutes. And then for everybody, though, of course, ride home plus subscribers will get this ad free.

Starting point is 00:18:28 We've also got the audio from one of the clubhouse sessions that Chris Messina and I did this week. It's about an hour of Chris and I going deeper on some of the very things we talked about this week. If you weren't able to listen live, here you go. Talk to you on Monday.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 02/26 – Twitter Does ALL The Things (Even $$$ For Tweets)

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