Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 10/25 - Introducing Facebook News

Episode Date: October 25, 2019

Introducing Facebook News. Did the major US Carriers do an end-run around Google out of spite? Amazon is back to making as little profit as it possibly can, HBO Max makes its aggressive pricing move, and, of course, the Weekend Longreads Suggestions. Sponsors: Mealime LegalForce RAPC (650-390-6461 or [e-mail]) Links: Rupert Murdoch wanted Mark Zuckerberg to pay him for news stories — and now Facebook is going to do just that (Recode) [Update: Google responds] Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile join forces to bring RCS to Android in 2020 (9to5Google) AMAZON.COM ANNOUNCES THIRD QUARTER SALES UP 24% TO $70.0 BILLION (Amazon) Behind AT&T's plan to take on Netflix, Apple and Disney with HBO Max (Reuters) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: The 2010s Broke Our Sense Of Time (Buzzfeed) Inside R/Relationships, the Unbearably Human Corner of Reddit (The Atlantic) He revolutionized how millions of people spend money in India. His next target: America (CNN Business) Now the Machines Are Learning How to Smell (Wired) Pentagon, With an Eye on China, Pushes for Help From American Tech (NYTimes) Google CEO Sundar Pichai on achieving quantum supremacy (MIT Technology Review) How Do You Like We Now (Bloomberg Opinion) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 ride home for Friday, October 25th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Introducing Facebook News. Did the major U.S. carriers do an end run around Google out of spite? Amazon is back to making as little profit as it possibly can. HBO Max makes its aggressive pricing move and, of course, the weekend long read suggestions.

Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Facebook today began testing what it is calling Facebook News with a small set of users in the U.S. across four categories of news, general, topical, diverse, and local news. If you are a part of the test, you will see a dedicated news tab inside the Facebook app. Facebook is manually curating the news outlets that will have distribution within the tab. And among the partners right now are the New York Times, Condé Nass, Dow Jones, Reuters, the Associated Press, Business Insider, BuzzFeed, and some local news outlets in New York, L.A., Chicago, Dallas Fort Worth, Philadelphia, D.C., Miami, Houston, Atlanta, and Boston.

Peter Kafka is reporting that Facebook will pay some of these news partners up to $3 million a year for the right to feature their content in the tab, quoting Kafka. Users who click on the icon will see headlines for a handful of top stories, selected by Facebook editors, and a personalized selection of headlines selected by Facebook's algorithmic software. Clicking on those headlines will send users to the publisher's own sites, where Facebook users can read the entire story for free. And while sites with subscription-based business models will have to let Facebook users see individual articles without paying,

they'll be able to keep their paywalls mostly intact. If you click on a Wall Street Journal article via Facebook's news section, for example, you'll be able to read that one story, but if you click on a subsequent Wall Street Journal piece, you'll be asked to pay up. The program isn't supposed to diminish the presence of news in Facebook's main news feed, sources say, if your uncle shares a story about Donald Trump, you will probably still see it, end quote. And here's how Facebook itself describes the product offering. Today's stories, chosen by a team of journalists to catch you up on the news throughout the day.

Personalization based on the news you read, share, and follow so you can find new interests and topics. And Facebook news is fresh and interesting every time you open it. Topic sections to dive deeper into business, entertainment, health, science, and tech, and sports. Your subscriptions. a section for people who have linked their paid news subscriptions to their Facebook account and controls to hide articles, topics, and publishers you don't want to see, end quote. So, yeah, publishers, of course, are very wary of Facebook, who has burned them before, and not that long ago even, but Facebook swears that they are committed to being a true partner

to journalism, so we shall see. And quietly, I've been hearing whispers that Apple News has been a hit inside people's iPhones, though I'm not sure how much of a financial winner it has been for publishers, at least as of yet. This is odd. Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint have teamed up to announce the Cross-Carrier messaging initiative to bring RCS messaging to Android phones in the U.S. in 2020. Why is this odd?

Because it seems like they did this on their own without working with Google on it. quoting 9 to 5 Google. Google has been pushing RCS messaging for Android smartphones for the past couple of years now, but its efforts have seen a very slow rollout. Earlier this year, Google decided to leapfrog carriers and start rolling out RCS independently through the Google Messages app in some regions, but not in the United States. This new service will use the GSM's Rich Communication Service Standard, which is what RCS stands for, to create, quote, a single, seamless, interoperable

RCS experience across carriers, both in the U.S. and globally, end quote. Right now, it's unclear if this will be using the groundwork that Google has laid out for RCS or if it might require a different app. Actually, more on that in a second. Notably, there's no mention of Google in any of the carrier's press releases, end quote. Back to that separate app then. The Verge is reporting that the cross-carrier messaging initiative will be its own Android app. So again, suggesting that it won't use Google messages might be sort of a screw you to Google in a way. Also, the cross-carrier messaging initiative, quote, will likely be the new default messaging app for Android phones sold by those carriers. It will support all the usual RCS features like typing indicators, higher

resolution attachments, and better group chat. It should also be compatible with the global universal profile standard for RCS that has been adopted by other carriers around the world. Garland says the CCMI will also work with other companies interested in RCS to make sure their clients are interoperable as well, notably Samsung and Google. That should mean that people who prefer Android messages will be able to use that instead, but it sounds like there may be technical details to work out to make that happen, end quote. Absolutely fascinating. This looks like a grab by the carriers to take back some of the power from the Android ecosystem in a very interesting strategic way. But then again, people have tried to get RCS to work for years. No one could. And that's why Google tried to make things happen all on its own. It's just that now the carriers want to do it all on their own, seemingly. Dreaming of the good old days of the SMS Cash Bonanza carriers, as David Pierce tweeted, quote, so to sum up, this is a new messaging app made by the carriers without Google and Apple. Can't wait to use a crappy app to send messages to half my friends. And, quote, quote. More jockeying for position in the streaming wars. AT&T says HBO Max will be available for free to the 10 million or so AT&T customers in the U.S. who are already HBO subscribers when HBO Max

that new streaming service launches this spring. If I'm reading this correctly, that would mean DirecTV or AT&T wireless subscribers. So, for example, I think this is me because I subscribe to AT&T wireless and I subscribe to HBO via my Spectrum cable subscription. I'm not sure how they would work that out because some of my monthly HBO payment does go to Spectrum. But okay, if that's how it shakes out, I will be more than pleased. According to this piece from Reuters, AT&T aims to nab 80 million global subscribers and 50 million in the U.S. by 2025, which would be quite the feat if they were to pull it off. And maybe they will. If they're being this. aggressive quote, WarnerMedia hopes this service will get a boost in 2021 when it launches an

advertising supported option at a lower cost, Insider said. After it launches the ad-supported option, the company will add live programming on HBO Max. A long-term goal for HBO Max is to help AT&T retain wireless subscribers, according to executives, and also allow the company to pair wireless and direct TV satellite data to learn more about customers and in turn charge higher rates to advertisers, end quote. As the great Matthew Ball, tweeted, quote, HBO Max will not only substantially broaden HBO's style slash offering and increase its volume, but eventually have an ad-supported version and live TV, probably a Turner Sports add-on. So very literally, HBO Max isn't just going to be like TV, it's trying to

be TV itself, end quote, to which Twitter user J to the P-22 tweeted at him in response. So you're saying, it's not HBO. So it's TV. Amazon earnings. Q3 revenue of $70 billion up 24% year over year. Net income of $2.1 billion down from $2.9 billion in Q3 of 2018. AWS revenue of $9 billion up from $6.7 billion in Q3, 2018, with about 40% of that in profit, as always. So, AWS continues to grow. Revenue at Amazon Proper continues to grow, but Bezos and company have pulled back on the profitability a bit as they are want to do. Why? Well, they told you this was going to happen. Amazon spent $9.6 billion on shipping and fulfillment in Q3 up nearly 46% year over year. Again, why? Because they've been

trying hard to make Prime one-day delivery a reality, and that costs money. Bezos has never been shy about reinvesting in the business if he thinks he can improve it for payoffs down the road. quote, we are ramping up to make our 25th holiday season the best ever for Prime customers, with millions of products available for free one-day delivery, said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in a statement. Customers love the transition of Prime from two days to one day. They've already ordered billions of items with free one-day delivery this year. It's a big investment, and it's the right long-term decision for our customers.

And though it's counterintuitive, the fastest delivery speeds generate the least carbon emissions because these products ship from fulfillment centers very close to the customer. It simply becomes impractical to use air or long ground routes. Huge thanks to all the teams helping deliver for customers this holiday, end quote. Also worth noting that Amazon's other category, which is where its ads business lives, did $3.6 billion in revenue up 44% year over year, and subscription service revenue was up 34% year over year to $5 billion. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. All day, people have been sharing this Catherine Miller piece in BuzzFeed about how the

2010s as a decade have broken our sense of time. And this is one of those pieces where the writing is so good. I really can't summarize it. Well, it's the beauty of the words that leaves you with the overall impact. So please give it a try. but taking a stab at summarizing. In short, this is the decade where everything feels warped and tech rightfully seems to be getting a lot of the blame. Quote, we all know what's changed, what's really happened in the 2010s, it's beneath that bridge in Brooklyn, and it's at the

Trump rally in New Mexico, where exiting fans stopped to take selfies with the president speaking behind them in the distance. The man with the broken watch knows, the people who can't quit know, and so does Lana Del Rey. The internet is no longer a place. you go. Who we are on the phone and in the waking world have merged, end quote. Actually, yeah, speaking of that bridge and Brooklyn thing, come for the amazing writing and stay for the description of the tourist scrum that happens outside of my office every single day. Next, you don't have to page Dr. Freud to understand why I keep seeking out stories like this one. I just so desperately want the internet to be good, and it's so often bad.

But I'm an internet true believer, so I keep looking. This one I found in the Atlantic, and it's about how the moderators of the R-slash relationship subreddit have managed to keep that forum sane and surprisingly humane. And how is this done? As we keep coming back to time and again on this show, the secret seems to be keeping humans in charge, doing old-fashioned curation, not algorithmic nonsense. quote, you can imagine the conversation spiraling out of control on R slash relationships, but you rarely see it happen.

That's because of Anne, a pseudonymous 58-year-old woman who lives in California. She's been leading the moderation team for R-slash relationships for close to a decade, long before mainstream publication started running roundups of the subreddit's worst stories. And if you ask her, it's not even that hard to maintain civil discourse and community. The big secret? just delete stuff. Quote, we maintain the community by removing as much stuff as we remove, she told me flatly in a phone call stating what should be obvious to me, end quote. Next, you might not have heard of it, but Paytm is an Indian startup that has become a payment and commerce powerhouse in less than a decade.

If you haven't heard of Paytm, read the profile of the company and founder by CNN business, and get ready, because Paytm is ready and. for a big push to make a beachhead in the U.S. And now the machines are learning to smell. Wired seems to think so, with a piece describing how Google researchers are training neural networks to predict how a molecule smells based on its chemical structure. Quote, it's proven extremely difficult

to figure out a molecule's odor from its chemical structure, change or remove one atom or bond, and you can go from roses to rotten eggs, says Wilchko, who led the Google research team for the project. There have been previous attempts to use machine learning to detect patterns that make one molecule smell like garlic and another like Jasmine, end quote. But apparently the Google researchers think they're getting close to cracking it. I think we've talked about this before, but I can see both sides of the argument about tech

companies creating tech for the military. Some people get into tech to change the world and maybe they don't imagine or don't want the tech that they'd create to someday be turned into weapons. Believe me, I get that. But I'm also sympathetic to the idea that if you don't allow the technology you create to be used to keep your country strong militarily, at what point are you letting your country fall behind? The New York Times has another look at how the Pentagon continues to reach out to American tech companies, to partner with them more closely in order to maintain America's technological edge in the strategic sense. And by the way, speaking of technology breakthroughs. We had a big one this week. The MIT technology review has an interview

with Google's Sundar Pichai, talking about that achievement of so-called quantum supremacy this week. And finally, I know, I know, I just can't resist. One more piece on WeWork, a takedown of the whole situation by Bloomberg's Matt Levine is almost swiftian in its scathing sharpness. Let me give you two quotes. Quote, Newman did a certain sort of capitalism, one with some cachet at Harvard Business School, as well as anyone has ever done it. It's one thing to build a successful company that creates a lot of value and take some of that value for yourself. Newman created a company that destroyed value at a blistering pace and nonetheless extracted a billion dollars for himself. He lit $10 billion

of soft banks money on fire and then went back to them and demanded a 10% commission. What an absolute legend, end quote. And then this quote, suggesting that like the John Paulsons of the world that bet on the other side of the housing bubble correctly and by doing so corrected a huge market inefficiency and made themselves wealthy in the process, Newman, quote, spotted a bubble in venture subsidized, fast-growing, money-losing, capital-intensive, low-margin, tech-adjacent companies. noticed in particular that SoftBank seemed to be on the long side of that bubble and set himself up to profit on the other side. By raising money for his own Ultra Unicorn, by setting up the governments of that unicorn in a maximally self-interested way, and by selling and margining a bunch of his personal shares. When investors like SoftBank were frenziedly buying unicorn stock, he was frenzily selling it. He set himself up to profit from the collapse of the unicorn bubble and accelerated that collapse.

lessons were learned and he taught them. Now he's rich, end quote. Read it all and don't miss the imagined sadomasochistic roleplay between Newman and Masasson. You heard that right. S&M roleplay cannot recommend this piece highly enough. That is all for this week. Hey, weekend bonus episode coming at you tomorrow, Saturday. It's a good one.

One of my very favorite areas to talk about, as you know, tech history. enjoy that and talk to all of you again on Monday.