Tech Brew Ride Home - Friday, May 11, 2018 - A Facebook Cryptocurrency?

Episode Date: May 11, 2018

Is a Facebook cryptocurrency really possible? Can Snapchat redesign its way back into users' hearts? What's going on at Symantec? Klout strikes out. And the Weekend Longreads. Stories from: @alexeheath, @mekosoff Tweets: @om, @manjusrii, @sfiegerman Links:"It Was Cataclysmic": Can Snapchat Survive Its Redesign? (Vanity Fair)IAB says online advertising grew to $88B last year — more spending than TV (TechCrunch) Longreads:Don't Skype Me: How Microsoft Turned Consumers Against a Beloved Brand (Bloomberg)How to Make Your Open Office Less Annoying (The Atlantic)The 15 People Who Keep Wikipedia’s Editors From Killing Each Other (WSJ)The Wealthy Are Hoarding $10 Billion of Bitcoin in Bunkers (Bloomberg)Supercomputers are driving a revolution in hurricane forecasting (Ars Technica) 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 TechMeme right home for Friday, May 11th, 2018. Today is a Facebook cryptocurrency really possible? Can Snapchat redesign its way back into users' hearts?

Clout strikes out and the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So I was skeptical of this yesterday, and I maybe still am just a little bit, but Cheddar was reporting this morning that sources have told it, that Facebook is indeed exploring the idea of creating its own cryptocurrency to facilitate payments among its users. Facebook reportedly started studying blockchain almost a year ago when a member of its corporate development team Morgan Bellar started investigating blockchain uses in social media contexts. Cheddar says that at the time, Belor was the only employee

studying decentralized ledgers. There's no word if Bellar will beller will be able to beller. specifically be a part of the small crypto team that Facebook announced would be headed by David Marcus, but according to Cheddar's unnamed source, quote, they are very serious about it. Still, even if this rumor pans out, the cheddar piece notes that a Facebook coin, or whatever it will be called, would probably take years to materialize. Of course, Facebook does have a history with digital currencies. Remember Facebook credits, launched back in two, 2009. Those sort of faded away with the likes of Farmville and Facebook shut down credits two years later.

But the obvious joke here would be that if Facebook is a nation state, it would be the most populous in the world. So why not issue its own currency? It's been a tough few weeks for Snap, and a lot of people have put blame for Snap's woes squarely at the feet of a redesign of the Snapchat app that the company rolled out some months ago. Now, users being unhappy with a redesign is nothing new, but occasionally a redesign can be nearly fatal. See the history of dig.com. So when the Snapchat redesign

started catching flack from famous celebrities and led 1.2 million people to sign a petition against the changes, Snap probably assumed the controversy would die down eventually. Well, maybe not. Snapchat today began rolling out a redesign to the redesign for users of iOS, which undoes some of the previous changes that so upset people. Snaps and chats are back in chronological order again, and stories from your friends, they're back on the right-hand side of the app.

Your friends' stories will still remain separate from branded content, though. But Snap now has a separate subscriptions feed to make it easier to search for stories from brands and publishers. Note that this rollout is happening right now on iOS. and I couldn't find any word about when it would be coming to Android. Of course, this design U-turn is not solely about users finally getting their way. Among the details of Snap's recent disastrous earnings report came the fact that Snap was actually making less money per user. So the redesign wasn't just irking people,

it was actually making it harder for brands to advertise on Snapchat as well. But let's just say the redesign was a washout for everybody. According to new data from UGov brand index, consumer opinion of SNAP among 18 to 34-year-olds in America fell a whopping 73% since the redesign. Young people's opinions or feelings about Snapchat fell, and their satisfaction with Snapchat as a service also fell. So this was not a case of a tiny but vocal minority being unhappy.

This was most of Snapchat's youthful user base rebelling. So Snap is in a tough problem. position now. The impetus behind the redesign was the widespread belief that its original design was too confusing for most people, especially us olds. And if Snapchat wanted to reach the mainstream, it needed to change things up a bit. Snap's CEO Evan Spiegel also wanted to separate personal and public content. Quote, one of the complaints we've heard about social media is that photos and videos from your friends are mixed in with content from publishers and creators and influencers. Spiegel explained at the time of the change, your friends, your friends are

aren't content, their relationships. That's why today we're separating the social from the media, end quote. But by doing so, it turned out Spiegel made nobody happy, not the users and not the publishers and creators that pay the bills. So now Snap has angered its core users and hasn't made any headway in attracting new ones. Oh, and advertisers are also unhappy, leading to Snap making less money. The discontent from the advertiser side of the equation, at least, is captured in a great piece in vanity fair, quoting from it. Employees at four different publishers told me that unique views, subscriber numbers, and time spent, both metrics of engagement for their Discover additions, were cut in half after the redesign. It was cataclysmic in terms of engagement, one source told me.

We saw Uniques drop by over 50%, but worse was we saw we saw, saw the new subscriber numbers absolutely plummet. So not only were fewer people viewing the content, no one was signing up to get the page higher up in their feed, end quote. The piece ends with an advertiser who has a Discover channel on Snapchat quoted as saying, I would like to be optimistic, and the fact is that this continues to be a pretty successful platform for us. My impression, though, is that the new redesign might be too little, too late. They've done quite a lot to alienate readers and users. Companies like Snap actually have to try pretty hard to screw up a good thing.

As I've mentioned recently, the reason that the big internet companies have recently been on a tear, at least according to their stock prices and their earnings reports, is because they're basically sitting smack in front of a tidal wave of history. People's time and attention have moved online and the global advertising industry is following. It didn't make a lot of headlines, but this was proven out yesterday when the IAB, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, released its yearly internet advertising revenue report. For the first time in history, digital advertising accounted for more revenue than money spent on broadcast and cable TV ads in a single year. Total online advertising spend reached $88 billion in 2017, a 21% increase from a year earlier. television ads came in at 70.1 billion, a decline of 3% year over year.

Social media revenue generally, by the way, the money made by companies like Snapchat, came in at $22.2 billion, representing 36% growth. And it's pretty clear that all this digital growth is coming from advertisers, moving their money from offline to on. Pricewaterhouse Coopers prepares the report every year for the IAB, and PWC partner David Silverman told TechCrunch, quote, I'd say the cannibalization that has occurred over time is eyeballs shifting away from traditional media. This is an area that's going to continue to really drive growth,

the convergence of media and particularly video. At some point, people only watched TV at home on their living room couch. Now people watch it on any device anywhere, end quote. So, quite a historical milestone. Want a bit of trivia? Total spending on online advertising only crossed $1 billion a year for the first time in 1997. So it took exactly 20 years to go from $1 billion to $88 billion. The moves by tech companies to attempt to stay ahead of the upcoming GDPR law continue apace.

Google this morning updated its privacy policies, as and Gadget headlined it, so you can actually understand them. Google didn't make any substantive policy changes per se, but it did change the wording for clarity and to make improvements to the controls available for users to manage data. This is because a key part of GDPR says that companies must provide, quote, clear and transparent information about data usage. Google is making changes because it wants to continue to do business in Europe

without facing enormous fines. But other companies are taking a look at GDPR and basically just saying, We Fold. The latest to do so was lithium technologies, the owner of the website and social media ranking tool Clout. Clout announced that it will shut down operations May 25th. What's so special about May 25th? That's the day GDPR goes into effect. Lithium bought Clout in 2014 for $200 million.

And the official reason lithium is, giving for the shutdown is that clout is no longer compatible with the company's long-term strategies. But a lot of people are putting two and two together. On Twitter, Belinda Barnett quoted the official closure announcement, Clout as a standalone service is not aligned with our long-term strategy, end quote. Translation. We couldn't monetize it, and the general data protection regulation stuff makes it too hard to. So, bye.

Clout was founded in 2008 and was famous for creating a clout score, a number between one and 100 that supposedly reflected how influential you were on social media. It reportedly had around 100 million users at its peak, though at least anecdotally. I don't think people used it very regularly. I think we all just signed up to see what our score was, and then we're like, okay, whatever. I'll leave the eulogizing, though, to CNN's senior tech reporter Seth Feigerman. Quote, for a brief, wonderful moment, a generation of internet users was able to judge itself, not based on the content of their character, but by a seemingly arbitrary number generated by a pointless website

fueled by millions in venture capital. And a dream. So this is problematic. Shares of Symantec, maker of Norton antivirus, fell more than 35% at points today in, trading after the software and security company warned that its annual report to shareholders would be delayed because of an internal investigation. Apparently, the audit committee on Symantec's board of directors has launched an internal investigation into concerns raised by a former employee.

Quote, the investigation is in its early stages and the company cannot predict the duration or outcome of the investigation, Symantex said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange commission. quote, the company's financial results and guidance may be subject to change based on the outcome of the audit committee investigation. The company said it is unlikely. The probe will be finished in time for it to file its annual report for the fiscal year ended March 30th, 2018, in a, quote, timely manner. I've been watching the headlines all afternoon to see if any details trickled out about what exactly this former employee has alleged or what the investigation is looking into. but at the time of this recording,

all we know is summed up by cybersecurity manager Kevin Beaumont Gossi the Dog on Twitter who said, somebody whistleblowing at Symantec. So it's honestly been a bit of a slow news Friday, so rather than troll for some thin story that I'll try to blow up into something more substantial,

I'd rather not waste your time. Let's just get into the weekend Longreads suggestions proper. First up, Bloomberg has a piece about the general consensus that Skype has basically become an unholy, borderline unusable mess over the last few years, or as O'Mallek has said, quote, a turd of the highest quality. The piece generally paints a picture of a once almost priceless asset

that has gotten muddled as the strategic worth of the asset has continually shifted for owner Microsoft. Quoting from the piece, Microsoft has paid a price for prioritizing corporations over consumers, the former seek robust security, search, and the ability to host town halls. The latter, ease of use, and decent call quality. Inevitably, the complexity of the corporate software crowds out the simplicity consumers prefer. Skype has tried to be all things to all people, and almost all those things are executed better elsewhere, says Matthew Colnaine, a user experience and content strategists at the UK's Open University.

Speaking of modern day digital annoyances, if you work in tech, there's a very good chance you work in an office with an open floor plan. The Atlantic has a piece up about the myriad ways people are trying to fix the flaws inherent in open workplaces so that you know you can try to get some work done. Quoting, science might have the answer, sort of, in the form of chairs shaped like eggs and ceilings that bounce your own squawks back at you. forcing you to quiet down through a trick of acoustic psychology. This is all part of the mostly fruitless search for a technology that might make open offices less miserable. For example, some researchers are looking into natural white noise sounds like flowing water to muffle office sounds or large felt isolation cones that would hang from the ceiling and provide temporary privacy, end quote. The piece notes that around 70% of offices in the U.S. are now open concepts.

And a lot of the joking on Twitter about this piece has noted that there's a relatively simple solution to all this. Wall Street Journal has a piece up about what it's calling the Wikipedia Supreme Court, the final arbiter that adjudicates major disagreements when they spring up among editors at the crowdsourced encyclopedia. It's a panel known as ARBCOM, and it has actually accumulated a corpus of nearly two decades of what amounts to settled Wikipedia case. law. Quoting from the piece, there are things that wouldn't start an argument anywhere else that can still start an argument on Wikipedia, says Ira

Matetsky, a Manhattan litigator, and the unpaid panel's longest serving current member. Among them, capitalization rules and whether individual television episodes deserve encyclopedia entries, end quote. I think they do, by the way. Don't take those away.

Bloomberg has a piece up about the underground bunkers and vaults where the wealthy keep their Bitcoin holding, something called cold storage, where you can keep your private keys in a physical place and keep them offline so hackers can't get to them. It might sound insane if you don't know anything about Bitcoin, but if you do, it's frankly a fairly logical thing to do if you're sitting on, say, a billion dollars worth of cryptocurrency.

Finally, I found this one really fascinating. Ars Technica has a piece up about how supercomputers have actually made hurricane forecasting way more accurate. Quoting from the piece, based on new data from the National Hurricane Center for Hurricanes based in the Atlantic Basin, the average track error for a five-day forecast fell to 155 nautical miles in 2017. That is, the location predicted by the Hurricane Center for a given storm was just 155 nautical miles away from the actual position of the storm five days later. What's incredible about this is that back in 1998, this was the average error for a two-day track forecast.

As always, links to all these pieces are in the show notes. That's all for this week, everybody. Happy Mother's Day to you mothers out there. I've been your host, Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. And check out Techmeme.com anytime day or night for all the latest tech news headlines. Talk to you next week.