Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 03/12 – Is TikTok Coming For Instagram?

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 Tuesday, March 12th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. More app store changes from Apple will allow developers to offer apps via their website, in Europe only, of course. Some of you can file your taxes online for free starting today. Why Bitcoin has been breaking records and interesting AI raise is TikTok about to launch an Instagram competitor, though maybe the reason they need to do so is their user numbers are flatlining. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. announced App Store updates under the EU's DMA, including a web distribution tool to let developers

Starting point is 00:01:12 offer apps via their websites, launching in spring, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. First off, Apple says that app marketplaces can now offer a catalog of apps solely from the developer of that marketplace. Previously, Apple said that app marketplace operators were required to allow submissions from other developers. With this change, which is effective immediately, a company can operate an app marketplace and solely offer its own apps for download. For example, meta could operate an app marketplace in the European Union that exclusively offers its own apps for download. Under the initial guidelines, this was not allowed. Second, Apple is also giving developers a way to forgo the app marketplace route entirely. Later this spring, Apple will add a new web distribution feature that lets developers

Starting point is 00:01:55 distribute their iOS apps directly from their website. This means that iPhone users will be able to go to a developer's website and download an app without using the app store or any all- alternative app marketplace whatsoever. To use this feature, developers will have to opt into the new App Store business terms, which means they will pay the core technology fee of 50 cents for each annual install over $1 million in the past 12 months. Any app distributed through the web will still be required to meet Apple's notarization guidelines. Apps can only be installed from a website domain that the developer has registered in App Store Connect. Apple will also make a number of APIs available for integration with system functionality for developers.

Starting point is 00:02:34 Finally, Apple is giving developers more freedom around how they can link to an external webpage to complete a transaction for digital goods or services on an external web page. Apple says that developers can choose how to design promotions, discounts, and other deals, as opposed to using Apple's own templates and following its guidelines. This change is effective immediately, end quote. We finally did it, y'all, in the year 2024. You can now pay your taxes on the Internet. I know. Sounds crazy and futuristic.

Starting point is 00:03:09 So you can only do this in 12 U.S. states, and only about 19 million Americans can do it. But hey, innovation. Progress, quoting the Associated Press. The new system called direct file is a free online tool. Taxpayers in selected states who have very simple W-2s and claim a standard deduction may be eligible to use it this tax season to file their federal income taxes. The program will also offer a Spanish version, which will be available starting at 1 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday. The Treasury Department estimates that one-third of all federal income tax returns filed

Starting point is 00:03:43 could be prepared using direct file and that 19 million taxpayers may be eligible to use the tool this tax season. Certain taxpayers in Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, Wyoming, Arizona, Massachusetts, California, and New York can participate. Direct file can only be used to file federal income taxes. Taxpayers from states that require filing state taxes will need to do so separately. The direct file pilot is part of the IRS's effort to build out a new government service that could replace some taxpayers' use of commercial tax preparation software, such as TurboTax. It's meant to be simple and provides a step-by-step walkthrough of easy-to-answer questions, end quote.

Starting point is 00:04:29 You might have heard that Bitcoin blew past its all-time high yesterday, topping $72,000 a coin, but I wanted to make note of the reason probably why this is happening. In short, those Bitcoin ETFs are doing exactly what the Bitcoin bulls always said they would. Now that it's easily tradable on public markets, more people are participating in Bitcoin. Coding Bloomberg, a record $2.7 billion flowed into crypto assets last week, according to a Monday report from the Digital Asset Manager and Crypto Research firm. The bulk of the flows went toward Bitcoin, reads the report. Since the start of this year, about $10.3 billion has flowed into crypto assets,

Starting point is 00:05:09 close to the $10.6 billion of inflows recorded by the market over the entire course of 2021, according to the report by CoinShare's head of research, James Butterfill. That was also the year Bitcoin hit its last all-time high near $69,000. Spot Bitcoin ETF offerings, including from BlackRock and Fidelity investments, have attracted a majority of the inflows to crypto markets in 2024. They've also helped offset outsized outflows from grayscale investments Bitcoin ETF, since its conversion from a trust in January, end quote. Here's the thing, though, now that it is on public markets, this can happen to Bitcoin as well.

Starting point is 00:05:48 Record inflows into short Bitcoin instruments is happening at the same time. Airbnb will no longer let hosts use indoor security cameras starting April 30th, citing renter's privacy. Quoting The Verge, the Vacation Rental app previously let hosts install security cameras in so-called common areas of listings, including hallways, living rooms, and front doors. Airbnb required hosts to disclose the presence of security cameras in their listings and make them clearly visible, and it prohibited hosts from using cameras in bedrooms and bathrooms. But now hosts can't use indoor security cameras at all. The change comes after numerous reports of guests finding hidden cameras within their rental,

Starting point is 00:06:34 leading some vacation goers to scan their rooms for cameras. Airbnb's new policy also introduces new rules for outdoor security cameras and will now require hosts to disclose their use and locations before guests book a listing. Hosts can't use outdoor cams to keep tabs on indoor spaces either, nor can they use them in, quote, certain outdoor areas where there's a great expectation of privacy, such as an outdoor shower or sauna. Additionally, listings will have to disclose noise decibel monitors, which hosts might use to measure whether there's a party going on in their rental, something that Airbnb banned in 2022. These changes were made in consultation with our guests, hosts, and privacy experts,

Starting point is 00:07:10 and will continue to seek feedback to help ensure our policies work for our global community. Juniper Downs, Airbnb's head of community policy and partnership, says in a statement. Airbnb hosts will have until the end of April to remove these security cameras from inside their listings. If a guest reports the presence of an indoor camera after that, Airbnb says it will investigate and that it could remove the host's listing or account as a result, end quote. Interesting, Ray's time to continue that movie trope for a second day. co-pilots that can help you generate or complete code aren't cool. You know what would be cool? A coding assistant that could finish a whole project for you. Or wait, try this one on. Creating an image or video

Starting point is 00:07:57 from a few words of text prompts isn't cool. You know what would be cool generating an entire video game from text prompts. Say hello to Cognition AI, which has raised $21 million from Founders Fund, Elad Gill, and Moore for their new bot called Devin. Quoting Bloom, Devin is a software development assistant in the vein of co-pilot, which was built by GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI. But like a next-level software development assistant, instead of just offering coding suggestions and auto-completing some tasks, Devin can take on and finish an entire software project on its own. To put it to work, you give it a job. Create a website that maps all the Italian restaurants in Sydney, say, and the software performs a search to find the restaurants,

Starting point is 00:08:40 gets their addresses and contact information then builds and publishes a site displaying the information. As it works, Devin shows all the tasks it's performing and finds and fixes bugs on its own as it tests the code being written. One of the big claims cognition AI is making with Devin is that the company has hit on a breakthrough in a computer's ability to reason. Reasoning in AI speak means that a system can go beyond predicting the next word in a sentence or the next snippet in a line of code towards something more akin to thinking and rationalizing its way around problems. The argument in AI land is that reasoning is the next big thing that will advance the industry and lots of startups are making various boasts about their ability to do this type of work. In my test with the software, Devin could build a website from scratch in five to ten minutes,

Starting point is 00:09:26 and it managed to recreate a web-based version of Pong in about the same amount of time. I had to prompt it a couple times to improve the physics of the ball movement in the game and to make some cosmetic changes on its websites, all of which Devin, just fine and with a polite attitude. Celas Alberti, a computer scientist and co-founder of another stealth AI startup, of course, has tried Devin and says the technology is a leap forward. It's less like an assistant helping with code and more like a real worker doing its own thing, he says. This feels very different because it's an autonomous system that can do something for you, Alberti says. Devin excels at prototyping projects, fixing bugs, and displaying complex data in

Starting point is 00:10:05 graphical forms, according to Alberti. Most of the other assistants derail after four or five steps, but this maintains its state almost effortlessly through the whole job, he says. Cognition AI is hardly alone in its quest to build an AI coder. Last month, the startup magic AI raised more than $100 million from the venture capitalist team of Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman and others to create something Gross describes as a, quote, superhuman software engineer, end quote. TikTok app code apparently shows a separate TikTok photo. app in development, a potential Instagram rival that would sync with the main app and which may launch soon on iOS and Android, quoting Spandroid, who found this code, quote,

Starting point is 00:10:54 If you are a TikTok user, you may be well aware of a feature that allows users to post pictures as videos. They appear like regular videos in the user feed. You can share multiple photos, and users can slide through the pictures to see them, just like Instagram. This might not be the best way to share pictures with everyone, so TikTok decided. to create a completely new and separate app called TikTok Photos. Code strings clearly hint toward a new app called TikTok Photos and states about sharing photos to TikTok photos and reach other like-minded people who enjoy photo posts. TikTok will likely show all these strings on a page to the user, which will inform them about the new photo sharing platform and let them open

Starting point is 00:11:31 TikTok Photos or install TikTok Photos. The same code strings indicate syncing your posts from TikTok to TikTok Photos along with TikTok Photos will be launched soon. The post which TikTok is talking about here may be the old photos which you have posted on TikTok already and the new ones which you might post through the TikTok app instead of the TikTok Photos app. Although this will be optional as a user can turn off the photo sharing with a toggle, TikTok also wants you to gain more audience through the TikTok Photos app. And in the end, along with all these strings, TikTok app, also included the icon of the new TikTok Photos app, which have the same color scheme as the original TikTok app icon, end quote. Finally today, this piece,

Starting point is 00:12:17 from Business Insider is basically encapsulated in this paragraph, quote. After demolishing the competition from 2020 through the first half of 2022, TikTok's daily active user growth rate has collapsed. In the fourth quarter of 2023, the video service lagged Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. Yes, you read that right. The ancient big blue app grew faster than TikTok, end quote. So maybe that's why TikTok has been pushing long form videos and considering Instagram clones. I encourage you to check the piece out to see the charts illustrating this. But the piece goes on to speculate as to the reasons why this is happening and settles on something that has long been a pet theory of mine when it comes to social networks.

Starting point is 00:13:01 Quoting again, let's say early TikTok users were about 13 when they first downloaded the app in 2016 and 2017. Now these people are at least 20 years old. They have full-time jobs or are studying at college. For many, their parents no longer do their laundry, cook their meals, and ferry them to and from sports games, meetings, and other engagements. For readers who have not yet experienced this, it's called life. This stuff takes a lot of extra time, which leaves less for TikTok. This shows up in the data, too. TikTok's U.S. average monthly users between the ages of 18 and 24 declined by nearly 9% from 2022 to 2023, end quote. So here's my theory about all this, and stay with me for a second.

Starting point is 00:13:40 My theory is that social networks function in the same way that generations in popular music functioned, in the 20th century. In other words, a cohort of people can age out. Like the kids rocking out to Little Richard and Elvis in 1956 and 57 have this whole era of early rock and roll that then gets subsumed by the British invasion and the Beatles about seven years later. The early rocker generation was the generation born during World War II, but the generation who goes crazy for the Beatles in 1964 is the true sweet spot of the baby boomer cohort. Elvis seemed passe. to them. And they're teeny boppers at the time. They love them some boy bands. But by 1967, 68, that same generation is entering college, so the music gets more adult. I want to hold your hand becomes the

Starting point is 00:14:29 white album and Jimmy Hendricks and harder stuff. But then that generation gets jobs and starts families, and the music becomes Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles. So then the generation coming up after them says F that. And by 1976, 77, you get punk music. Heck, I can try. I can try. the generational turnover of music tastes in my own life. The hair metal of my childhood turned into Nirvana, but I can chart the exact moment. A new generation, the millennials were coming up behind us. Hanson and Mbop signaled that things like Soundgarden were passe to be replaced by the likes of the Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys. That same generation would age into things like early Kanye. So let's plot out a similar trajectory with social media. Social media is like the

Starting point is 00:15:16 music of your childhood in a way. It reflects your worldview as much as it forms you, and then you age into something else. There was a GeoCities generation, different from a MySpace generation, but both of which aged into a Facebook generation. Instagram allowed that generation to age gracefully into a different kind of social media for a different stage in life, while Snapchat came up from below for the slightly younger cohort, and then TikTok captured the generation after that. Now, I know the analogy doesn't exactly line up one-to-one for one thing. Facebook, you could argue, became the platonic ideal of social media for all generations, maybe especially the boomers. And TikTok is such a different thing than Facebook in form and function that maybe it's not even a

Starting point is 00:15:59 direct lineage. Although, then again, is the DNA of TikTok in what MySpace was briefly? Anywho, point is, here's my advice for someone who wants to make a mint as a venture capitalist specializing in social media. Whenever one new social social, media platform makes it big. Wait five to seven years and start looking for the thing that the next generation of kids will adopt in reaction to the previous thing. Invest in that. Then wait for another five to seven years, rinse and repeat. Just like all those A&R folks like Seymour Stein and Clive Davis made their fortunes picking the next big sound in popular music for decades. Given the timeline of when it came to prominence and the user numbers just described, we might be in store for

Starting point is 00:16:41 a TikTok replacement any moment now. That pretty much qualifies as an end of episode, Brian Rant, right? Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 03/12 – Is TikTok Coming For Instagram?

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