Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 12/04 - Larry and Sergey Into The Sunset

Episode Date: December 4, 2019

Larry and Sergey ride their Segway’s off into the sunset, a new entrant in the streaming wars, more news from the re:Invent conference, YouTube says it’s algorithm change is working and the year that was, in the world of Reddit. Sponsors: Metalab Capterra.com/ride GiveWell.org/ridehome Links: A letter from Larry and Sergey (The Keyword) GOOGLE’S THIRD ERA (The Verge) Plex launches a free, ad-supported streaming service in over 200 countries (TechCrunch) With Outposts, Local Zones, and Verizon, AWS looks beyond the cloud (Mostly Cloudy) YouTube says viewers are spending less time watching conspiracy videos. But many still do. (The Washington Post) Instagram to collect ages in leap for youth safety, alcohol ads (Reuters) Reddit's monthly active user base grew 30% to reach 430M in 2019 (TechCrunch) Subreddit That Hates on ‘Game of Thrones’ Is the Most Popular TV Subreddit of 2019 (The Wrap) 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. TechMeme Right Home is sponsored all this week by MetaLab. Their slogan is MetaLab, We Make Interfaces. For a decade, MetaLab has helped some of the world's top companies and entrepreneurs build products that millions of people use every day. You probably didn't realize it at the time, but odds are you've used an app that they've helped build or design. I'm talking about apps like Slack, Coinbase, Facebook Messenger, Oculus, Lonely Planet, and many more. There's plenty of examples of innovative companies that MetaLab has worked with. And again this week, I'll be taking you through some of the case studies, their greatest hits, if you will. But MetaLab wants to bring their unique design philosophy to your project.

Let them take your brainstorm and turn it into the next billion dollar app from Idea sketched on the back of a napkin to a final shipped product. Check them out at MetaLab.co. That's MetaLab.com. And when you get in touch, as always, tell them Brian sent you. Welcome to the Techmeme right home for Wednesday, December 4th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Larry and Sergey ride their segways off into the sunset. A new entrant in the streaming wars. More news from the Reinvent conference. YouTube says its algorithm change is working and the year that was in the world of Reddit. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech.

Late yesterday, Sergey Brin and Larry Page posted a blog post announcing well, let me just read it to you, quote. With Alphabet now well established, and Google and the other bets operating effectively as independent companies, it's the natural time to simplify our management structure. We've never been ones to hold on to management roles when we think there's a better way to run the company. And Alphabet and Google no longer need two CEOs and a president. Going forward, Sundar Pachai will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet. He will be the executive resource. responsible and accountable for leading Google and managing Alphabet's investments in our portfolio

of other bets. We are deeply committed to Google and Alphabet for the long term and will remain actively involved as board members, shareholders, and co-founders. In addition, we plan to continue talking with Sundar regularly, especially on topics we're passionate about, end quote. So the founders stepping down from day-to-day roles at Google slash Alphabet, this was both a surprise and also not at all a surprise. For a while now, it's been an open secret in the valley that the Google guys were basically checked out. Even Larry Page, who was ostensibly the Alphabet CEO, even as Sundar Pichai, was the CEO of Google. And in a way, nothing really changes, depending on how you look at things. Larry and Sergei still control Alphabet by way of their 51%

ownership of the super voting stock. They sit on the board of directors, executive committee, so they still tell Sundar what to do and can fire him if they so choose. But at the same time, this is quite an important change of the Guard. And it comes at a super interesting time for Alphabet, as we've been discussing recently. The Google Civil War, the antitrust scrutiny, the various executive scandals. Here's Casey Newton in his newsletter this morning, quote. One popular theory was that they are fleeing something. Some speculated that they are fleeing a board investigation into Google's troubled history of inappropriate relationships between Google's mostly male C-suite and their subordinates. If you don't know the name Amanda Rosenberg,

you should. Or maybe they are fleeing a period of historic worker unrest at Google. Others told me they must be leaving because of the ongoing antitrust investigations into the company, end quote. Later, He pulls in an apt watchman reference, quote, It's hard not to look at Larry Page's life and see a little Dr. Manhattan in him. A young scientist becomes a titan of industry in an accidental collision of technology and timing, sending him into such rarefied air that he all but loses interest in his former world. The rest of us shout questions at him forever, but we're just shouting into the void, end quote. Indeed, this kind of reminds me of what an ex-Gougler explained to me years ago around the time that Alphabet was first set up.

You have to understand, this person told me, Larry and Sergey really do want to change the world. There's a reason why that sentiment is not just a cliche. For all of the amazing impact that Google Search and Search advertising has had, for all the ways that Google Alphabet is an insanely good business, on some level, Larry and Sergey were always disappointed that, in essence, they ended up just reinventing the advertising wheel. 99% of what Google slash Alphabet does is advertising. Thus, that was the explanation at the time for Alphabet. Yes, it was a way of streamlining the operations and organizing those other bets, but those other bets were there to keep Larry and Sergey interested.

Maybe the bets just haven't paid off soon enough. I tell people all the time, I love starting businesses. I hate running them. I get bored once things actually work out and run smoothly. In essence, it's been 20 years of that now at Google. So maybe this is a bit of that, or maybe it's just time. But also, and this is worth pointing out, quoting Dieter Bone at the verge, Sundar Pichai's rise through Google's ranks was well deserved,

because he has calmly and consistently delivered good products, from the very first Google toolbar to Chrome to Google's online apps, to ordering its scattered hardware efforts. He steadily took on more of Google's user-facing products until eventually he took on the job of CEO. All of the stuff Google made was innovative and smart, but also directionless and unpolished. But Chai's job was to take Google's products out of permanent beta.

At the same time, he's had to ensure future technologies, especially those based on AI, turned into real products. From a purely product perspective, which of course includes the lucrative ad products that make the whole thing go, Pichai has been very successful. Pichai is not a corporate suit. Google is still Google and will still toss out weird ideas and still do weird stuff to the web and Android all the time, but there's a sense of direction in the past few years that was lacking before, end quote. As we'll talk about on a weekend bonus episode this weekend, now is certainly the time when Google could use someone with a strong sense of direction at the helm, because boy howdy, is it looking like that company is going to be facing perhaps the biggest challenges of its life in the coming years. So in that sense, maybe it really was past time for this sort of change to happen. New entrant into the streaming wars.

Plex today launched a free ad-supported streaming service in around 220 countries, featuring thousands of movies and shows from studios like MGM, Warner Brothers, Lionsgate, and Legendary. The back catalog of movies is impressive, things like the usual suspects, the Terminator, Apocalypse Now, Rain Man, Teen Wolf. This is not just, you know, bottom of the barrel scraps stuff. This is stuff you might actually want to watch. Think of this as Plex's answer to the Roku channel. And remember, it's totally free because ads, quoting Sarah Perez in TechCrunch. Today, the service will feature both pre-roll ads and traditional ad breaks,

but Plex promises an ad load that's 50 to 60% less than what you'd otherwise find on broadcast television. Currently, Plex is leveraging ad network partnerships to sell those ads, but says it may move into direct sales in 2020. The service itself lives right within Plex's media organization software. This app has evolved over the years to become more than just a do-it-yourself media player for home media. Today, Plex organizes your own media collections alongside podcasts, web shows, streaming news, and music, courtesy of a title partnership. The free ad-supported content will now appear on the Plex sidebar under a new Movies and TV heading. In this section, the content is organized in a somewhat Netflix-style layout with image thumbnails for easy browsing and hubs for finding popular trending or genre-specific content, for example.

Flex has also introduced several editorially curated hubs as well as those personalized to the user based on their cross-platform cross-content watch history. In total, there are around 70 different hubs that could potentially show up here, Flex says, end quote. More headlines from the Reinvent conference. Amazon has unveiled local zones. small data centers far from main AWS regions and made the availability of the previously announced outposts general, quoting mostly cloudy, quote, customers can run outposts in two configurations, an AWS native configuration that uses the cloud leader's software as the primary interface and a VMware cloud for AWS configuration that will become available in early 2020,

Jesse said. Think of outposts as training wheels for the cloud designed for customers that want to run some of their applications on hardware they control, but also want to be able to take advantage of cloud services, as makes sense. Local zones unveiled for the first time Tuesday are a little different. AWS operates a huge network of data center regions around the world, but any globally distributed network is subject to latency issues as the speed of light is a gating factor for some applications that require near real-time feedback. With local zones, AWS is extending its reach by building small data centers based around the AWS Outposts design in strategic locations where it doesn't have a main region. For example, the first local zone will arrive

in Los Angeles, which is far enough away from AWS's main West Coast data center operations in Oregon to cause problems for some customers. Bloomberg reported Tuesday that Disney animators were interested in AWS outpost because the round-trip from Southern California to Eastern Oregon was taking too long. Local zones could help address those issues as well. Also announced yesterday, SageMaker Studio, a web-based IDE for machine learning workflows that offers ways to organize, search, and share projects, data sets, code, and more. And fraud detector, an AI-powered service to find anomalies and transactions, an enterprise search, tool and something called code guru, a service to help spot computationally expensive code. A little bit of credit where due department mixed with big only if true department.

You might remember that last year, YouTube said it was tweaking its algorithms, the recommendation algorithms to stop suggesting what it called borderline content, content like conspiracy theories. Well, YouTube wants you to know that since doing so, it says that viewers are spending 70% less time on that content, but they didn't provide much more in the way of details to verify this. Quote, YouTube said it was pushing users towards video from more reliable news sources pointing to Fox News and Brazilian radio outfit Joven Pan as examples. The company said that for searches for ongoing news events such as Brexit, 93% of the top 10 recommended videos are from, creators YouTube deems, quote, high authority. The company didn't disclose what sample size it used for that data or how many people click on the top videos under a given search or in what order. To help direct viewers to more reliable information, YouTube said it had been showing users

snippets of text news articles that it verifies as accurate, particularly following breaking news events or displaying information panels that provide additional context. That type of information will appear to viewers watching videos pushing people to eschew vaccines, according to the blog post. YouTube said it relies on a number of factors to determine reliability, including the amount of time a given video is watched, how many times a video is clicked on, as well as likes and dislikes. It also turns to about 10,000 contract workers around the world who review content, which helps train its software to automate the process, end quote. And meaningful change is coming to Instagram.

That app says it will now require birth dates. from new users in order to improve safety features for minors, but also to better target ads for age-restricted products. Until today, all you had to do to set up an Instagram account was say that you were at least 13 years old. Now, quoting Reuters, Instagram said advertisers were not the driving force for the new requirements. Gambling and birth control are among other types of ads restricted to older audiences by Instagram policies and laws. The policy change could help stave off passage of costly child safety and data privacy regulations as lawmakers and family safety groups in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere

criticize the app for exposing children to inappropriate material. The birth date requirement is the latest step Instagram has taken to move away from longstanding principles such as anonymity that had distinguished it from Facebook's namesake app. Understanding how old people are is quite important to the work we're doing not only to create age-appropriate experiences, but to live. live up to our longstanding rule not to allow access to young people. Instagram's head of product, Vishal Shah said in an interview with Reuters. He declined to specify age-based features in testing, but said age could be the basis for

recommended privacy settings or in-app education about staying safe online. Birth dates will not be visible to other users, end quote. Finally, today, as they tend to do every year, Reddit has published its 2019 retrospective. Headline numbers, 430 million monthly active users, which is up 30% year over year, with 199 million posts this year, 1.7 billion comments and 32 billion upvotes, according TechCrunch. The most upvoted posts this year referenced Reddit's fundraise led by China's Tencent, which in February led Reddit's $300 million series D, valuing the site at $3 billion. Users were concerned at the time the investment would lead to Chinese censorship, which led them to flood the site with images that would be forbidden in China.

One of these, a photo of Tankman at Tiananmen Square, then became the most upvoted post with 228,000 upvotes. Meanwhile, the most upvoted AMA, asked me anything post on the site, was with Bill Gates, which received 110,000 upvotes. Reddit also noted a number of trends across its over 100,000 active communities. including sizable increases in its top 50 beauty and style communities, which grew more than 63% and 52% year-over-year respectively. To some extent, these increases were driven by the blogger beautyfews. For example, the R-slash Beauty Guru Chatter community jumped by 87% year-over-year. The R-slash-skin addiction community was the most popular beauty community reaching over a million subscribers, Reddit says. Wedding-focused Reddit also grew with R-slash-Weddings,

under 10K, up by 109%, and R-slash Bridezillas up by 852% year over year. Family and parenting communities grew by 87% year-over-year. The top 50 food communities grew 35% year-over-year, and several spirits-focused communities grew, like R-slash tequila, up 99%, R-slash whiskey, up 52%. R-r-slash vodka, up 44%, R-slash-Burban, 27%. And R-slash-wine-making, 16%. The top 50 fitness and wellness communities grew by 30%. percent, end quote. Oh, and the most popular Game of Thrones subreddit was a subreddit that likes to drag Game of Thrones, quoting the rap.

According to Reddit's 2019 Year in Review report, which was released Wednesday, the Free Folk subreddit is the most popular of the platform's TV communities with the Game of Thrones subreddit coming in at number two for the year. The free folk community is well known for, among other things, openly criticizing Game of Thrones creators, Dan Weiss. and David Benioff, and posting slash discussing leaks, whereas the straight GOT subreddit is usually the show's biggest cheerleader and not as spoiler-friendly. Freefolk is also known for raising more than $130,000 for Amelia Clark's Same You charity. The rest of Reddit's top 10 TV focus pages include in order, The Bachelor, RuPaul's Drag Race, Big Brother, 90-day fiancé, teen mom OG, teen mom two, Dunder Mifflin, which is the office subreddit, Survivor, and Bravo's Real Housewives franchise, end quote. Of course, I'd remind you that R-slash ride home exists. It's the subreddit for this show

where people tip me stories that could end up being part of the show, but also where listeners like you sit back and commiserate with other listeners like you and debate the stuff that we talk about every day. Check that out if you never have. ride home. Talk to you tomorrow.