Burying the URL →

“Today, a Canary build of Google Chrome removed something kind of important from the browser: the URL.”

I don't think that this is such a big deal. Most people don't type out full URLs - they start entering the name of the site they want and either search or let the auto-complete fill out the rest.

Marco Arment:

“This change is probably a decent usability choice. It’s certainly self-serving, in that it’s clearly the best thing for Google: conceptually, you are no longer using the web. You are using Google full-time.”

Bingo.

Business systems inspired by business culture

Two competing views on 'Chorus', Vox Media's much sung (sorry) CMS.

Leslie Kaufman, for the New York Times:

“In this high-tech universe, Vox Media’s content management system — which even has its own name, Chorus, and is used to publish all the company’s websites — has earned recognition. It is credited with having a toolset that allows journalists to edit and illustrate their copy in dramatic fashion, promote their work on social media, and interact with readers — all seamlessly and intuitively.”

Sounds great, but I'm inclined to agree with Joshua Benton, writing for Nieman Lab:

“...I get a little frustrated when Vox’s big edge is portrayed as Chorus, its content management system. Chorus is very nice! Most newspapers’ CMSes are terrible! And any CMS designed primarily for digital is likely to be better for digital publishing than one designed first for print. The loving coverage Chorus gets would seem to imply that, if only every news organization had a Chorus, they’d all be getting venture capital thrown their way too.

But Vox’s edge really isn’t in a particular piece of software. It’s in people and culture. The CMS is an outcome of those two things, not the driver of them.”

Apple tinted glasses

Amazon recently bought Comixology, a digital comic-book platform. Comixology has (had?) a popular iOS iPad app that allowed readers to purchase new comics directly from their iPad. Unsurprisingly, less than a month after purchasing Comixology the iOS app has been updated to remove the in-app purchasing feature, in line with Amazon's iOS Kindle app.

What do you think John Gruber thought about this?

A petulant reaction, but not a surprising one.

Why did Amazon do this? Because Apple takes 30% of the price of all in-app purchases. The 30% figure is a high one, but Apple is entitled to make rules as it pleases on its own platform - to best benefit their business - and clearly for app developers it is worth sacrificing 30% of their revenue in order to access the huge iOS market. I'm sure that is how Gruber would defend the 30% rule, and I would agree with him. Amazon, however, are equally entitled to do what they believe will best benefit their business, and clearly they did not want to share revenue with one of their rivals.

When Apple kicked Google's Maps and Youtube apps out of the default iOS app collection, Gruber applauded Apple protecting its business. Amazon here is only doing the same. The net result of both decisions? Diminished experience for the user.

Why Movie Streaming Sites So Fail To Satisfy

Farhad Manjoo, for The New York Times:

“In the music business, Napster’s vision eventually became a reality. Today, with services like Spotify and Rdio, you can pay a monthly fee to listen to whatever you want, whenever you want. But in the movie and TV business, such a glorious future isn’t in the offing anytime soon.”

There's nothing new in this piece, but it does drive home the depressing state of affairs in online video streaming. Manjoo puts the problems mainly down to "windowing":

“The main reason you won’t see a comprehensive, all-you-can-eat movie plan soon is something called “windowing,” the entertainment industry term for the staggered way movies are released to various outlets.”

This is probably true to an extent, but I think he misses - or at least understates - another important aspect of this debate. The film studios actively, consciously, deliberately do not want Netflix to succeed. They do not want Netflix to have new or popular films. They do not want Netflix to be the ‘go-to’ place for the best TV shows.This isn’t (just) because Netflix cannot or will not offer them enough money to be moved further up the "windowing" priority list. It’s because were Netflix to be the ‘go-to’ place for TV shows, were it to have the newest and most popular films, were it to succeed, then it would have too much power, would grow too big, would have the upper-hand. It would remove the studios from the (public-facing) picture. It would do to film and TV as Amazon did to books.

Manjoo uses Spotify as a comparison to show what Netflix could and should be, and indeed the music industry has had a large part to play in creating the situation Manjoo describes. The reason Netflix is not the Spotify of video is because the music industry is five years ahead of the film and TV production business. That is not to say, though, that in five years we will have a Spotify for films. Piracy hit music before it did video, because the bandwidth required to download a song is far less than it is to download a feature-length movie. This meant that record labels were under threat much earlier than film studios, and has given the studios the opportunity to avoid the mistakes made by the music industry, an opportunity that they have seized.

The rise of internet piracy and the consequent and speedy decline in CD sales sent the music industry into tail-spin. Desperate, the record labels grabbed a hold of the life-belts thrown to them by services like iTunes and Spotify.

Life-belts of sorts. By so readily allowing their content to be sold through Spotify (and similar services) they have relinquished the upper-hand. Now if Spotify don’t have your song, it will be hard to make it a hit.

The film studios are clearly eager to avoid the rock-and-hard-place situation that befell the record labels.

In Praise of Unfairness →

“Back when I started out as an equity analyst, in the days when mobile operators were sexy disruptive growth companies, my boss was very fond of comparing the number of customers per employee at fixed and mobile networks. People from fixed networks used to complain about this comparison, saying that it was unfair, because they needed lots of people to maintain the copper line network that a mobile network didn’t need because it didn’t have one.

And my boss would reply “yes, it’s an unfair comparison, but it’s a relevant one”.”

This story reminded me of a time when I was involved in a project comparing a live product with a prototype. Some involved were heavily invested in the prototype succeeding, and argued that it was not fair to test the usability of the prototype against the live product that people already knew how to use. Most of us will remember being frustrated as children to have been told that “life isn’t fair”, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Often the reality of the situation is that it is unfair. As Evans says, that’s what makes it interesting.

Stratechery 2.0 →

Speaking of Ben Thompson, he had some big news today. Following his three-part blog series on future publishing models, he has relaunched his site Stratechery with a ‘freemium’ model. There will be tiered subscriptions offering extra content, the ability to comment and meet-up opportunities with other subscribers. His twice-weekly posts will remain free.

In his own words:

“At Stratechery, I want to build a site that enables me to focus on writing in a way benefits not just myself but my readers as well. To do that I’ve focused on building a freemium model that will allow me to focus on writing, grow my audience, and reward those who want to join the conversation, get more content, or create a community.”

Talk about putting your money where your mouth is.

Legal Publishing: A Hole Bloggers Can't Fill

I linked recently to Ben Thompson’s post ‘The End of Average’, detailing his views on the future of ‘news’. That post was part of a 3 article series by Thompson on “the state of journalism in the internet age”. In a post on LexBlog, Kevin O’Keefe links to the final part of that series, 'Newspapers are Dead; Long Live Journalism'. O’Keefe then applies Thompson’s analysis to the world of legal publishing, coming up with his own hypothesis:

“Insight and commentary on the law (secondary law) will be a small endeavor. A single lawyer or small group of lawyers will blog on a narrow niche they practice in. The tighter the niche the better. Distribution will be free and open. Social publishing via sharing by others across social media will play as big a role as publishing on the blog itself. More general treatises and journals that have served as secondary law will decline in importance.

Monetization for legal blogs will come from the fact that law blogs are free and open. Lawyers will enhance their reputations and build relationships like never before. Becoming a “go to” lawyer by virtue of bogging enables lawyers to realize sizable earnings. There will be no need to monetize legal commentary behind subscription based paywalls of large legal publishers.

Legal news and reporting, with a focus on investigative reporting, will likely be done by smaller streamlined news organizations. LexisNexis’ Law360 and an evolving Law.com will play a roll. You’ll also see original reporting from blogs and legal networks such as LexBlog’s LXBN.”

I think I agree with most of those points. In the wider academic community (particularly scientific journals) there is an increasing drive towards open-access publishing, and it is hard to imagine the legal world not following, sooner or later.

I do however have two problems with O’Keefe’s conclusions.

First, lawyers value authority above all. They are - entirely understandably - scared of being wrong, because the stakes are so often so high. They therefore need to be sure that what they are advising their clients is correct, and if it isn’t, they need to be able to point a finger. That is what law firms pay companies like LexisNexis and Westlaw for - to be right, and if not right, then to be a scapegoat.

Second, O’Keefe appears to be considering only the market for legal commentary and journals. In the UK (and likely very soon in the US), there is a rapidly accelerating demand for practical legal guidance. This type of content - checklists, flowcharts, precedents - is necessarily basic and therefore quite boring to write. Why would any of O’Keefe’s expert, “narrow niche” bloggers want to churn out ‘how-to’ documents unless they were being directly remunerated for doing so? Whilst there is a demand for these basic type documents, legal bloggers won’t feel the customer need because - in O’Keefe’s market vision - they won’t have any ‘customers’.

I think it is highly likely that O’Keefe is right, and that some aspects of legal publishing will become freely available - a change driven by the legal blogging community. Indeed, this is a change that is already well progressed -  it is not so long ago that you had to pay to view government legislation, and BAILLI are doing their best to make cases free too. I think it very likely that the market for closed, costly legal journals will shrink, to be replaced by expert bloggers writing as a means to boost business development. I just don’t think that the change will be as cataclysmic as either O’Keefe or Thompson suggest.

Disclaimer:

This post has been sitting in my drafts folder for a while, and I’ve been struggling to write it because it has a very direct bearing on my actual grown-up job. I was worried that I was part of the industry Kevin talks about, and that therefore my view was a biased one. I’ve thought a lot about it and decided that, as far as I can tell, I’m not being biased at all, and that actually my view is made more well informed by my work, not less.

How Gmail Happened

 Harry McCracken, for Time, with a fun story about the inception of Gmail (now 10 years old):

“If you wanted to pick a single date to mark the beginning of the modern era of the web, you could do a lot worse than choosing Thursday, April 1, 2004, the day Gmail launched.

Scuttlebutt that Google was about to offer a free email service had leaked out the day before: Here’s John Markoff of the New York Times reporting on it at the time. But the idea of the search kingpin doing email was still startling, and the alleged storage capacity of 1GB—500 times what Microsoft’s Hotmail offered—seemed downright implausible. So when Google issued a press release date-stamped April 1, an awful lot of people briefly took it to be a really good hoax. (Including me.)

Gmail turned out to be real, and revolutionary. And a decade’s worth of perspective only makes it look more momentous.

The first true landmark service to emerge from Google since its search engine debuted in 1998, Gmail didn’t just blow away Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, the dominant free webmail services of the day. With its vast storage, zippy interface, instant search and other advanced features, it may have been the first major cloud-based app that was capable of replacing conventional PC software, not just complementing it.”

When it first came out, I remember being particularly excited at how quick and clean the interface was. Amazing how little the design has changed since then:

Gmail as it appeared in 2004. Screenshot by Kevin Fox, Gmail designer

Gmail as it appears now. Screenshot by some guy

US Supreme Court to decide whether software can be patented →

This is a tough debate. On the one hand, it is clear why software should be subject to patents just as other ‘inventions’ are. Perfect illustration is the controversy around the clones of the game ‘Threes’ (which is totally great, by the way). Why would anyone put in hard work to come up with an innovative product if they know that it will be immediately and shamelessly ripped off? It is the patent system that protects against that happening.

The problem is that patents are too powerful. Companies can acquire (often extremely vague) patents and use them to extract money from other companies too small to adequately defend themselves. These are called ‘patent trolls’.

But it’s not just the ‘trolls’ that make the US patent system counter-productive:

“Daniel Nazer, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that restrictions on patent eligibility would lead to greater innovation because companies would be forced to come up with new products instead of relying on patent protections.

”That’s how people get cheaper, better products,” he said. “You stay a step ahead.””

That’s exactly right. Vague patents rigorously enforced harm competition. Even lousy products can be patented, and this deters more motivated companies from making a better competing product, lest it be subject to a patent challenge.

jhxmti has it right in the comments:

“If you want to remain the best, you should be striving to remain the best by virtue of your good product, not by virtue of destroying other good products.”

The End of Average

I'm a little late to this, by Ben Thompson, but it is exactly what I think too:

“Most of what I read is the best there is to read on any given subject. The trash is few and far between, and the average equally rare.

This, of course, is made possible by the Internet. No longer are my reading choices constrained by time and especially place. Why should I pick up the Wisconsin State Journal – or the Taipei Times – when I can read Nate Silver, Ezra Klein, Bill Simmons, and the myriad other links served up by Twitter? I, and everyone else interested in news, politics, or sports, can read the best with less effort – and cost – than it ever took to read the merely average just a few short years ago.”

It's great to see these 'personality-driven sites', as Thompson calls them, springing up more and more. One of my first ports of call in the morning are to check Marco Arment and John Gruber's personal sites, because I want to hear their personal opinions, not just get 'tech' news. The sustainability of that personal site model, though, appears to be under threat in the light of Arment's recent sponsorship revelations.

I only wish that John Siracusa would write more...

Jelly

Biz Stone (Twitter co-founder), talking to Vanity Fair about his vision for Jelly, a new kind of search engine:

“The key difference between now and 1999 is that now a vast percentage of the global population has a mobile device, and because humans are linked to one another through their devices, Stone explained, there’s a very good chance someone you know, or someone who knows someone you know, has the answer to a question. Stone used ants to further describe Jelly’s basic assumption, “sometimes there’s a whole greater than the sum of its parts, like an ant colony can be genius, while an individual ant is an idiot, right?””

Ending sponsorships →

Thought that this was a really interesting (and honest) statement by Marco Arment, about sponsorships on his site:

“They were always very easy to sell, staying booked solid for months ahead of time. But in the last few months, sponsor interest vanished, despite my traffic and subscriber numbers remaining high. I asked around, and they all said the same thing: they stopped seeing enough clickthroughs.”

This is probably quite worrying for a lot of the Apple geek writers out there that make (or try to make) a living out of blogs like Marco's. I thought John Gruber might have linked to it, but clearly he is having sponsorship problems of his own:

Is Amazon bad for books? →

Great, great article by George Packer for The New Yorker which is also long, long. It's a comprehensive look at Amazon's business ethos and at that of Jeff Bezos, the company's founder.

Much of the article focuses on Amazon's history - particularly on its dealings with the publishing industry - but there was one future-looking section that particularly caught my eye: 

“In December, the company patented “anticipatory shipping,” which will use your shopping data to put items that you don’t yet know you want to buy, but will soon enough, on a truck or in a warehouse near you.”

So helpful it's creepy.

How pCell works, and why it's a bigger deal than anyone realises

If you haven't heard about pCell, here's an explanation from the creators to get you up to speed. In short, it means having full signal on your mobile phone all of the time.

However Imran Akbar noticed something else:

“But here’s the real doozie: The last slide of the presentation at Columbia says the following:

- pCell technology is not just limited to communications
the “synthesis of a tiny radio-wave bubble in real time software opens up a new wave of applications”
- the really radical announcements are yet to come
- hint: we showed one in the intro video”

What in the world is he talking about?”

If you're short on time, jump straight to his conclusion. Genuinely incredible.

The Mystery of Flight MH370 Just Got Bigger →

Josh Voorhees, for Slate:

“But the huge uncertainty about where the plane was headed, and why it apparently continued flying so long without working transponders, has raised theories among investigators that the aircraft may have been commandeered for a reason that appears unclear to U.S. authorities. Some of those theories have been laid out to national security officials and senior personnel from various U.S. agencies, according to one person familiar with the matter. At one briefing, according to this person, officials were told investigators are actively pursuing the notion that the plane was diverted “with the intention of using it later for another purpose.””

Absolutely terrifying.

Arms Wide Open →

Interesting story about the 'Cristo Redentor' statue in Rio, Brazil, a landmark that will be increasingly splashed around in a World Cup year.

The reason I'm linking, though, is because the article is visually great, published by 'BBC Beta'. The piece is full of massive photos that morph cleverly as you scroll through the article, as well as an interesting 'table of contents' style navigation along the top of the page.

What's Wrong with the Web →

Tony Haile, for Time:

“Here’s where we started to go wrong: In 1994, a former direct mail marketer called Ken McCarthy came up with the clickthrough as the measure of ad performance on the web. From that moment on, the click became the defining action of advertising on the web. The click’s natural dominance built huge companies like Google and promised a whole new world for advertising where ads could be directly tied to consumer action.

However, the click had some unfortunate side effects. It flooded the web with spam, linkbait, painful design and tricks that treated users like lab rats. Where TV asked for your undivided attention, the web didn’t care as long as you went click, click, click.”

None of this should be a surprise to anyone who, you know, uses the internet.

Apple maps: how Google lost when everyone thought it had won →

Charles Arthur, for The Guardian:

“Apple’s maps have turned out to be a hit with iPhone and iPad users in the US - despite the roasting that they were given when they first appeared in September 2012.

But Google - which was kicked off the iPhone after it refused to give Apple access to its voice-driven turn-by-turn map navigation - has lost nearly 23m mobile users in the US as a result.”

This is such a disingenuous opening paragraph. Apple's Maps app has hardly been a 'hit', as Arthur himself concedes. Tim Cook, Apple CEO, was forced to make a public apology, such was the extent of the mistakes in their map data. Indeed, he fired the man responsible for the Maps app soon after the release.

What is more, whilst Google was no doubt "kicked off the iPhone" for not providing turn-by-turn directions, it is unfair to present this as the only side of the story. Apple too was being witholding, refusing to allow Google to collect more data from the app. Arthur wants to be part of the Apple blogger crowd, but he should remember that he is not writing for his own site, nor for a trashy, tech news, internet-only publication.

The reason that Apple Maps is used more often than Google's app is simply down to integration. Apple is well known for saving all of the best treats for itself (*cough* same-as-Google-and-turn-by-turn-directions *cough*), and this includes making its own apps the non-negotiable default. If a user is sent a link in an email, it will open in Safari. If a user taps an email address in an text message, it will open in Mail. And if an address or postcode is tapped then it will open in Maps. Mystery solved.