Dozen Worthy Reads 📰 (No. 169)
This week : Facebook/Antitrust, Shopify audiences, Github copilot, Facebook bulletin, tech legal hiring surge, Neeva, Instagram and creators, Apple and Privacy, Longer Tiktok's and more ...
Hi All,
I hope you all are doing well and welcome to Dozen Worthy Reads. A newsletter where I talk about the most interesting things about tech that I read the past couple of weeks or write about tech happenings. You can sign up here or just read on …
First off, my apologies for not publishing last week. It was a busy week! On that note Coil, where I work, is looking for a Senior Product Designer.Reach out to me if this interests you or if you’d like to learn more.
Let's get into this week’s news:
Facebook wins the battle?
If you have been following Facebook’s Antitrust battle, you will recall the lawsuit filed by the FTC late last year. The FTC sued Facebook that the company is illegally monopolizing “personal social networking” anti competitively. Well Judge James Boasberg threw the lawsuit out, for the time being anyway with great questions. The Judge questioned two key things 1) What is “personal social networking” and 2) what is monopolizing. Judge Boasberg alluded to the fact that the FTC could not expect the court to believe that there was an implied monopoly. Matt Stoller has a brilliant read on exactly what happened. The key thing to note here is that the Judge followed the law to a T. The FTC has 30 days to amend their lawsuit and file. More generally, under Lina Khan, the FTC has and will continue to file many more lawsuits. The grand tech party might be coming to an end.
Shopify Audiences
Amazon has a huge ads business today. At 10+% of the total US Digital Ad Market share it is expected to continue to grow. Well, Shopify was not gonna sit back and watch the fun so they created a product called Shopify Audiences which is a ads data exchange network which will use aggregated data around purchases from any Shopify website to generate custom audiences for another merchant to run ads on FB, Snap, Twitter as custom or lookalike audiences. This would (theoretically, anyway) result in better performing ads and lower CPC’s. Tanay Jaipuria has a great read on how this works. The Anti-Amazon alliance is well and growing!
Computers that code. Brilliantly cool application of GPT3.
MSFT owned Github released a paid product called Copilot that would give developers suggestions and code snippets based on a large pool of code. This is a great application of using code to build code!
Facebook Bulletin : Newsletters and Gates
You all are obviously familiar with Substack. Facebook recently released their version of Substack called Facebook bulletin. It's unlikely that Facebook will have a 0% revshare model forever. Facebook will also let the author own their distribution lists. Big Tech has been a bunch of walled gardens forever but now they seem to be relenting to keep engagement (and ads revenue) on their platforms. I can imagine at some point FB running ads on “free” blogs. Obviously Facebook keeps users on the platform for longer and more $. This also helps Facebook fight against paid news.
When the lawsuits come you hire .. lawyers
Big Tech is bracing for the antitrust lawsuit barrage. Per NYTimes its boom time for antitrust lawyers. While MSFT has not been so far directly targeted, they expect it and are beefing up their own legal team. MSFT has been here before and they know all too well the energy needed to sustain these lawsuits (as well as deep coffers) both of which they have.
Neeva : Experimenting with paid search models
Neeva releases a paid search engine (I’m hoping to write about this soon). Yes you read that right. Paid. Search. Engine. If privacy is a rich man’s game then only the people who can afford the $5 a month will be able to use Neeva leaving the rest of the world stuck with selling personal data for information. Would you pay $5 a month for a search engine?
Instagram wants a bite of the creator economy
Instagram is developing a version of Twitter’s “Super Follows”. With this they are going deeper into creator monetization tools. This is all very interesting. Since the beginning of Social Media time Big Tech has gotten free content and that model is not sustainable. This is one way to try and keep creators back on their platforms and not migrating to either other platforms or worse still setting up their own presence somewhere else.
How far can Apple take the privacy narrative?
EU’s Vestager warns Apple against using “privacy” as the reason to control the app store. Sideloading (which very few people bother with) or using another app store (if defaults matter this is a moot point) but the important thing here is that regulators are realizing that this excuse is getting old.
Andy Jassy takes the reins
As Jassy takes the reins from Bezos he has to deal with attrition at the highest levels. I’d written about Jassy previously when the announcement was made
Binge watch TikTok for longer
TikTok is rolling out longer videos. I am not too happy about this TBH, the shorter videos work so well with my diminished attention capacity. TikTok is obviously trying to outdo Insta and YT before Insta and YT outdo TikTok. Adam Mosseri has said that Instagram is becoming more serious about video content. It remains to be seen if this will work well or will the app look like the warfield that Facebook has become with product and feature bloat? Skeptical here!
The internet is rotting
A great read from Jonathan Zittrain that talks about how the internet is rotting because we don’t have any gatekeepers. Unintended consequences. Web pages can be changed, deleted, and companies can go out of existence. Who should be responsible for the Internet?
The Tyranny of spreadsheets
Spreadsheets have been used for decades and most people take the data they see for granted (well we even do that with apps). The question that comes to my mind is whether a good analyst will question the data again and again. This article had a great history of spreadsheets, numbers, double-entry bookkeeping.
The creator economy comes for gaming
With Roblox’s great run, we’re going to see more and more UGC within games (as well as games). Amazon also just open sourced their game engine, Lumberyard this weekThe Creator Economy Comes for Gaming - Future
Great reads from around the internet
How zero knowledge proofs will change the internet fundamentally : How the Coming Privacy Layer Will Fix the Broken Web - Future
The dark side of Noom (a fitness app). Technology can’t solve every problem : The Dark Side of Noom - Glassy
Metaverse Primer : A Framework for The Metaverse — MatthewBall.vc
The Ultrafast delivery market : Ultrafast Delivery: The $28B Market to Build the On-Demand Bodega
Thank you for reading. Stay safe, be well! If you enjoyed reading this please consider sharing with a friend or two (or sign up here if you came across this or were forwarded this)