ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► Will someone say something funny first and then that can be our opener and then we'll start.

00:00:03 ◼   ► Oh, I'll get right on that.

00:00:04 ◼   ► So this is another case where we got a bunch of feedback that I thought talked about something

00:00:11 ◼   ► we had covered in the previous show, but apparently we did not do a good enough job.

00:00:14 ◼   ► So if we don't get the job done the first time, we'll go back and try again.

00:00:16 ◼   ► This was about video games and the topic came up when both of you had said that you had played

00:00:24 ◼   ► video games when you were younger and didn't play them as much now. We talked about why that might

00:00:28 ◼   ► be and I talked about the average age of a gamer and then we brought out stats from the

00:00:32 ◼   ► ESA I think on the last show and talked all about this and a couple people wrote in to

00:00:37 ◼   ► talk about the difference between people who play video games and people who are self-identified

00:00:42 ◼   ► gamers. Some people wrote in to say oh I just play a couple iOS games now and then I certainly

00:00:48 ◼   ► wouldn't call myself a gamer. One of the best ones I thought was Joe Lyon who wrote in to

00:00:51 ◼   ► say this is a section from what he wrote having put in hundreds or thousands of hours playing

00:00:57 ◼   ► games over the past couple of years, I by no means consider myself a gamer. So, I mean,

00:01:02 ◼   ► a lot of people put in the argument in terms of time, like, "Oh, I just play once in

00:01:05 ◼   ► a while, not a big deal." But this guy plays games all the time, on his own accounts,

00:01:09 ◼   ► hundreds of thousands of hours, like in playing during the commute, just obsessively playing

00:01:13 ◼   ► games, finishing games or whatever, but does not consider himself a gamer. And the discussion

00:01:19 ◼   ► was not about what I would call a self-identified gamer. It was just about the idea that, you know,

00:01:25 ◼   ► You and Marco said most people you know like they thought it was a common thing that like you played games when you're younger and didn't

00:01:30 ◼   ► Play them anymore as an adult

00:01:32 ◼   ► Self-identified gamer is a whole other ball of wax. I mean as many people point out including Joe Lyon

00:01:37 ◼   ► Like I watch TV all the time. Do I identify as a television watcher?

00:01:41 ◼   ► No, it's not it's not like it's not the games you play. It's not how long you play them

00:01:46 ◼   ► Identity is entirely up to the person. I would call myself a self-identified like I would call myself a gamer

00:01:52 ◼   ► But it's for reasons entirely outside

00:01:54 ◼   ► How many games I play how long I play them I guarantee I play games less for less amount of clock time

00:01:59 ◼   ► Then then almost anybody else who considers themselves a gamer

00:02:03 ◼   ► So that's more of an identity in a cultural type thing

00:02:06 ◼   ► It has nothing to do with that and it certainly has nothing to do with what we were discussing which was

00:02:09 ◼   ► Is it common for people to play a lot of games when young and stop when they're older and by going through the stats on?

00:02:15 ◼   ► gamers we discovered that that's not the case that

00:02:19 ◼   ► In fact, there was one of the stats people it was like twice as many adult women play games as males under 18

00:02:26 ◼   ► And the average game was like our age

00:02:29 ◼   ► So it's very clear that the majority of the people who are playing games today did not stop playing games when they got older. Oh

00:02:36 ◼   ► Hang on a second. I've got to go and say goodnight to one of my children, but I'll be back

00:02:41 ◼   ► You can you can you can just vamp for a second and make a nice cut point and I'll add something in but

00:02:48 ◼   ► This is something I have to do. I'll be right back

00:02:50 ◼   ► All right, well now you're never gonna be able to make a reasonable edit out of this but tough luck

00:03:01 ◼   ► What was I saying before I left? I believe you had finished that follow-up bit. So we're moving on to other follow-up

00:03:06 ◼   ► Yeah

00:03:07 ◼   ► I guess that's all I had to say about video games

00:03:08 ◼   ► but basically that the thing the message that we failed to get across was that

00:03:12 ◼   ► The entire discussion was not about self-identified gamers

00:03:15 ◼   ► That was not part of--

00:03:17 ◼   ► this feedback from Joe Lyon said that we needed to define

00:03:19 ◼   ► the terms better.

00:03:20 ◼   ► If we did a bad job of that, I'm sorry.

00:03:21 ◼   ► But we were not talking about self-identify.

00:03:23 ◼   ► We were just talking about the phenomenon

00:03:24 ◼   ► on is it common for people to play games when they're young

00:03:27 ◼   ► and then stop playing them when they're older?

00:03:29 ◼   ► Regardless of during any of those times

00:03:31 ◼   ► whether they consider themselves self-identified gamers--

00:03:33 ◼   ► and like I said, I don't think that tag has anything

00:03:36 ◼   ► to do with any criteria you might bring up

00:03:38 ◼   ► that you could measure, like how long you play,

00:03:40 ◼   ► what types of games you play, how obsessed you are

00:03:42 ◼   ► with games, anything like that.

00:03:44 ◼   ► you choose to identify yourself, you choose if that's some part of your identity. Again,

00:03:48 ◼   ► with television, I don't, part of my identity is not that I watch television, but part of my

00:03:52 ◼   ► identity is that I play games. Why? Because that's what I choose to do, and that's up to

00:03:55 ◼   ► each individual person, but that's not what we were talking about. All right, so we also got a

00:04:00 ◼   ► lot of feedback about our discussion, what was really more your guys' discussion, about

00:04:06 ◼   ► ComiXology and in-app purchase and Apple and who's at fault, who's on first, what's on second,

00:04:12 ◼   ► I don't know, it's on third. And a lot of people wrote in to compare your arguments, John, to the arguments—

00:04:20 ◼   ► I hope I got this right, I think I got this right—against net neutrality.

00:04:24 ◼   ► So this whole discussion about a fast lien on the internet and, oh, if Netflix is pumping a crud load of data across

00:04:31 ◼   ► Comcast pipes, then you know what, Netflix should probably have a discount or maybe even pay more depending on who you ask.

00:04:38 ◼   ► And so can you address how this is either the same or different than net neutrality?

00:04:42 ◼   ► Yeah, it doesn't really matter whether the people who are sending the feedback were for

00:04:46 ◼   ► or against net neutrality. And in fact, I think what they wanted to say was that all

00:04:51 ◼   ► those people who sent that feedback, I would guess the real debate they want to have is

00:04:54 ◼   ► about net neutrality. Because regardless of which side they are on the Apple thing, what

00:05:00 ◼   ► they're trying to say is this Apple situation is similar to net neutrality. And if you don't

00:05:04 ◼   ► have the same opinion about both situations, you're being inconsistent. Therefore, you're

00:05:07 ◼   ► wrong about one of those two things. And it doesn't really matter if they think we're

00:05:10 ◼   ► were wrong about Apple and comixology, if they think we're wrong about net neutrality

00:05:13 ◼   ► or whatever, they just wanted to see some consistency. And I didn't, like a lot of this

00:05:17 ◼   ► was over Twitter, I didn't have time to send back tweets that explain this whole big long

00:05:21 ◼   ► thing, although I tried to a couple times on Twitter before I realized it was pointless.

00:05:25 ◼   ► And for emails, I figured we would address it on the show because like one or two responses

00:05:29 ◼   ► came in, you're like, all right, no big deal. And one or two Twitter, but it was super common

00:05:33 ◼   ► that everybody was like, you're going to give, you're saying that Apple should cut a deal

00:05:38 ◼   ► with Amazon and how is that any different

00:05:42 ◼   ► than the ISPs cutting a deal with Netflix or Amazon

00:05:46 ◼   ► or anything like that.

00:05:47 ◼   ► And I think it's different in a couple of ways.

00:05:50 ◼   ► Some very important and some less important.

00:05:52 ◼   ► Well, you can decide which ones you find more convincing.

00:05:55 ◼   ► The biggest and most important difference

00:05:57 ◼   ► in what I tried to express on Twitter,

00:05:59 ◼   ► 'cause I thought, oh, here's a succinct way to express this,

00:06:02 ◼   ► is Apple doesn't sell access to the internet.

00:06:04 ◼   ► That was not convincing to anybody.

00:06:06 ◼   ► is like, so what? What's different about the internet and Apple selling access to its customers?

00:06:12 ◼   ► You give us a 30% cut, we let you use our payment system and get access to our customers.

00:06:17 ◼   ► And I wasn't about to try to explain in 140 characters what the difference between access

00:06:22 ◼   ► to Apple's customers and the internet is, but I will try to do so now. The internet

00:06:30 ◼   ► is it's a series of tubes. Yeah. By definition, there is one internet. Anything you connect

00:06:39 ◼   ► to the internet becomes part of the internet. The internet is the way we are all connected

00:06:42 ◼   ► to each other. There are not multiple internets. There's not one, there's not two, there's

00:06:46 ◼   ► not five. If you made a second one and it connected to the internet, it would by definition

00:06:50 ◼   ► become part of the internet because every place in the internet is reachable to every

00:06:54 ◼   ► other place, plus or minus net and all this other stuff. But that's like conceptually,

00:06:57 ◼   ► what the internet is. it's how we're all connected to each other. that is very

00:07:03 ◼   ► different than getting access to the customers of the second place cell phone

00:07:10 ◼   ► you know platform or any other type of thing like that. like maybe if Android

00:07:17 ◼   ► didn't exist and I guess if Microsoft didn't also exist you would have a

00:07:21 ◼   ► little bit more of an argument but I would say that even in that case the

00:07:25 ◼   ► possibility of something coming up that would be similar to iOS, like if Android didn't

00:07:30 ◼   ► exist you're like, well, Google could enter the phone space and make their own operating

00:07:33 ◼   ► system and platform and do something, or Apple could, or Amazon could, or Microsoft could,

00:07:39 ◼   ► right? No one is saying, well, what about when the competitor to the internet comes

00:07:42 ◼   ► along? Because this whole internet thing could be replaced by just some hungry competitor

00:07:46 ◼   ► comes up with the new internet, the internet 2, which is the thing that exists, look it

00:07:49 ◼   ► up. But anyway, like... Does it still? Yeah, I'm sure it does, and I'm sure it will eventually

00:07:53 ◼   ► be connected to the internet. What about the IPv6 internet? We'll come to replace the old

00:07:56 ◼   ► internet. That is not much of a possibility, I don't think, happening these days. The internet

00:08:01 ◼   ► access is, the internet itself is a very, is perhaps the only unique singular different

00:08:08 ◼   ► than everything else in many, many different ways. I don't think it's unreasonable to say

00:08:15 ◼   ► that the internet is so different from the iOS app store that it doesn't apply. But if

00:08:19 ◼   ► you don't find that convincing, they're basically the same thing. It's a bunch of people connected

00:08:23 ◼   ► through tubes to each other. It should be the same. The second part of this thing, and

00:08:28 ◼   ► this gets into the nitty-gritty details of net neutrality, is in the United States, your

00:08:33 ◼   ► choice for getting internet access are much more limited than your choice for a cell phone

00:08:37 ◼   ► provider. Pretty much anyone in the United States can get an iPhone, or has the opportunity

00:08:41 ◼   ► to. If they assume they can afford an iPhone, they can get a phone that has T-Mobile prepaid,

00:08:46 ◼   ► they can get an Android phone, you can get one of my dumb phones. Your choice is for

00:08:51 ◼   ► cell phone, tablet, so on and so forth. No matter where you live in the United States,

00:08:55 ◼   ► you have many different choices. In a lot of places in the United States, you only have one

00:09:00 ◼   ► choice for internet access. And some of those places where you might have two choices soon,

00:09:03 ◼   ► you will have one choice because there is constant consolidation. A lot of these places

00:09:07 ◼   ► have local monopolies. And the reason they have local monopolies leads to the third reason. In

00:09:12 ◼   ► the United States anyway, I don't know about the rest of the world, but in the United States,

00:09:15 ◼   ► a lot of our internet infrastructure was built essentially with taxpayer dollars. These

00:09:20 ◼   ► broadband companies got billions of dollars in tax breaks in exchange for, "Okay, well,

00:09:24 ◼   ► we'll give you these tax breaks, so we'll help you out here," the government said, "as

00:09:28 ◼   ► long as you build out your networks to provide more people with access," because we as the

00:09:31 ◼   ► government had decided it's for the good of the nation that more people have broadband

00:09:34 ◼   ► access, therefore here is a billion dollar write-off for you to continue to expand your

00:09:39 ◼   ► networks.

00:09:40 ◼   ► So these networks that the ISPs have, some of whom are a monopoly in their particular

00:09:44 ◼   ► local markets, weren't just built by those ISPs.

00:09:47 ◼   ► were built with taxpayer money and have been operating for many years in a way

00:09:52 ◼   ► that is neutral to that where they don't decide you know who's trafficably sped

00:09:56 ◼   ► up and slowed down based on who will pay them. All of this I think makes the

00:10:01 ◼   ► internet, it's complicated by the fact that of course the iOS App Store runs

00:10:05 ◼   ► over the internet and if you want to think about that you can think well okay

00:10:08 ◼   ► what if Comcast decides they want 40% of every purchase through the App Store

00:10:11 ◼   ► everyone would go nuts right? I think they are extremely different situations

00:10:16 ◼   ► And I don't see any inconsistency in saying the internet this strange singular thing that in the United States

00:10:22 ◼   ► Is only accessible to people through a single broadband ISP in many locations and has been

00:10:27 ◼   ► Partially paid for by taxpayer money and has operated in this sort of common carrier like situation for many many years

00:10:34 ◼   ► Should be treated differently than one vendors App Store

00:10:39 ◼   ► And I put a link in the we'll put it in the show notes to this recent

00:10:44 ◼   ► Vi-heart video trying to explain that neutrality which is kind of a boring weird thing to understand

00:10:49 ◼   ► but she does these neat little things where she draws on a notepad and talks over it and

00:10:51 ◼   ► Maybe it won't make it any clearer, but at least you'll be entertained

00:10:55 ◼   ► The fun thing about her example is as Casey alluded to is thinking he watched the video

00:10:59 ◼   ► The example she gives the way she tries to draw an analogy is that the customer who uses a lot like Netflix, you know

00:11:06 ◼   ► It's like wow a huge amount of the traffic going through these isps is Netflix the isp

00:11:11 ◼   ► Example she uses the ISPs go to the Netflix and say, you know, 30% our traffic is from your stupid movies

00:11:16 ◼   ► Why don't you pay us some extra money?

00:11:18 ◼   ► Otherwise, we'll throttle all your bandwidth which is exactly the opposite of the situation that I was suggesting for Amazon or at the App Store

00:11:24 ◼   ► In general, which is hey, it looks like you're selling 20 billion dollars worth of comic books

00:11:28 ◼   ► Would you guys like a volume discount?

00:11:30 ◼   ► We'll take less of a percentage if you if you sell more because we want people to drive more and more business through our store

00:11:36 ◼   ► I

00:11:37 ◼   ► Don't think the direction you're turning the dollar makes so much of a difference

00:11:40 ◼   ► The bottom line is I think Apple should have the right to set whatever terms it wants for

00:11:44 ◼   ► the people who sell through its app store.

00:11:46 ◼   ► And I don't think there's anything magical about it being 30% for everybody.

00:11:49 ◼   ► And as many people pointed out, it's not 30% for everybody.

00:11:51 ◼   ► If you sell a commercial physical product through the app store, you don't have to pay

00:11:55 ◼   ► Apple anything.

00:11:56 ◼   ► Why?

00:11:57 ◼   ► Because Apple makes the rules of their app store.

00:11:59 ◼   ► It's already not uniform.

00:12:00 ◼   ► And all I was suggesting was continue to make it not uniform.

00:12:03 ◼   ► Come up with a different rate.

00:12:04 ◼   ► Take a larger, smaller percentage based on volume, based on whatever the heck you want

00:12:07 ◼   ► to do.

00:12:09 ◼   ► Unlike the net neutrality thing, if Apple gives Amazon a break and bad things start

00:12:13 ◼   ► to happen, they can change their mind.

00:12:17 ◼   ► Apple can at any time change the terms and they control their own app store.

00:12:20 ◼   ► It is a private thing.

00:12:21 ◼   ► Yes, it happens over the internet, but it is definitely a private thing.

00:12:25 ◼   ► And the only other two points I want to make on the Apple Comixology thing, which I didn't

00:12:28 ◼   ► get a chance to put in the show is, for the most part, the only feedback we got were the

00:12:34 ◼   ► net neutrality ones and people telling me that the app store has to stay the way it

00:12:37 ◼   ► otherwise bad things will happen. Oh, and the third one was that Apple shouldn't budge because

00:12:42 ◼   ► Amazon's in the wrong and why should Apple change anything? It's Apple's right to do whatever it

00:12:45 ◼   ► wants blah blah blah. Nobody wrote me in to say that it was better for users this way, that not

00:12:52 ◼   ► being able to buy comic books through the ComiXology app is better for users. Nobody

00:12:55 ◼   ► argued that, which makes me think that that is a pretty slam dunk. Everyone agrees that's worse.

00:12:59 ◼   ► So all the people arguing the opposite are basically saying it's okay for things to be

00:13:03 ◼   ► slightly worse on Apple's platform because and then the greater good, like because they have

00:13:06 ◼   ► have to hold the line because if they give in now, they'll just be giving in forever

00:13:09 ◼   ► and they'll lose control of the app store and so on and so forth. I think that slippery

00:13:12 ◼   ► slope angle would be more convincing if this was the first time this happened and if this

00:13:16 ◼   ► hadn't been the case on the app store for years and Amazon had shown that it's not willing

00:13:19 ◼   ► to budge. And I think the other point about the situation is that the way I think about

00:13:24 ◼   ► it is, is this a bigger problem for Apple or Amazon? If Amazon says, "Okay, we're going

00:13:30 ◼   ► to make you buy everything through a website," and Apple doesn't get those sales anymore,

00:13:34 ◼   ► Who is that a bigger problem for?

00:13:35 ◼   ► Is it a bigger problem for Apple now that they're not getting a 30% of anything because

00:13:39 ◼   ► Apple is selling everything to the website?

00:13:41 ◼   ► Or is it a bigger problem for Amazon in that people won't buy as many comics because they

00:13:44 ◼   ► have to go to the stupid website?

00:13:46 ◼   ► I think, and as I tried to argue last time, it is a bigger problem for Apple because it

00:13:51 ◼   ► makes Apple's platform worse.

00:13:54 ◼   ► And Amazon always has the excuse of, "Well, yeah, Apple's platform is a little bit worse,

00:13:59 ◼   ► but hey, if you don't like it, buy Kindle."

00:14:01 ◼   ► They have their own platform to promote in exchange, right?

00:14:05 ◼   ► And so yes, Amazon is going to lose sales because people can't buy things easily, but

00:14:08 ◼   ► their answer is so much more compelling than Apple's.

00:14:10 ◼   ► Their answer is, "You shouldn't be buying the stupid iPads anyway.

00:14:13 ◼   ► Buy Kindle Fire.

00:14:14 ◼   ► We have an amazing looking screen.

00:14:15 ◼   ► It's a great place to read comics.

00:14:17 ◼   ► You can buy them right on the device.

00:14:18 ◼   ► By the way, it's also cheaper than an iPad."

00:14:20 ◼   ► Apple's answer is, "Yeah, it's worse, but trust us.

00:14:22 ◼   ► We really need to hold the line on this because if we give it to Amazon, the world will come

00:14:25 ◼   ► to an end."

00:14:26 ◼   ► And I did get two different kinds of feedback from people who were like, "Oh, this happened

00:14:30 ◼   ► and they kept using their mom in the examples,

00:14:33 ◼   ► "I'm just, I'm just the messenger, don't shoot me."

00:14:35 ◼   ► Again, it could be because their mothers

00:14:37 ◼   ► are much more technologically advanced than their fathers

00:14:39 ◼   ► and their fathers don't touch iPads.

00:14:40 ◼   ► But anyway, they were saying,

00:14:41 ◼   ► "Oh, this happened on my mom's iPad

00:14:43 ◼   ► and I just put a shortcut to the website on her iPad

00:14:48 ◼   ► and she just goes to that, it's no problem,

00:14:50 ◼   ► but not a big deal."

00:14:51 ◼   ► Another person said, "This happened,"

00:14:53 ◼   ► they're talking about when the Kindle store

00:14:54 ◼   ► stopped having an internal web view for the website.

00:14:57 ◼   ► "This happened on, you know, back in 2011

00:14:59 ◼   ► for the Kindle store and from from that point on my mom always calls me when she wants to

00:15:03 ◼   ► buy a book and I buy it for her and then other people saying this happened and then someone

00:15:08 ◼   ► you know stopped even buying things because they said oh this is stupid it's broken now

00:15:12 ◼   ► I'm not going to do this anymore so anecdotal evidence on all sides whether this is a problem

00:15:17 ◼   ► or not but I think it was only one person who said that uh that it's not a big deal

00:15:22 ◼   ► you just go to the web link but anyway I think this hurts Apple more than it hurts Amazon

00:15:27 ◼   ► And I think after several years, it's clear that Apple is not going to win this by holding

00:15:33 ◼   ► strong.

00:15:34 ◼   ► And I just don't see the point anymore in holding the line and making things worse for

00:15:37 ◼   ► users with the argument that if you do anything else, just the App Store will come crumbling

00:15:43 ◼   ► down.

00:15:44 ◼   ► If they do this and it turns out bad, they still have total control.

00:15:45 ◼   ► Apple can change the rules at any time.

00:15:47 ◼   ► I think it's worth an experiment.

00:15:49 ◼   ► Especially it could be a secret experiment where they have secret deals with Amazon and

00:15:52 ◼   ► they call it off and they have NDAs and no one can talk about it or whatever.

00:15:56 ◼   ► Apple is in a driver's seat here. I just think it's time for customers to stop suffering.

00:16:00 ◼   ► Well, hold on though. There was one other point that a few people pointed out that one of the

00:16:06 ◼   ► reasons why Amazon might not want to do Apple's in-app purchase system has nothing to do with

00:16:11 ◼   ► the 30% cut and everything to do with Amazon wanting to own that buying experience. And I

00:16:17 ◼   ► alluded to that a little bit, but we've got a number of people pointing out specifics of why

00:16:21 ◼   ► that's important to them. So one of the biggest of course is they want your credit card information

00:16:27 ◼   ► to be entered into Amazon. They want to have the most credit cards on file of anybody and

00:16:31 ◼   ► they want your default behavior to be if you're going to buy something, buy it from Amazon

00:16:35 ◼   ► with one click, done, done, done. And so for you to be using Apple's system, that's one

00:16:41 ◼   ► more customer that Amazon might not have using them. Also, Amazon extensively, when possible,

00:16:50 ◼   ► And this has become less possible with big name e-books because of the agency deal, but

00:16:54 ◼   ► when possible Amazon uses heavy price controls and price tweaking.

00:17:00 ◼   ► And that's why if you go visit Amazon product pages for almost anything, it's kind of unusual

00:17:07 ◼   ► to see the same price twice.

00:17:10 ◼   ► And the prices seem kind of random, especially on digital goods where they can fudge numbers.

00:17:14 ◼   ► And they reserve the right on their app store to change the price of apps at will.

00:17:20 ◼   ► and stuff like that, like there's all sorts of ways

00:17:22 ◼   ► Amazon uses price control as a sales or data tactic.

00:17:27 ◼   ► And they can't really do that at the kind of granularity

00:17:32 ◼   ► and volume they would want to do it at

00:17:35 ◼   ► in Apple's system at all.

00:17:36 ◼   ► So, and again, so it's all, I think with Amazon,

00:17:39 ◼   ► it's much more about owning that transaction,

00:17:42 ◼   ► getting user behavior, getting everyone using Amazon

00:17:44 ◼   ► and paying through Amazon.

00:17:46 ◼   ► I don't think, even if Apple's system was free,

00:17:49 ◼   ► I don't think Amazon would use it.

00:17:51 ◼   ► Now it is Apple's fault for disallowing them

00:17:53 ◼   ► from using their own.

00:17:54 ◼   ► That certainly is something Apple could change

00:17:57 ◼   ► if they wanted to, but again,

00:17:58 ◼   ► I think that opens up a weird can of worms

00:18:00 ◼   ► and I think that would be a bad precedent to set.

00:18:03 ◼   ► - Yeah, I don't think, I still don't think

00:18:06 ◼   ► allowing alternate payment systems is reasonable.

00:18:08 ◼   ► I don't think anyone suggested that.

00:18:09 ◼   ► A lot of people sent in email about this saying,

00:18:12 ◼   ► you know, basically saying,

00:18:13 ◼   ► oh, they should never allow alternate,

00:18:15 ◼   ► yeah, they probably shouldn't allow

00:18:16 ◼   ► alternate payment systems.

00:18:16 ◼   ► Like you can see how that could be chaos

00:18:18 ◼   ► and terrible and everything.

00:18:20 ◼   ► And if it's the case that all Amazon wants

00:18:22 ◼   ► is credit card numbers,

00:18:23 ◼   ► because Apple has way more credit cards than Amazon does.

00:18:25 ◼   ► That's what someone threw around a stat recently,

00:18:26 ◼   ► but it wasn't even close.

00:18:27 ◼   ► And you would think Amazon would have more credit cards,

00:18:29 ◼   ► but apparently not.

00:18:30 ◼   ► But if that's the line in the sand that Amazon is making,

00:18:33 ◼   ► I still think this is Apple's problem,

00:18:34 ◼   ► and I think it's an even worse problem,

00:18:35 ◼   ► because then it's like, oh, what can we do?

00:18:37 ◼   ► In fact, if we made it free, they still wouldn't buy.

00:18:39 ◼   ► Like, Amazon has things that Apple doesn't.

00:18:41 ◼   ► Amazon has a popular store where people buy tons of stuff.

00:18:44 ◼   ► Apple has a kind of semi-popular store

00:18:47 ◼   ► where people buy some things,

00:18:48 ◼   ► And apparently iBook sells comics too,

00:18:49 ◼   ► but Merlin was saying that it's a terrible experience.

00:18:52 ◼   ► You know, like, it's a problem.

00:18:54 ◼   ► You know, it's a similar situation

00:18:56 ◼   ► that Apple was with Google.

00:18:57 ◼   ► Google has something that Apple needs,

00:18:59 ◼   ► and Apple decided we're gonna make our own,

00:19:02 ◼   ► which is a good strategic move,

00:19:03 ◼   ► 'cause you don't wanna rely on your deadly enemy

00:19:05 ◼   ► to be providing you with essential functionality,

00:19:07 ◼   ► but it's really hard, and Google's really good

00:19:09 ◼   ► at what it does, and Apple tried to do

00:19:10 ◼   ► some of the same stuff itself,

00:19:11 ◼   ► and didn't do that good a job, and it's getting better.

00:19:13 ◼   ► What are they gonna do now?

00:19:14 ◼   ► Like, as a platform owner,

00:19:16 ◼   ► Apple has to figure this stuff out.

00:19:18 ◼   ► They can't have a platform and say, do everything our way,

00:19:20 ◼   ► but we're not gonna use anything from Google

00:19:22 ◼   ► and we're not gonna use anything from Amazon

00:19:23 ◼   ► and just everything's gonna be a little bit worse.

00:19:24 ◼   ► Like their job as a platform is to encourage

00:19:27 ◼   ► a rich ecosystem of people who provide awesome apps.

00:19:30 ◼   ► And if everyone knows, if you're gonna buy stuff,

00:19:33 ◼   ► go to Amazon's platform.

00:19:34 ◼   ► And if you're gonna do anything with cloud stuff,

00:19:36 ◼   ► go to Google's platform.

00:19:37 ◼   ► But I guess anything else, you know,

00:19:38 ◼   ► like this is Apple's problem long-term

00:19:40 ◼   ► and I don't know what the solution is.

00:19:42 ◼   ► I'm just arguing for at this point,

00:19:45 ◼   ► being stubborn and holding the line for another three years,

00:19:48 ◼   ► as they've done with allowing you to purchase stuff

00:19:51 ◼   ► inside applications, is going to hurt Apple

00:19:55 ◼   ► more than it hurts Amazon or more than it hurts Google.

00:19:57 ◼   ► Unless, you know, the other solution is Apple

00:19:58 ◼   ► could just tell tons of iOS devices,

00:20:00 ◼   ► 'cause if iOS had 90% market share,

00:20:02 ◼   ► then suddenly this is back to being Amazon

00:20:03 ◼   ► and Google's problem, but they don't.

00:20:05 ◼   ► So for now, it's Apple's problem.

00:20:08 ◼   ► - Well, they do have that kind of level

00:20:10 ◼   ► of a lot of things like web browsing with purchase intent

00:20:13 ◼   ► and stuff like that.

00:20:14 ◼   ► the iOS platform does represent itself way larger

00:20:19 ◼   ► than its installed base in things like,

00:20:22 ◼   ► what percentage of people doing actual online

00:20:25 ◼   ► purchasing of goods are using Apple stuff?

00:20:28 ◼   ► Or what percentage of people buying books online,

00:20:31 ◼   ► buying movies online, that kind of stuff.

00:20:33 ◼   ► I bet Apple's platforms actually are big enough in those

00:20:36 ◼   ► that Amazon, for instance, has to have an iOS app

00:20:40 ◼   ► for their business to be healthy in that department.

00:20:43 ◼   ► - I don't know if they ever broke those down

00:20:45 ◼   ► by how many of these purchases were through apps

00:20:46 ◼   ► versus how many were through Mobile Safari,

00:20:48 ◼   ► someone going to Amazon.com and just buying,

00:20:50 ◼   ► you know, sweaters and stuff.

00:20:51 ◼   ► Like, I don't know if it's broken down by app.

00:20:53 ◼   ► Amazon's perfectly happy to let you use your iPad

00:20:55 ◼   ► as a web browser and buy stuff from Amazon.

00:20:57 ◼   ► - So can we go back a second to the is this

00:21:02 ◼   ► or is this not net neutrality debate?

00:21:04 ◼   ► Because I feel like you kind of fluff that off,

00:21:07 ◼   ► well, it's not the internet, thus it's not the same.

00:21:09 ◼   ► So no, and I don't know if it's quite so simple.

00:21:12 ◼   ► And the way I look at it, and it didn't occur to me until people wrote in about it, but

00:21:17 ◼   ► if you look at the situation at my house today, if I want to watch some content, let's use

00:21:24 ◼   ► Netflix as an example, Verizon is standing between me and that content.

00:21:31 ◼   ► So somehow or another, I need Verizon to kind of orchestrate the exchange between Netflix

00:21:38 ◼   ► and me.

00:21:39 ◼   ► In a similar vein, if I have an iPhone and I want some content, be it a comic or be it

00:21:45 ◼   ► an app or whatever the case may be, Apple is standing between me and the content I want.

00:21:52 ◼   ► And I think what people are bothered by is at this point, couldn't you make a reasonable

00:21:59 ◼   ► argument that the same kind of common carrier stuff that applies to Verizon, isn't that

00:22:07 ◼   ► almost aren't we almost at the point that that applies to Apple to

00:22:10 ◼   ► Apples not Verizon's not between you and the content you want Verizon is between you and the internet

00:22:15 ◼   ► Sure

00:22:16 ◼   ► That's that's an important distinction because when you're buying something through Apple you like you're buying something from Apple store

00:22:23 ◼   ► Right someone uploaded to Apple Apple has it Verizon has nothing

00:22:26 ◼   ► Verizon doesn't like you are choosing to go through a Verizon's gate to get to the internet at which point you can choose wherever you

00:22:34 ◼   ► want to go. I mean you're going through the interest for crying out loud you're

00:22:36 ◼   ► going through the internet to get to the App Store if you want to think of it

00:22:39 ◼   ► that way. Verizon is the gate between you and buying the thing. Why shouldn't

00:22:43 ◼   ► Verizon get 40% of every purchase through the App Store? They are your gate

00:22:46 ◼   ► to the internet and the internet is a different thing. It's how we are all

00:22:50 ◼   ► connected to each other. Verizon does not own anything on the internet. Verizon

00:22:55 ◼   ► does not run the internet. Verizon doesn't run Netflix. Verizon doesn't

00:22:58 ◼   ► accept uploaded videos from from movie studios to Netflix. Verizon doesn't

00:23:01 ◼   ► manage the subscriptions of people to Netflix.

00:23:04 ◼   ► Verizon has nothing to do with Netflix.

00:23:05 ◼   ► They are a gateway to the internet.

00:23:07 ◼   ► They like to put themselves in between and say,

00:23:09 ◼   ► oh, well, the entire internet is our oyster.

00:23:12 ◼   ► No matter what you wanna do there,

00:23:13 ◼   ► we can extort money from whatever the most popular things

00:23:15 ◼   ► are because otherwise we'll cut off their access.

00:23:17 ◼   ► And we can do that because in the US anyway,

00:23:19 ◼   ► in many markets we have monopolies

00:23:21 ◼   ► and what are they gonna do?

00:23:21 ◼   ► Go to a different competitor?

00:23:23 ◼   ► Verizon has nothing.

00:23:24 ◼   ► Apple owns the App Store.

00:23:25 ◼   ► They accept uploads.

00:23:26 ◼   ► They have a developer program.

00:23:27 ◼   ► They made the hardware.

00:23:28 ◼   ► They made the software.

00:23:29 ◼   ► They allow people to upload things.

00:23:31 ◼   ► They accept your money. They do it like that is Apple. We're going through the internet

00:23:34 ◼   ► to get to Apple. It's not the same thing as the internet at all. The internet is a special

00:23:38 ◼   ► unique snowflake. I'm going to say that it is different than everything else. The internet

00:23:43 ◼   ► is not the app store for crying out. The app store is on the internet without the internet.

00:23:47 ◼   ► Nothing works. So simply because Apple made the app store, it, we have to play by their

00:23:55 ◼   ► rules even if they're completely unfair and owns it and runs it and makes all decisions

00:23:59 ◼   ► about it is that it's basically private versus public. And I think the internet works best

00:24:05 ◼   ► and has historically been treated as a public thing that we all share together. Because

00:24:09 ◼   ► it doesn't work if we cut ourselves off from it and try to divvy it up into little pieces

00:24:13 ◼   ► and disconnect. If you disconnect a subnetwork from the internet, that's not the internet

00:24:20 ◼   ► anymore. It's pointless to anybody. If the Northeast says, "Well, we're not going to

00:24:22 ◼   ► communicate with anybody who's not in the Northeast," that's pointless. The whole point

00:24:26 ◼   ► is we're all connected to each other through it. That's what makes the internet the internet.

00:24:30 ◼   ► It is a unique thing. It should be treated differently than everything else. That's totally

00:24:35 ◼   ► different than things that live on the internet. It is complicated by the fact that the app

00:24:39 ◼   ► stores on the internet would be simpler if it was just something that wasn't involved

00:24:45 ◼   ► in the internet, but everything's involved in the internet now. The whole thing with

00:24:47 ◼   ► net neutrality is if you allow regional ISPs to be gatekeepers and extort money for things

00:24:53 ◼   ► they're already being paid for on both ends, they're getting to choose the winners and

00:24:55 ◼   ► Apple chooses winners and losers in its own app store all the time. They choose who to feature, they choose who to be rejected, they choose every...

00:25:01 ◼   ► They choose to make the rules, they change the rules once your application is in the app store. Of course they pick the winners and losers in the app store.

00:25:07 ◼   ► It's their thing. But they don't choose whether you can get to the app store. Verizon would choose, "Oh, well if Apple doesn't pay us, we're not going to allow people to get to the app store over their iOS devices wirelessly."

00:25:17 ◼   ► Right, it's almost as if you're creating your own intranet. Speaking of which, our sponsor this week

00:25:23 ◼   ► is Igloo. Igloo makes an intranet you'll actually like. Now they gave me this different read this

00:25:28 ◼   ► time, but I figured I'd throw that in there anyway. So, it's quarterly earnings season.

00:25:33 ◼   ► Time to read those highly scripted texts about revenue, margin, and earnings data.

00:25:37 ◼   ► With that in mind, Igloo, the makers of "An Intranet You'll Actually Like," wanted to present

00:25:43 ◼   ► a quarterly report that you'll actually like. They're a private company, so they

00:25:47 ◼   ► decided to present the numbers you care about in a way that's easy to understand. It's

00:25:51 ◼   ► how they design their software too.

00:25:53 ◼   ► The quarterly report takes the form of an infographic with fun stats about how customers

00:25:58 ◼   ► use their intranet every day. One blog post every minute, 144 meetings every hour, 995

00:26:05 ◼   ► wiki articles added every day. And it's blended with quirky facts about the people

00:26:09 ◼   ► that work at igloo. For example, they've consumed 6,144 cups of coffee in the past three months.

00:26:15 ◼   ► The site's developed with a cool parallax experience and some cool animations,

00:26:19 ◼   ► so check it out. Check out what's been happening at igloo this year. igloosoftware.com/earnings.

00:26:25 ◼   ► Once again, check out igloo software, the makers of the internet you'll actually like,

00:26:30 ◼   ► at igloosoftware.com/earnings. Thanks a lot to igloo for sponsoring our show once again.

00:26:35 ◼   ► They're pretty cool people there.

00:26:37 ◼   ► All right, the last bit of follow up is on App Links.

00:26:41 ◼   ► Quick little thing.

00:26:42 ◼   ► We talked about the Facebook project App Links last week.

00:26:45 ◼   ► And we got a bunch of feedback from people

00:26:47 ◼   ► who are much more familiar with it than we are,

00:26:49 ◼   ► saying that really the point of App Links

00:26:51 ◼   ► is mostly not about going from browsers to apps,

00:26:55 ◼   ► which is what we were mostly talking about.

00:26:57 ◼   ► It's mostly to more intelligently link from apps

00:27:00 ◼   ► to other apps without bouncing through the browser.

00:27:04 ◼   ► So for instance, if, you know, like in the Twitter app,

00:27:07 ◼   ► if they integrated app links and you link to an Instagram link,

00:27:10 ◼   ► well, assuming Twitter and Facebook were talking,

00:27:12 ◼   ► I bet Twitter would actually explicitly disable

00:27:16 ◼   ► the Instagram link from working.

00:27:18 ◼   ► But anyway, suppose it was some other service

00:27:21 ◼   ► that Twitter is friendly with, like,

00:27:23 ◼   ► okay, suppose it's the Tumblr app,

00:27:27 ◼   ► and Tumblr app wants to link to Instagram,

00:27:29 ◼   ► 'cause I don't think they hate each other yet.

00:27:31 ◼   ► So the Tumblr app would link directly to Instagram

00:27:34 ◼   ► instead of bouncing through the web browser.

00:27:37 ◼   ► So you still have to fetch the page,

00:27:39 ◼   ► but then they have a library that handles that for you.

00:27:42 ◼   ► So it's still kind of iffy.

00:27:44 ◼   ► It's still--

00:27:46 ◼   ► You don't have to fetch the page.

00:27:47 ◼   ► Well, they have to fetch the HTML.

00:27:49 ◼   ► No, you don't, because that's part of the API.

00:27:51 ◼   ► That's one of the things that people were pointing out to us,

00:27:53 ◼   ► is that Miss Casey brought that up as well,

00:27:54 ◼   ► and I was looking at the doc.

00:27:55 ◼   ► So the stuff is still in the page,

00:27:58 ◼   ► but that's the protocol.

00:27:59 ◼   ► How do you provide this information to the thing?

00:28:01 ◼   ► but Facebook or somebody provides a library that--

00:28:05 ◼   ► like they said, you can crawl the pages yourself

00:28:07 ◼   ► and extract the information.

00:28:08 ◼   ► But we also provide an API that basically you just give us

00:28:11 ◼   ► a URL and we give you the equivalent app link.

00:28:14 ◼   ► Oh, that's right.

00:28:15 ◼   ► Yeah, the discovery service.

00:28:16 ◼   ► That's right.

00:28:17 ◼   ► Right.

00:28:17 ◼   ► So they'll crawl them, and they'll--

00:28:19 ◼   ► so then you don't have to go out to a page and get it.

00:28:21 ◼   ► If you're lucky, it'll be in a cache or a local thing.

00:28:24 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:28:24 ◼   ► It boils down to the same thing.

00:28:26 ◼   ► But basically, they want to be able to--

00:28:29 ◼   ► Given a URL that I would go to on a web page,

00:28:32 ◼   ► instead of going to that web page,

00:28:34 ◼   ► have something else that has already been to that web page,

00:28:36 ◼   ► extract the information needed to build the app link,

00:28:39 ◼   ► and that take me deeply into another application.

00:28:41 ◼   ► And hopefully the thing doesn't have to actually

00:28:43 ◼   ► go to that web page, pull it up and do that thing.

00:28:44 ◼   ► Hopefully something has done it before.

00:28:47 ◼   ► But that's the equivalency.

00:28:48 ◼   ► I think the piece that I was missing in this thing

00:28:50 ◼   ► is basically like, given a URL that works in a web browser,

00:28:53 ◼   ► that would work just fine,

00:28:56 ◼   ► like it shows you the thing that you're gonna buy

00:28:58 ◼   ► or whatever, tell me what is the equivalent location

00:29:01 ◼   ► inside an application and form that into an app link

00:29:04 ◼   ► that I can use to get to the equivalent page

00:29:06 ◼   ► inside another app.

00:29:07 ◼   ► - Boy, that is a fantastic way for Facebook

00:29:09 ◼   ► to capture tons of click data on all the URLs

00:29:11 ◼   ► people are clicking in apps.

00:29:13 ◼   ► Now, you can see now I know why they launched this.

00:29:14 ◼   ► There we go.

00:29:15 ◼   ► That's the reason right there.

00:29:17 ◼   ► It's just a discovery service.

00:29:19 ◼   ► It's just an implementation detail.

00:29:21 ◼   ► Don't worry about it.

00:29:21 ◼   ► - Well, you're right, 'cause they wanna bypass the webpage,

00:29:23 ◼   ► because the only way you could get to places

00:29:26 ◼   ► with like, you know, protocol helpers

00:29:27 ◼   ► going through a web page and redirecting you to the like whatever protocol

00:29:30 ◼   ► handler that iOS says this belongs to your application. It's like no no no

00:29:33 ◼   ► we'll we'll get that you know given a URL we will tell you what the equivalent

00:29:37 ◼   ► application page is based on all this metadata that is in the URL and that's

00:29:41 ◼   ► why this stuff is on a web page and it makes more sense to me now that like you

00:29:44 ◼   ► know if you don't support app links you'll just go to the page and the page

00:29:46 ◼   ► will show you details for that book but if that page has app link information

00:29:50 ◼   ► and you tap on it in an app that supports app links we won't show you

00:29:53 ◼   ► that detail page for the book instead we'll take you directly to the

00:29:56 ◼   ► book selling application that, you know,

00:29:58 ◼   ► the page that shows the detail inside the app

00:30:00 ◼   ► instead of going to a web browser.

00:30:02 ◼   ► - Right, and for every single link you tap

00:30:03 ◼   ► in any application that supports this,

00:30:05 ◼   ► it's going to first check

00:30:06 ◼   ► with the Facebook Discovery Service.

00:30:08 ◼   ► And yeah, anyone else can run a Discovery Service,

00:30:10 ◼   ► but this is gonna be the default one

00:30:11 ◼   ► that's already built in and free.

00:30:13 ◼   ► So of course everyone's gonna just use that.

00:30:15 ◼   ► And that way every single link you ever tap

00:30:16 ◼   ► in an app that supports this will first tell Facebook

00:30:18 ◼   ► that you're clicking on it.

00:30:19 ◼   ► That's fantastic.

00:30:21 ◼   ► - But it's there, I mean, it may only tell Facebook

00:30:23 ◼   ► that they're clicking on it, but you know,

00:30:24 ◼   ► Facebook wants to have this constellation of applications surrounding their data,

00:30:28 ◼   ► and so they want to use it for their purposes, and like, okay, well, if they don't have the Facebook whatever app

00:30:32 ◼   ► installed, take them to Facebook.com/whatever, but if they do have the Facebook whatever app

00:30:36 ◼   ► installed, don't bother sending them to Facebook.com instead send them to the app because they think their big thing

00:30:40 ◼   ► now is like, you know, customize experiences in native applications instead

00:30:44 ◼   ► of sending people to one big blue website. We also have T-shirts for sale.

00:30:48 ◼   ► We have T-shirts for sale for a very short time remaining. We only have

00:30:52 ◼   ► have right now there's as we record there's like four days remaining when we

00:30:56 ◼   ► release this it'll be more like one or a day and a half remaining so please if

00:31:00 ◼   ► you want a t-shirt which you greatly appreciate because we'll make a few

00:31:04 ◼   ► dollars on each one if you want a t-shirt please get it quickly because

00:31:09 ◼   ► you're almost out of time but thank you very much to everyone who's bought them

00:31:13 ◼   ► so far the numbers have have really surprised me we've sold as we record

00:31:17 ◼   ► it's just under a thousand which is amazing I think I was estimating like a

00:31:21 ◼   ► a few hundred maybe at best, and so I'm very happy

00:31:24 ◼   ► to thank you everyone for buying our shirts.

00:31:27 ◼   ► - Yep, that's very awesome of everyone who has,

00:31:29 ◼   ► and we appreciate it.

00:31:31 ◼   ► - So if you want one, go to ATP.fm/shirt.

00:31:35 ◼   ► - And we did announce this on last week's show,

00:31:38 ◼   ► and that was like your advance notice,

00:31:40 ◼   ► so if you're hearing this show and it's like Sunday,

00:31:43 ◼   ► you've probably missed it already.

00:31:45 ◼   ► This is only for the people who are gonna download the show

00:31:47 ◼   ► when it comes out on Friday, or I think Saturday,

00:31:49 ◼   ► you might have time.

00:31:50 ◼   ► So you did have an entire week to try to get these shirts.

00:31:53 ◼   ► I know people are gonna be sad because they missed it

00:31:55 ◼   ► because people wait till the last minute

00:31:56 ◼   ► and they can't decide if they want it or not.

00:31:57 ◼   ► So if you're listening to this now

00:31:59 ◼   ► and you think you might want a shirt,

00:32:00 ◼   ► just pause the podcast and go see if the sale is still on.

00:32:04 ◼   ► They're priced to move, people.

00:32:05 ◼   ► Some people were asking if they thought

00:32:07 ◼   ► the source code in the back would come out.

00:32:09 ◼   ► Our answer is we have no idea, but we really hope it does.

00:32:12 ◼   ► - Otherwise. - Yeah, we have no way to tell.

00:32:14 ◼   ► I mean, I made it as big as possible.

00:32:17 ◼   ► I intentionally made the lines very short

00:32:20 ◼   ► so that I could scale the text up

00:32:21 ◼   ► and have it fit in the back.

00:32:22 ◼   ► I also used Monaco Bold.

00:32:25 ◼   ► So everything should be a little bit thicker,

00:32:27 ◼   ► which should make it a little bit more likely

00:32:29 ◼   ► to come out, I think.

00:32:30 ◼   ► And we only used a few colors,

00:32:32 ◼   ► so they can reuse the color without having to dither it

00:32:35 ◼   ► or anything weird like that.

00:32:37 ◼   ► - I thought you were using Menlo.

00:32:38 ◼   ► You didn't use Menlo?

00:32:39 ◼   ► - Oh, sorry, it is Menlo, you're right.

00:32:41 ◼   ► Yeah, I use Menlo, so it doesn't look stupid.

00:32:43 ◼   ► but yeah, so it should be relatively thick.

00:32:47 ◼   ► So it should turn out, but we aren't screen printers

00:32:50 ◼   ► and we aren't Teespring and we,

00:32:52 ◼   ► because of the way Teespring works,

00:32:54 ◼   ► we can't really get a sample first.

00:32:56 ◼   ► Like we have to just put them for sale

00:32:58 ◼   ► before any are printed, including ours,

00:33:00 ◼   ► and we will get them when everyone else does.

00:33:02 ◼   ► So we think the code on the back will turn out,

00:33:05 ◼   ► but we really can't know for sure until it does.

00:33:07 ◼   ► So we can't really guarantee that, but we'll find out.

00:33:10 ◼   ► - If it doesn't think of it this way,

00:33:11 ◼   ► you'll have the T-shirt equivalent

00:33:12 ◼   ► of the upside down airplane stamp.

00:33:14 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, and I have a few other shirts from Teespring

00:33:17 ◼   ► and their quality seems really good.

00:33:20 ◼   ► Like they're a real screen printing shop.

00:33:22 ◼   ► It isn't doing like what CafePress does

00:33:23 ◼   ► where it's basically like a transfer almost.

00:33:27 ◼   ► They're actually like, it's a real screen printer

00:33:30 ◼   ► and they were able to get quite a lot of detail

00:33:32 ◼   ► on the shirts I've had previously from them.

00:33:34 ◼   ► So I have high hopes, but we'll see.

00:33:36 ◼   ► - All right, so we got some news about app.net yesterday.

00:33:41 ◼   ► Is that right?

00:33:42 ◼   ► yesterday when we record this anyways.

00:33:44 ◼   ► And it sounds like they're sunsetting their brand

00:33:48 ◼   ► without sunsetting their brand.

00:33:50 ◼   ► - Oh no, they're winding down.

00:33:51 ◼   ► - Ah, my apologies.

00:33:52 ◼   ► - No, no, oh wait, no, sorry.

00:33:53 ◼   ► They're winding down just the developer incentive program.

00:33:56 ◼   ► App.net will continue operating on a forward basis.

00:33:59 ◼   ► - With nobody actually dedicated to it.

00:34:02 ◼   ► - Right, see this is sad.

00:34:04 ◼   ► I mean, I can't really say that no one saw this coming

00:34:09 ◼   ► 'cause we all saw this coming, I think,

00:34:10 ◼   ► but I just don't, I think they should've just killed it.

00:34:15 ◼   ► And 'cause I'm sure they're going to kill it.

00:34:18 ◼   ► It's, you know, maybe they haven't killed it yet

00:34:20 ◼   ► because they want to wait out people who have paid

00:34:23 ◼   ► so they don't have to try to deal with issuing refunds

00:34:26 ◼   ► for like partially fulfilled subscriptions.

00:34:28 ◼   ► Which we, that's a pretty good reason.

00:34:29 ◼   ► But, although if they were gonna do that

00:34:32 ◼   ► they should stop taking subscriptions now.

00:34:34 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:34:35 ◼   ► So maybe that wasn't their plan, but you know,

00:34:39 ◼   ► And now, what they basically said is,

00:34:42 ◼   ► so a few weeks ago in mid-April was when all of the initial

00:34:47 ◼   ► subscriptions expired.

00:34:49 ◼   ► So if you were one of the backers at the very beginning,

00:34:51 ◼   ► which is where I think most of their user base came from,

00:34:54 ◼   ► at least most of their paying user base,

00:34:57 ◼   ► if you were one of those original backers that,

00:34:59 ◼   ► they did kind of like a Kickstarter style thing,

00:35:01 ◼   ► and then they lowered the price, then you got extended,

00:35:05 ◼   ► and so anyway, all those subscriptions were up

00:35:08 ◼   ► this a few weeks ago in early April.

00:35:11 ◼   ► And so of that massive original wave of backers,

00:35:14 ◼   ► they basically said they didn't get enough renewals

00:35:16 ◼   ► to be able to afford any other,

00:35:18 ◼   ► or any full-time employees anymore.

00:35:20 ◼   ► So there are now no more employees.

00:35:23 ◼   ► They will use contract work here and there occasionally

00:35:27 ◼   ► as the budget permits, which is a fancy way of saying

00:35:30 ◼   ► if you subscribe some more.

00:35:32 ◼   ► And so it's basically like there's basically no one

00:35:35 ◼   ► working on it anymore.

00:35:36 ◼   ► said it's financially healthy enough to keep going indefinitely, but that statement is

00:35:43 ◼   ► probably based on the number of subscribers that it has today. And now that they've announced

00:35:47 ◼   ► that it's kind of dying or dead, I suspect the number of subscribers will continue to

00:35:53 ◼   ► go down. So I suspect that an actual shutdown is likely within probably, I don't know, six

00:36:01 ◼   ► months.

00:36:02 ◼   ► So did you, either of you guys renew when the renewal happened?

00:36:07 ◼   ► I did, and now I regret it, of course.

00:36:09 ◼   ► Same here.

00:36:10 ◼   ► Same here.

00:36:11 ◼   ► I didn't actually, because I just never use it.

00:36:14 ◼   ► I do use it.

00:36:15 ◼   ► I still use it every day.

00:36:17 ◼   ► And I'll be sad to see it go away, but what do you do?

00:36:20 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't really actively use it.

00:36:23 ◼   ► Well, I use it to announce that we're live, and there's somewhere to the order of 200

00:36:28 ◼   ► people that subscribe to that.

00:36:30 ◼   ► actually 204. And I use it when somebody mentions me, but that's it. I never

00:36:38 ◼   ► actively go to app.net to just see what's cracking on app.net. The only time

00:36:43 ◼   ► I ever go is if somebody's addressing me or I'm announcing that we're live.

00:36:47 ◼   ► Yeah, I discovered when my renewal was coming up I decided, you know what,

00:36:52 ◼   ► I don't use this anymore so I don't want to pay for it again. So let me convert my

00:36:56 ◼   ► paid account to a free account. And to do that you have to stay

00:37:00 ◼   ► under a certain following limit, I think it's like 40 people that you can follow, it's something like that.

00:37:04 ◼   ► And so I had to reduce my following list

00:37:08 ◼   ► down to that number. And so what I did was I went through the following list and I just opened

00:37:12 ◼   ► up all those people's timelines on App.net and anyone who

00:37:16 ◼   ► had not posted anytime recently I assume had abandoned the service

00:37:20 ◼   ► and therefore I could safely unfollow them. And it was really

00:37:24 ◼   ► really easy to get the number down by that method because so

00:37:28 ◼   ► many people. I was actually kind of surprised like how many people who I

00:37:32 ◼   ► initially had followed were no longer using the service. Like so many

00:37:35 ◼   ► people hadn't posted in months. Some of them hadn't posted in over a year.

00:37:40 ◼   ► The service is about two years old. Some of them hadn't posted in over a year.

00:37:43 ◼   ► Some of them had never posted and they were like I had followed them because of

00:37:47 ◼   ► like a Twitter friend finder kind of thing and it was it was kind of

00:37:52 ◼   ► sad and it was it was kind of sobering. I really think you know there are people

00:37:55 ◼   ► who use it every day, no question. But I think it's a really small group.

00:37:59 ◼   ► And I've heard from developers of App.net.apps

00:38:03 ◼   ► that it just, there were just never

00:38:07 ◼   ► enough users to really make development for it feasible.

00:38:11 ◼   ► You needed a critical mass of your friends to be there

00:38:15 ◼   ► for it to be viable for you. And I went over there and it became very clear

00:38:19 ◼   ► very quickly that a critical mass of the people I

00:38:23 ◼   ► interact with did not make it over there from Twitter.

00:38:26 ◼   ► And so for a while, there was a tiny little bubble of people

00:38:31 ◼   ► over there that I would talk with in that arena.

00:38:34 ◼   ► But it was clear that most of my interactions

00:38:36 ◼   ► were still going to take place on Twitter,

00:38:39 ◼   ► because that's where everybody was.

00:38:40 ◼   ► And app.net became kind of like a back channel for Twitter,

00:38:43 ◼   ► because of the small subset of people

00:38:44 ◼   ► who are driven to app.net by anger at Twitter,

00:38:47 ◼   ► or by just desired--

00:38:49 ◼   ► that could be an interesting back channel for commentary

00:38:51 ◼   ► and stuff.

00:38:52 ◼   ► It was never going to be—like enough people didn't move.

00:38:57 ◼   ► With things like this, with platforms where you are seeing things other people write and

00:39:03 ◼   ► other people are seeing things that you write, audiences is king.

00:39:09 ◼   ► And if the people you want to follow aren't posting on App.net and the people you want

00:39:13 ◼   ► to read what you're writing aren't on App.net, then you're just not going to go there.

00:39:17 ◼   ► And I didn't read Brianna's post yet,

00:39:20 ◼   ► but she did a thing basically like--

00:39:22 ◼   ► I have an Insta paper, of course--

00:39:24 ◼   ► that it's not a technology problem, it's a social problem.

00:39:28 ◼   ► And as unfortunate as that is, we

00:39:30 ◼   ► thought they had some of the social aspects

00:39:32 ◼   ► from the developer-facing side they had better than Twitter.

00:39:35 ◼   ► They figured out how can we make it--

00:39:37 ◼   ► how can we make a win-win situation for developers

00:39:39 ◼   ► to use this platform?

00:39:40 ◼   ► But the biggest win they didn't put in there,

00:39:42 ◼   ► which Marco pointed out, is you've

00:39:44 ◼   ► got to have a lot of users, because there

00:39:46 ◼   ► potential customer base. And if you can't get that, it doesn't matter that you do all

00:39:49 ◼   ► those other things right. Everything else flows from, "Well, yeah, but who's there?

00:39:53 ◼   ► How many users do you have?" And we make fun of that. I go eyeballs and big growth rates.

00:40:00 ◼   ► But you don't have to make everything free for everybody and just make the entire world

00:40:04 ◼   ► use it, but you do have to meet some minimum and they just never met it. And then we can

00:40:08 ◼   ► go 2020 hindsight and say, "What should they have done to get more users?" Margo, I think,

00:40:13 ◼   ► has talked about probably the biggest reason,

00:40:16 ◼   ► which is waiting way too long to do a free tier,

00:40:18 ◼   ► and that just put a stopper on the entire service

00:40:20 ◼   ► for like an entire year.

00:40:22 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, that was the big thing.

00:40:24 ◼   ► It was noble of them to try a paid model

00:40:28 ◼   ► so they could avoid the weird advertiser creepiness

00:40:32 ◼   ► phenomenon that all these free services

00:40:33 ◼   ► have to return to to make money.

00:40:36 ◼   ► That was an interesting idea, but the problem is,

00:40:38 ◼   ► and we all, I think, knew it at the time,

00:40:40 ◼   ► The problem is that for a social product like that,

00:40:45 ◼   ► you need as many people as possible.

00:40:47 ◼   ► And by putting up the paywall right at the beginning

00:40:49 ◼   ► and having no free tier, having everything be paid only

00:40:52 ◼   ► at the beginning for almost the whole first year,

00:40:55 ◼   ► that was really, really fatal.

00:40:59 ◼   ► And furthermore, even after they made a free tier

00:41:04 ◼   ► in I believe early last May or last April,

00:41:09 ◼   ► But for a while, you had to have an invitation

00:41:12 ◼   ► from somebody else, and there were a limited number

00:41:14 ◼   ► of invitations, so you had to be invited by a paid member.

00:41:17 ◼   ► Now, that I think was fatal also, even more fatal,

00:41:22 ◼   ► like beating a dead app.net, even more fatal,

00:41:25 ◼   ► because when they did finally go free,

00:41:29 ◼   ► there was this big asterisk, well it's free,

00:41:31 ◼   ► but you can't just go sign up.

00:41:32 ◼   ► It's free, but you have to be invited,

00:41:34 ◼   ► and there's very few invites.

00:41:38 ◼   ► they eventually removed the invitation requirement,

00:41:41 ◼   ► but everyone had already been told

00:41:44 ◼   ► that this was now free, but you need an invitation.

00:41:46 ◼   ► So it's like, and no one got the memo

00:41:48 ◼   ► when that requirement was lifted.

00:41:50 ◼   ► And so even people who were on the fence about it,

00:41:54 ◼   ► once they learned it was free,

00:41:55 ◼   ► and then were kind of turned away

00:41:56 ◼   ► by the invitation requirement,

00:41:59 ◼   ► they probably didn't go back after to check,

00:42:01 ◼   ► oh, is that requirement still there?

00:42:03 ◼   ► - It's really hard to strike that balance though,

00:42:04 ◼   ► because it can't, you know,

00:42:06 ◼   ► the whole thing we're talking about,

00:42:06 ◼   ► If you make it free for everybody and nobody is ever motivated to do the pay thing, you've

00:42:11 ◼   ► just killed your service.

00:42:12 ◼   ► That's the whole point.

00:42:13 ◼   ► They were trying to make a service that was sustained by the people who use it.

00:42:16 ◼   ► You have to strike that perfect balance.

00:42:18 ◼   ► Free that it gets people in the door, but sort of like Dropbox has found, I assume,

00:42:22 ◼   ► the balance for themselves, which is, yeah, you can use Dropbox for free until you reach

00:42:25 ◼   ► a certain quota, and enough people are going to reach that quota and pay for it that it

00:42:29 ◼   ► pays for all the freeloaders.

00:42:30 ◼   ► And that is really difficult to strike that balance.

00:42:33 ◼   ► everybody pay on a service that is going to live or die by the number of people who use

00:42:37 ◼   ► it is really difficult. Maybe they were fooled by the initial enthusiasm of an alternate

00:42:43 ◼   ► service of Twitter, but everyone who joined quickly found out, well, most people I know

00:42:47 ◼   ► don't care about what the hell Twitter is doing to developers and they're back over

00:42:51 ◼   ► there on Twitter, so I guess I'm going to go back there too.

00:42:57 ◼   ► The invitation thing could have been throttling for load or trying to build hype or a combination

00:43:02 ◼   ► of them. A lot of big services do that. Gmail was invite only in the beginning. That's not

00:43:06 ◼   ► an entirely crazy thing, but it's all about timing and balance. Did you do it for too

00:43:10 ◼   ► long? Is the balance incorrect? All those people who found they could go to free, all

00:43:15 ◼   ► those dedicated people, like I use App and .NET all the time, but I can get by with the

00:43:19 ◼   ► free tier. Well, that's bad. The fact that you found it easy to get to the free tier,

00:43:24 ◼   ► that is an incorrect balance. By that point, it was probably too late anyway.

00:43:27 ◼   ► When I was thinking of the things they could do, things they could have done, a lot of

00:43:32 ◼   ► people, and I think Marco as well, blogged about this, like focus.

00:43:35 ◼   ► They seem to try a lot of different things and a lot of people have said, "Oh, well,

00:43:39 ◼   ► they were all over the place.

00:43:40 ◼   ► No one knew what they were.

00:43:41 ◼   ► They didn't concentrate on any one thing.

00:43:43 ◼   ► That's why they messed up."

00:43:44 ◼   ► But on the other side of that coin is, what if they had tried to do one of those things

00:43:46 ◼   ► for the entire time we would have been saying, "You should have tried different things.

00:43:49 ◼   ► You should have tried file hosting.

00:43:50 ◼   ► Maybe you could have been an API for applications."

00:43:52 ◼   ► So I mean, it all stems back to the same problem.

00:43:55 ◼   ► they did not find a way to get people onto the service,

00:43:57 ◼   ► and every other problem they have is like,

00:43:59 ◼   ► you know, falls out of that.

00:44:01 ◼   ► - Maybe, but I don't know, I mean, at the same time,

00:44:04 ◼   ► like, all these different things, that was all effort

00:44:08 ◼   ► that was expended that was not trying to get people

00:44:11 ◼   ► on the service.

00:44:12 ◼   ► It was trying to add value for people who are already there

00:44:14 ◼   ► to maybe in the future maybe get some more people

00:44:16 ◼   ► to sign up, but like, every one of their major API pushes,

00:44:21 ◼   ► every one of their major new products or aspects

00:44:23 ◼   ► of the service is that the kind of thing was like,

00:44:25 ◼   ► oh, this will be great once more people are here.

00:44:28 ◼   ► But that never came.

00:44:30 ◼   ► - Well, they were trying to get new customers.

00:44:32 ◼   ► Like they would say, okay, we can't get people

00:44:33 ◼   ► to come and use it like Twitter.

00:44:34 ◼   ► Maybe we can get app developers to use it

00:44:36 ◼   ► as their backend kind of like Simperium or something.

00:44:38 ◼   ► Like it was trying for another user base.

00:44:41 ◼   ► Okay, we can't get enough regular people.

00:44:42 ◼   ► How about it, can we get enough developers of applications?

00:44:44 ◼   ► Well, we can't get enough of them.

00:44:45 ◼   ► How about people who just want to host their files?

00:44:47 ◼   ► And the thing that might've undone them

00:44:49 ◼   ► is instead of doing the pivot thing where you just like,

00:44:51 ◼   ► this is where we're gonna go now,

00:44:53 ◼   ► They never got rid of the old things.

00:44:54 ◼   ► They just added to them.

00:44:55 ◼   ► So it became this big long list of things that it did.

00:44:58 ◼   ► And that becomes difficult to support.

00:45:00 ◼   ► You know, it's not as if they said,

00:45:02 ◼   ► okay, well we were a Twitter-like service,

00:45:03 ◼   ► but now we're a file hosting service.

00:45:04 ◼   ► We were a file hosting service,

00:45:06 ◼   ► but now we're an API connecting thing.

00:45:08 ◼   ► Like, they did all those things at once.

00:45:10 ◼   ► And to their credit, engineering-wise,

00:45:11 ◼   ► they seemed to do a good job on all those things.

00:45:13 ◼   ► Like, Manton is very happy using them

00:45:15 ◼   ► as an API and a back end, but,

00:45:17 ◼   ► yeah, again, you gotta, you have to be able to show

00:45:20 ◼   ► that you are sustainable or show that you get so many customers that some VC is going

00:45:26 ◼   ► to pour money down your throat forever until someone buys you out.

00:45:29 ◼   ► Right. Well, and engineering is one of the least important things when it comes to growing

00:45:34 ◼   ► a social product. Like, look at MySpace. MySpace, you know, it's easy to laugh at them now,

00:45:38 ◼   ► but before Facebook was big, MySpace basically ruled the internet for a few years. And they

00:45:43 ◼   ► had the worst technology in the universe powering that thing. They still do. And it's like,

00:45:47 ◼   ► It is comical just how much in shambles that company always was.

00:45:52 ◼   ► MySpace has always been comically dysfunctional before and after acquisition, and their site

00:45:58 ◼   ► was held together by tape and glue, and yet it was the biggest social site on the web

00:46:03 ◼   ► for a long time and still is no slouch.

00:46:09 ◼   ► The technology matters very, very little.

00:46:11 ◼   ► What matters for anything that is social is just the social network effect.

00:46:16 ◼   ► getting the people who you want to talk to and reach on there. And there was never any

00:46:22 ◼   ► hope for something that was paywall only for every single user to ever get that big. If

00:46:29 ◼   ► they were going to get big, they should have had a free tier at the very beginning. But

00:46:35 ◼   ► that's hard. The reason they did invitations was probably not to build hype, it was probably

00:46:39 ◼   ► because they were afraid of things like spam and abuse from bulk registrations, which is

00:46:43 ◼   ► a major problem, it's hard to deal with. But that's the gain. That's the gain you're signing

00:46:50 ◼   ► up for if you want to have any kind of socialization or have anything that requires strong network

00:46:56 ◼   ► effect here or that needs to overcome strong network effect. So really what they, I think

00:47:00 ◼   ► what they should have done instead was had no social products at all and focused purely on

00:47:07 ◼   ► the developer API stuff. Because then they have a lot fewer direct competitors. But even

00:47:13 ◼   ► Even then, the model of having the users pay

00:47:17 ◼   ► instead of the developers is weird.

00:47:19 ◼   ► And I think that, I don't think that

00:47:21 ◼   ► ever really had a chance.

00:47:23 ◼   ► - To App.net's credit, the success they had surprised me.

00:47:27 ◼   ► Like when they got real app developers

00:47:29 ◼   ► to make real App.net clients,

00:47:30 ◼   ► instead of just like some random person doing it as a lark,

00:47:33 ◼   ► you know, like the Netbot thing, like where,

00:47:36 ◼   ► I mean, granted, maybe they just reused a lot of the work

00:47:38 ◼   ► they had done for Tweetbot and everything,

00:47:39 ◼   ► but you know, they got actual attention from real developers

00:47:42 ◼   ► They got some pretty darn high quality applications, even if it was someone's first application.

00:47:46 ◼   ► Like those people honed their app.net clients and shaped them up into, you know, applications

00:47:51 ◼   ► that I would put up against any third party Twitter client, you know?

00:47:55 ◼   ► And some of them, you know, some of them weren't just like tweetbot, portage netbot.

00:47:58 ◼   ► Some of them were brand new applications out of whole cloth.

00:48:01 ◼   ► And they were pretty darn good.

00:48:02 ◼   ► Granted, there was prior art in terms of people had seen what Twitter applications are like.

00:48:05 ◼   ► But just think, they managed to make something that was big enough to do that.

00:48:08 ◼   ► And that was part of their goal.

00:48:09 ◼   ► Like, we're going to make an awesome platform for developers.

00:48:12 ◼   ► They did every part of that except for the part where there's tons of customers.

00:48:15 ◼   ► And they tried to make up for that by giving them a share of the money they were getting.

00:48:19 ◼   ► It worked much better than I thought it would for longer than I thought it would.

00:48:22 ◼   ► And so I give them credit for even achieving that level of success.

00:48:26 ◼   ► If you think about that, who else has tried that and been even remotely as successful?

00:48:31 ◼   ► It is especially on something like a social network.

00:48:34 ◼   ► It's a tough sell.

00:48:35 ◼   ► So they have nothing to be ashamed of in terms of they had the guts to do this.

00:48:40 ◼   ► they made it happen and they got a reasonable level of success, they just didn't get over

00:48:44 ◼   ► the hump and they just now they're sliding back down the hill.

00:48:47 ◼   ► Yeah, agreed. I mean, you know, they're and you know, I've talked to Dalton, like, these

00:48:50 ◼   ► are good people. And I, I'm trying to, you know, be constructive here. Like they, I,

00:48:56 ◼   ► I don't think they're idiots. They're, I know they're not idiots. And I don't think they,

00:49:03 ◼   ► I think they just, they were trying something really, really hard. And it did not work.

00:49:08 ◼   ► And again, I agree, it lasted longer

00:49:11 ◼   ► and got further than I thought it would.

00:49:13 ◼   ► I didn't even think it would get backed.

00:49:14 ◼   ► Like I didn't think they would even make their goal

00:49:16 ◼   ► 'cause it seemed pretty high at the time.

00:49:18 ◼   ► And they did and they blew right past it.

00:49:20 ◼   ► I mean, and to last two years,

00:49:23 ◼   ► I mean, I certainly wouldn't have guessed that either.

00:49:26 ◼   ► But I don't know.

00:49:28 ◼   ► And I think now the way they're kind of winding it down,

00:49:31 ◼   ► I think they should just kill it

00:49:34 ◼   ► 'cause now it has nobody working on it

00:49:37 ◼   ► and the user number is just gonna go down

00:49:39 ◼   ► because now it's like a sinking ship.

00:49:41 ◼   ► Like it's almost like, you know,

00:49:44 ◼   ► like Merlin was talking about it briefly,

00:49:45 ◼   ► I'm back to work this week, so listen to that.

00:49:47 ◼   ► But you know, it's a little weird.

00:49:49 ◼   ► It's like you're hanging out at a bar with your friends

00:49:53 ◼   ► and there are people like filtering out for a while.

00:49:56 ◼   ► And now the owner has just turned the lights on and left.

00:49:59 ◼   ► And now you're all just sitting there

00:50:01 ◼   ► like with the lights on in this empty room.

00:50:03 ◼   ► Like how long are you really gonna stay there?

00:50:06 ◼   ► Somebody tweeted today that if you don't like using something

00:50:10 ◼   ► that doesn't have full-time people working on it,

00:50:12 ◼   ► then you should trash half the iOS applications on your phone.

00:50:16 ◼   ► It is a difference, because obviously a service

00:50:18 ◼   ► is different than a bunch of bits on your-- but this

00:50:21 ◼   ► is a problem all over.

00:50:22 ◼   ► This is why people are wary about signing up for things

00:50:28 ◼   ► or using applications.

00:50:29 ◼   ► And that's why big, successful companies

00:50:31 ◼   ► have some kind of advantage, because it's not

00:50:33 ◼   ► like a fly-by-night thing.

00:50:34 ◼   ► You're like, well, depending on the company,

00:50:38 ◼   ► like Apple, Microsoft, Google, you

00:50:40 ◼   ► figure if this thing goes away, it

00:50:43 ◼   ► won't be because the company went out of business.

00:50:45 ◼   ► It could be because they changed their mind or whatever,

00:50:47 ◼   ► but you're not worried about the viability of the company

00:50:49 ◼   ► because they have billions of dollars,

00:50:51 ◼   ► and you figure that gives them at least a couple of years

00:50:52 ◼   ► before they go down the tubes.

00:50:55 ◼   ► Whereas things like this, it's all just how much do you

00:50:58 ◼   ► believe in these scrappy group of people,

00:51:00 ◼   ► and they made it two years, which is longer probably

00:51:03 ◼   ► than some Google projects.

00:51:04 ◼   ► Good on them.

00:51:07 ◼   ► So something Marco said a few minutes ago actually really

00:51:10 ◼   ► made me think for a moment.

00:51:11 ◼   ► You had said something along the lines of, well, they kind of

00:51:15 ◼   ► screwed up having the users pay for App.net rather than

00:51:20 ◼   ► having the developers pay.

00:51:22 ◼   ► And it occurred to me that you could make a really legitimate

00:51:25 ◼   ► argument that App.net was further up the stack than a

00:51:28 ◼   ► lot of the things we're working with.

00:51:29 ◼   ► So if you look at the lowest level, we've got a physical

00:51:33 ◼   ► machine that say Marco owns for Instapaper or Overcast or what have you that is co-located

00:51:41 ◼   ► at somebody's data center.

00:51:43 ◼   ► And then you get a little less close to the metal and you have a virtual machine that's

00:51:47 ◼   ► still at somebody's data center and so on and so forth.

00:51:49 ◼   ► So it's a shared resource.

00:51:51 ◼   ► Then you move up the stack a little more.

00:51:52 ◼   ► You have something like Heroku or Azure is perhaps in the middle maybe, but something

00:51:56 ◼   ► like that where you have sort of a platform as a service thing.

00:51:59 ◼   ► Well, that's what app.net could have been.

00:52:01 ◼   ► I feel like it would be even further up the stack from like a Heroku where you have this

00:52:06 ◼   ► entire platform waiting for you.

00:52:08 ◼   ► And it seems, in retrospect, it seems obvious to me now after hearing Marco say that, that

00:52:12 ◼   ► that would have been really powerful for developers.

00:52:15 ◼   ► And if the pricing wasn't god-awful, that would be a really, really great way for a

00:52:19 ◼   ► developer to get, say, user accounts set up easily or data storage, like you had mentioned.

00:52:27 ◼   ► There's so many things that app.net eventually ends up doing.

00:52:31 ◼   ► I don't know if I should use past tense or not.

00:52:33 ◼   ► But anyway, there's so much that they do that as someone who has no interest in running

00:52:38 ◼   ► his own servers like myself, that is something that's very powerful.

00:52:41 ◼   ► And I think Man touched on this.

00:52:43 ◼   ► And I keep getting reminded of, I think it was Brent Simmons had posted about, "Hey,

00:52:47 ◼   ► why don't we have an API kind of like this?"

00:52:50 ◼   ► And I think his point was a little bit different, but it's a similar idea.

00:52:54 ◼   ► and it really could be a wonderful thing

00:52:56 ◼   ► if you don't wanna go through the hassle and effort

00:52:59 ◼   ► of completely rolling your own stuff.

00:53:01 ◼   ► - Yeah, totally, I mean that's,

00:53:03 ◼   ► and I think part of the problem with app.net is,

00:53:06 ◼   ► app.net, the name and domain, started out as something else

00:53:11 ◼   ► and Dalton and company kind of merged it in with this idea,

00:53:16 ◼   ► when Twitter started being a dick,

00:53:18 ◼   ► they started merging it in with this

00:53:19 ◼   ► and kind of took over and became something else

00:53:24 ◼   ► because it was a new cool thing that there was a need for.

00:53:27 ◼   ► And then as they ran app.net,

00:53:30 ◼   ► they kept doing more and more of those kind of things,

00:53:32 ◼   ► like hey, let's take this thing

00:53:34 ◼   ► and add this other thing to it,

00:53:36 ◼   ► and this other kind of product, this other kind of service,

00:53:38 ◼   ► and let's add this on and add this on.

00:53:40 ◼   ► And I think that lack of focus really hurt them a lot,

00:53:44 ◼   ► but I think if they would have skipped that first,

00:53:47 ◼   ► that second step, if they would have skipped the step of let's make this into a Twitter

00:53:51 ◼   ► alternative, or let's make this into a platform that could power

00:53:55 ◼   ► a Twitter alternative, please don't email me,

00:53:59 ◼   ► if they would have skipped that and gone directly from the old app.net

00:54:03 ◼   ► developer services company into what you just described,

00:54:07 ◼   ► like a high-level developer backend services company, where the developers

00:54:11 ◼   ► would pay them to host their backends on this infrastructure

00:54:15 ◼   ► structure and users would never have to know about it.

00:54:20 ◼   ► Just the same way users don't know if your backend is on AWS

00:54:24 ◼   ► or Parse or Microsoft Azure.

00:54:28 ◼   ► Users don't need to see that, it's an implementation detail.

00:54:31 ◼   ► And you, the application developer, would do your own

00:54:34 ◼   ► user management in the sense that you would say,

00:54:38 ◼   ► "All right, create a user and here's an email and password.

00:54:40 ◼   ► Give me a user account for this."

00:54:41 ◼   ► and then with every call you'd make, you'd say,

00:54:46 ◼   ► "All right, give me the files for user ID XYZ."

00:54:48 ◼   ► That's for my application.

00:54:50 ◼   ► That's a level up, and I think that's

00:54:52 ◼   ► probably a better business to be in, given

00:54:56 ◼   ► all the services they were building on top of it.

00:54:58 ◼   ► It seems like they would have been better off targeting

00:55:00 ◼   ► only developers, and making the developers pay,

00:55:03 ◼   ► and making all these great services they added to it

00:55:05 ◼   ► just developer services, really.

00:55:06 ◼   ► That would be boring, though.

00:55:08 ◼   ► There are services out there.

00:55:10 ◼   ► I mentioned Simperium, but there's also--

00:55:12 ◼   ► wasn't there that one before Game Center came out

00:55:14 ◼   ► that did all the game high scores and leaderboards?

00:55:16 ◼   ► What the hell was that called?

00:55:17 ◼   ► Yeah, I know what you meant.

00:55:18 ◼   ► Everyone-- I always had to say no to it.

00:55:20 ◼   ► Yeah, whatever.

00:55:21 ◼   ► But anyway, and Azure, of course,

00:55:23 ◼   ► one in all sorts of services that are like this that are

00:55:27 ◼   ► essentially offering alternatives to either

00:55:28 ◼   ► alternatives to iCloud or alternatives to Cordata.

00:55:30 ◼   ► And of course, all the alternatives to iCloud

00:55:32 ◼   ► don't have the advantage that iCloud does,

00:55:33 ◼   ► in that your users are probably already logged in.

00:55:35 ◼   ► Open Feint was the game thing.

00:55:37 ◼   ► - That's it.

00:55:38 ◼   ► - Yeah, but that's it.

00:55:39 ◼   ► And Simperium is like for a sort of alternative

00:55:41 ◼   ► to core data simpler kind of document data storage

00:55:44 ◼   ► and app.net was even more general.

00:55:47 ◼   ► But the thing is, I don't know any of those services

00:55:49 ◼   ► are like burning up the charts

00:55:50 ◼   ► and those companies are being wildly successful.

00:55:52 ◼   ► At the very least, app.net got to do something different

00:55:55 ◼   ► which was this weird Twitter-like thing

00:55:58 ◼   ► that got to run the experiment of

00:56:00 ◼   ► how does 256 characters feel compared to 140?

00:56:03 ◼   ► My answer to that is it feels pretty good.

00:56:07 ◼   ► I like it, I wish Twitter was like that.

00:56:09 ◼   ► What about out of band metadata?

00:56:11 ◼   ► The answer to that was it's really hard

00:56:12 ◼   ► to get clients to support it,

00:56:13 ◼   ► but it's kind of a good idea in theory.

00:56:15 ◼   ► The conversation threading,

00:56:17 ◼   ► lots of all the experiments they ran,

00:56:18 ◼   ► I mean, if Twitter wasn't a bunch of butts,

00:56:20 ◼   ► they would use it as like,

00:56:22 ◼   ► hey, these guys did all the research for us

00:56:23 ◼   ► by trying a whole bunch of crazy things

00:56:25 ◼   ► and some worked and some didn't,

00:56:26 ◼   ► but Twitter doesn't care about any of that stuff anymore,

00:56:28 ◼   ► unfortunately, but if they did,

00:56:29 ◼   ► App.net did a good service to them.

00:56:31 ◼   ► But I think the user goodwill, the people who did enjoy app.net and did enjoy the community

00:56:36 ◼   ► that was there and everything, is probably going to have a more lasting impact than all

00:56:40 ◼   ► the experiments there and more lasting impact than if they had just become another company

00:56:44 ◼   ► in line with all those other companies that I mentioned.

00:56:47 ◼   ► And I don't know how those companies are doing well.

00:56:49 ◼   ► Maybe they're doing fabulously well and I just don't know about it, but it seems like

00:56:52 ◼   ► there's a whole bunch of them and every once in a while one of the big dogs comes and squish

00:56:57 ◼   ► them.

00:56:58 ◼   ► Like, I don't know how OpenFane is doing now that Game Center is out.

00:56:59 ◼   ► Maybe they're doing great.

00:57:00 ◼   ► But like Azure and stuff, Microsoft has the advantage.

00:57:03 ◼   ► And they're like, you know, app.net would have to pay,

00:57:06 ◼   ► you know, S3 or AWS or Azure or something,

00:57:08 ◼   ► because they are a reseller of other services

00:57:11 ◼   ► with software on top of them.

00:57:12 ◼   ► Whereas Microsoft itself or Amazon itself or Apple itself

00:57:16 ◼   ► doesn't have that extra margin in the middle

00:57:17 ◼   ► to give to some other party in the chain.

00:57:19 ◼   ► So they're always gonna beat you on price.

00:57:21 ◼   ► And people who own platforms

00:57:22 ◼   ► are always gonna beat you on platform integration.

00:57:24 ◼   ► And that's a tough business to be in.

00:57:25 ◼   ► So maybe they would still be in business

00:57:28 ◼   ► if they had chose that model,

00:57:29 ◼   ► but I don't think it's a recipe for runaway success.

00:57:32 ◼   ► - Oh, I don't know about that.

00:57:33 ◼   ► I mean, they would be a value-added provider.

00:57:37 ◼   ► They would have this great system built

00:57:39 ◼   ► on top of raw hardware.

00:57:41 ◼   ► If you look at a service like Heroku,

00:57:44 ◼   ► the markup is insane.

00:57:47 ◼   ► I mean, there's tons of profit to be made there

00:57:49 ◼   ► by adding convenience and by building in functionality

00:57:53 ◼   ► that developers don't have to write themselves.

00:57:54 ◼   ► Like that's-- - Yeah, but they're

00:57:55 ◼   ► never gonna do, like, they don't,

00:57:57 ◼   ► They would have to pay Amazon if they use EC2 to deploy on.

00:58:00 ◼   ► They would have to pay--

00:58:01 ◼   ► Doesn't Heroku do that?

00:58:02 ◼   ► Well, yeah, I was saying Heroku is not burned off the chart,

00:58:05 ◼   ► too.

00:58:05 ◼   ► Like I'm saying, there's always going

00:58:07 ◼   ► to be someone who can offer the same service for cheaper

00:58:10 ◼   ► or the same service with better platform integration.

00:58:12 ◼   ► So it's a tough business to be in.

00:58:13 ◼   ► You're always kind of--

00:58:14 ◼   ► you're trying to find the little area that someone isn't

00:58:17 ◼   ► covering.

00:58:17 ◼   ► Like OpenFaint probably thought it was like, great,

00:58:18 ◼   ► Apple's never going to do anything with games.

00:58:20 ◼   ► We're all set with this.

00:58:20 ◼   ► And they were doing well for a while.

00:58:22 ◼   ► And then Game Center comes, which sucks and I hate.

00:58:24 ◼   ► but it really took the wind out of their sales.

00:58:28 ◼   ► Yeah, I suppose it is a harder business,

00:58:29 ◼   ► but do you think it's harder than a paid social network?

00:58:31 ◼   ► Well, I mean, it's risk reward.

00:58:33 ◼   ► They went for the riskier play initially that

00:58:35 ◼   ► had the bigger potential upside.

00:58:37 ◼   ► And like I said, I think the things they did with it

00:58:38 ◼   ► are more interesting experiments than if they

00:58:40 ◼   ► had tried to sell services.

00:58:42 ◼   ► And maybe they would have done something more interesting

00:58:44 ◼   ► there, but it just seems like it would have been more of the same.

00:58:46 ◼   ► Like, are we over something similar to these other companies

00:58:49 ◼   ► but with different services or whatever, whereas no one tried

00:58:51 ◼   ► to make-- well, no one made as successful

00:58:53 ◼   ► a sort of Twitter-like application as App.net.

00:58:56 ◼   ► I think, what was the other one, Tent?

00:58:58 ◼   ► It used to be called--

00:58:58 ◼   ► - Tentis.

00:59:00 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, they changed the name to something else.

00:59:01 ◼   ► Anyway, they had a federated system or whatever.

00:59:03 ◼   ► Maybe, you know, that's the thing

00:59:06 ◼   ► about leaving this thing running.

00:59:07 ◼   ► I think Tent is still running

00:59:08 ◼   ► 'cause it's like not centralized

00:59:10 ◼   ► and it's called Cupcake now or whatever.

00:59:12 ◼   ► Like, you know, it'll never die

00:59:15 ◼   ► 'cause it never lived, right?

00:59:17 ◼   ► At App.net, if it just limps along for years,

00:59:20 ◼   ► like sleeping, who knows?

00:59:21 ◼   ► It could be like IRC where people forget about it

00:59:23 ◼   ► until you realize, oh yeah, IRC is still there,

00:59:25 ◼   ► and it still works and still does what it's supposed to do.

00:59:27 ◼   ► And especially if they open source everything,

00:59:30 ◼   ► at .NET the protocol and technology

00:59:32 ◼   ► could rise again in the distant future.

00:59:34 ◼   ► Stranger things have happened.

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01:00:55 ◼   ► All right, so let's talk about one more thing tonight.

01:00:58 ◼   ► And this actually broke before the last episode, maybe even the day that we recorded the last

01:01:03 ◼   ► episode.

01:01:04 ◼   ► We didn't have time to talk about it.

01:01:05 ◼   ► And our friend Alan Pike wrote about how in a preview release of Chrome, they've removed

01:01:15 ◼   ► the URL bar or the omni bar or whatever you call it.

01:01:19 ◼   ► And so we'll put the link in the show notes and basically where

01:01:24 ◼   ► currently you have a full bore URL and it, you know, highlights

01:01:27 ◼   ► the top level domain and so on.

01:01:29 ◼   ► Uh, so it highlights like amazon.com for example.

01:01:33 ◼   ► Well, now what it would be is it would show that you're on amazon.com and that's it.

01:01:38 ◼   ► And then everything else is just a search Google box.

01:01:42 ◼   ► And the internet seems to be really upset about this.

01:01:47 ◼   ► And I got into a couple of conversations on Twitter

01:01:50 ◼   ► with a couple of people about this,

01:01:51 ◼   ► and people who are really fired up

01:01:53 ◼   ► and really angry about it, and not Alan.

01:01:56 ◼   ► Alan seems to be kind of ambivalent about it

01:01:59 ◼   ► from what I recollect from reading this.

01:02:01 ◼   ► But anyways, while I don't like it personally,

01:02:06 ◼   ► I'm not so sure this is such a terrible idea.

01:02:09 ◼   ► And I'm curious to hear what you two think about it.

01:02:12 ◼   ► I saw it come up in my beta because I'm on the beta channel and immediately did...

01:02:18 ◼   ► I should have done this first, but now I've learned that by the time something shows up

01:02:22 ◼   ► in the beta channel, there are 8,000 web pages explaining how to turn it off.

01:02:25 ◼   ► So you've just got to type "Chrome restore address bar" and the number one hit is someone

01:02:31 ◼   ► telling you how to do it.

01:02:32 ◼   ► But at this point, I just go immediately to "Chrome colon double slash flags" and then

01:02:36 ◼   ► find the little setting that turns it off and do relaunch and I restored it.

01:02:39 ◼   ► But the reason I have to restart is because I'm a web developer, I need to see the address

01:02:43 ◼   ► bar.

01:02:44 ◼   ► It's kind of important to see that.

01:02:45 ◼   ► And I'm assuming they will always include the feature to turn it on, because some people

01:02:49 ◼   ► are web developers, but most people are not.

01:02:51 ◼   ► And that's where we get into, is it a good idea to hide this to this degree?

01:02:55 ◼   ► And I'm not so sure.

01:02:57 ◼   ► Not because I think, oh, you always have to show the address, and people like...

01:03:00 ◼   ► I don't think people care about the address bar.

01:03:01 ◼   ► I don't think people ever even look at it.

01:03:04 ◼   ► And I don't like the idea of people phishing with the things with the big long username

01:03:08 ◼   ► with an @ that the username looks like a hostname and people think they're at apple.com, they're

01:03:12 ◼   ► not and that's why EV certificates for SSL are good because they put the little green

01:03:15 ◼   ► thing like there's a lot of important progress we should make in terms of the UI of highlighting

01:03:20 ◼   ► the parts that are important to people and making it not be freeform text. But by the

01:03:25 ◼   ► same token, the web works on URLs and you may not need to expose all the nitty gritty

01:03:31 ◼   ► details but there needs to be something up there that not looks like a URL necessarily

01:03:38 ◼   ► but that all the parts of the URL show through in all their glory.

01:03:43 ◼   ► Because URL design and URLs is a thing you can copy and paste out of an area

01:03:49 ◼   ► and send around, I think is still an important part of the web.

01:03:52 ◼   ► And it could work without it.

01:03:56 ◼   ► I can see a scenario where you have all the same features.

01:03:59 ◼   ► You don't need to swipe over some text and copy and paste it.

01:04:01 ◼   ► You can just use a sharing link and say copy URL and paste it into an email.

01:04:04 ◼   ► And then when you paste into the email, it could look different.

01:04:06 ◼   ► And you never need to see those parts.

01:04:07 ◼   ► But I think the path of least resistance for this thing

01:04:10 ◼   ► that we have-- like, URLs are not going away,

01:04:12 ◼   ► and people are going to want to share them over text mediums.

01:04:15 ◼   ► So they have to exist in some form.

01:04:17 ◼   ► So I'm all for stopping all the things that

01:04:20 ◼   ► are bad that people do with URLs and pinning down

01:04:23 ◼   ► different parts of it.

01:04:24 ◼   ► But I still think you have to be able to deal with it as text,

01:04:27 ◼   ► even users who don't know or care what it is.

01:04:30 ◼   ► Because even those people might want to send an email about it

01:04:32 ◼   ► at some point.

01:04:33 ◼   ► Yeah, but the problem I have with what you're saying

01:04:35 ◼   ► is I don't see any need to look at the full URL outside of what I'm trying to share it.

01:04:42 ◼   ► And you know, the people in the chat are pointing out, this is the behavior that Chrome is having

01:04:47 ◼   ► or will have theoretically is exactly how Safari works in iOS 7 today.

01:04:52 ◼   ► So if you look at a website, all you see at the top is the, is the host name and title,

01:04:57 ◼   ► you know, and so caselists.com, for example, and that's it.

01:05:01 ◼   ► And it's not until you tap in the URL bar or if you go to share that you actually see

01:05:06 ◼   ► the rest of the URL.

01:05:08 ◼   ► And what I'm saying is I don't think there even needs to necessarily be a tap in the

01:05:13 ◼   ► URL bar to see the rest of the URL.

01:05:15 ◼   ► The only time I think an average person would need to see the URL is just like you said,

01:05:19 ◼   ► Jon, in like a share sheet or something to that effect.

01:05:22 ◼   ► Web developers or developers in general absolutely agree with you that, yeah, we're going to

01:05:26 ◼   ► want to see it.

01:05:27 ◼   ► But your average user, I just don't think it's relevant.

01:05:30 ◼   ► And additionally, from anecdotal experience, I can't think of anyone other than my dad

01:05:37 ◼   ► who's pretty geeky who would ever type in a URL. Most people I know just go to Google

01:05:42 ◼   ► to look for what they want.

01:05:43 ◼   ► Yeah, like, I'm not saying it has to remain plain text. In the iOS situation, obviously

01:05:47 ◼   ► you do it for space constraints. I think the iPad, I think—I don't remember what the

01:05:52 ◼   ► iOS 7 iPad app looks like, but I mean, on the phone it makes perfect sense. Like, you

01:05:55 ◼   ► don't have room to show all that stuff. But, like, and I'm not saying you need to

01:05:58 ◼   ► show it as full-bore text, but there are portions of it.

01:06:02 ◼   ► You know how sometimes they have something that ends up being raw text, but they show

01:06:04 ◼   ► — for example, if it's a comma-separated list, but they show it as little capsule bubbles

01:06:08 ◼   ► because the theory is that people can deal with those capsule bubbles individually instead

01:06:12 ◼   ► of behind the scenes, it's just comma-separated text.

01:06:15 ◼   ► You talk about in email?

01:06:16 ◼   ► Yeah, like in the same way that they do with the EVSSL certificates where they show the

01:06:21 ◼   ► big green box that says "apple.com" so you can be sure it's from apple.com.

01:06:25 ◼   ► By all means, turn the address into a series of bits of UI,

01:06:29 ◼   ► but I think you'd still want people to be able to

01:06:32 ◼   ► back up one level in the hierarchy like you can

01:06:34 ◼   ► by command clicking the title bar in Safari.

01:06:37 ◼   ► Like, I don't want people to be afraid,

01:06:40 ◼   ► I don't want it to become sort of like

01:06:42 ◼   ► the thing that you don't touch.

01:06:43 ◼   ► I don't want people to be afraid to go up there

01:06:45 ◼   ► and backspace or, you know,

01:06:47 ◼   ► it's not for the average person,

01:06:50 ◼   ► but for regular people,

01:06:52 ◼   ► there's no reason to shut out more people.

01:06:53 ◼   ► People who are currently comfortable messing with the address bar, who are just on that

01:06:56 ◼   ► borderline, locking it down like this will scare them away.

01:06:59 ◼   ► And I think that just is reducing the pool of people who care about URLs.

01:07:04 ◼   ► And that way lies the madness of URLs as generated by terrible web content generators in the

01:07:12 ◼   ► early '90s, like front page URLs or the original City Desk URLs.

01:07:19 ◼   ► Remember those, Marco?

01:07:20 ◼   ► Oh yeah, all the zeros?

01:07:21 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:07:22 ◼   ► I mean, URL design is part of the web.

01:07:24 ◼   ► And yes, very few users ever touch it,

01:07:27 ◼   ► but I don't think it's worth locking it down more.

01:07:30 ◼   ► Like, they're already ignoring it.

01:07:31 ◼   ► Locking it down more doesn't help them.

01:07:33 ◼   ► It's like, well, previously they were screwing things up.

01:07:34 ◼   ► No, they weren't.

01:07:35 ◼   ► They don't even know that thing is up there.

01:07:37 ◼   ► Those people can hide that if they want, right?

01:07:39 ◼   ► But if you're gonna have it visible at all,

01:07:41 ◼   ► I would like you to get rid of the bad things

01:07:45 ◼   ► that are about the current URL.

01:07:46 ◼   ► You shouldn't be able to fish people with it.

01:07:48 ◼   ► It should be parsed out and made into some kind of UI,

01:07:51 ◼   ► but I would like to strike a balance that still allows it to be sort of piecemeal, editable,

01:07:57 ◼   ► and selectable, and manipulable by the people who do care about the editor's bar.

01:08:00 ◼   ► People who don't care about the editor's bar, just hide it completely.

01:08:03 ◼   ► Don't even include a token for it or anything.

01:08:05 ◼   ► Just make it like it is on iOS.

01:08:08 ◼   ► Make that the default if you want to.

01:08:09 ◼   ► It's just that I think that there's no reason to scare away the people who are on the borderline

01:08:15 ◼   ► now who just tweak it a little bit.

01:08:17 ◼   ► I think I think that is that is a reasonable interface like so we don't want people to use a command line or text or whatever

01:08:24 ◼   ► But I think our history with the GUI has shown that while the GUI is vastly superior for almost all things a couple of things

01:08:29 ◼   ► are actually useful for text just think of all the email clients that let you start typing in a

01:08:32 ◼   ► To address and then we like autocomplete and turn it into a little token that is a text interface with

01:08:40 ◼   ► Augmentation rather than saying oh every time you want to send to somebody

01:08:43 ◼   ► You have to open up this widget and scroll through and find the person or something like that

01:08:47 ◼   ► that we these hybrid interfaces that allow you to type freeform text and also

01:08:52 ◼   ► give you you know affordances to quickly turn that into a sort of an immutable

01:08:58 ◼   ► capsule so you're not afraid you're gonna screw it up or whatever that type

01:09:01 ◼   ► of design for the address bar seems appropriate and in the same way that the

01:09:05 ◼   ► text fields for to CC subject in an email client don't go away we just make

01:09:11 ◼   ► really good versions of those and I think that's what the address bar should

01:09:13 ◼   ► is a really good version of a place where people see and manipulate text who care about

01:09:19 ◼   ► it. And if you don't care about it, then yeah, just hide it.

01:09:22 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, it's a hard problem because we as geeks recognize the significance of

01:09:30 ◼   ► URLs and the power of URLs, but in reality, in real world use, they are a significant

01:09:36 ◼   ► usability problem and they're very confusing to people and people you know

01:09:41 ◼   ► what what Chrome did in this in this beta and and I've heard from various you

01:09:46 ◼   ► know various people on Twitter said like this is this is probably not going to

01:09:50 ◼   ► stick around but it was like it was an experiment but we'll see I better get

01:09:55 ◼   ► there eventually because it does benefit Google tremendously but I think it's

01:10:00 ◼   ► it's it's hard for us to accept but this is how people use the internet and

01:10:05 ◼   ► and not just like super novices, like almost everyone.

01:10:10 ◼   ► And there's lots of problems with URLs like security

01:10:13 ◼   ► and the phishing attempts and stuff like that,

01:10:15 ◼   ► but the fact is, showing the little lock icon

01:10:17 ◼   ► for SSL pages, showing the big green bar

01:10:20 ◼   ► for EVSSL certificates with a company name in it,

01:10:22 ◼   ► telling people to look for, make sure you're on

01:10:24 ◼   ► PayPal.com before you type in your PayPal password,

01:10:27 ◼   ► the fact is that doesn't work.

01:10:31 ◼   ► Most people don't check for those things.

01:10:33 ◼   ► In practice, these efforts really are not worth a whole lot.

01:10:38 ◼   ► We think they're effective.

01:10:40 ◼   ► To us, they make sense as nerds,

01:10:42 ◼   ► but the vast majority of people

01:10:45 ◼   ► don't even look at this stuff.

01:10:46 ◼   ► They don't pay attention to URL security.

01:10:48 ◼   ► They can't tell whether they're on PayPal or not.

01:10:50 ◼   ► If it looks like PayPal, it is PayPal to them.

01:10:52 ◼   ► Stuff like that.

01:10:53 ◼   ► It's really hard to meaningfully improve URL security.

01:11:00 ◼   ► and it's all down to just actual human nature

01:11:04 ◼   ► and human behavior, and there's not a lot

01:11:05 ◼   ► we can do about that.

01:11:06 ◼   ► - You wanna be able to tell them,

01:11:08 ◼   ► people won't do the right thing,

01:11:10 ◼   ► but in the case where someone is asking,

01:11:12 ◼   ► I wanna do the right thing, tell me what the right thing is,

01:11:14 ◼   ► if you can't easily describe it to them, that's a problem.

01:11:17 ◼   ► So I think at the very least that the bar should be,

01:11:20 ◼   ► if someone is on the phone with you and saying,

01:11:21 ◼   ► I can't tell if I'm on PayPal.com,

01:11:24 ◼   ► if you know what browser they're using,

01:11:25 ◼   ► you should be able to tell them something quickly.

01:11:26 ◼   ► Instead of telling them, scroll really far right

01:11:30 ◼   ► the address bar and make sure there's no @ sign because that's just a

01:11:33 ◼   ► gigantic username that begins with www.paypal.com or something, you know what I

01:11:37 ◼   ► mean? Like, if you could tell them, "Look at the big green thing, does it say

01:11:41 ◼   ► paypal.com and then the Chrome UI?" Like, that's not nothing, right? I mean,

01:11:47 ◼   ► getting back to how this is good for Google, though, I think that's one of the

01:11:50 ◼   ► dangers of this is that, yeah, people use the internet that way, but for example,

01:11:54 ◼   ► when you see a billboard with a URL or something in it, imagine with Google, you

01:11:58 ◼   ► being evil in the future of saying, even if you type in http colon slash slash triple

01:12:02 ◼   ► w dot apple dot com, we will do something different with that. We'll never take you

01:12:05 ◼   ► to apple dot com. Even if you saw that in a magazine ad, even if you saw it on a billboard,

01:12:09 ◼   ► everything is a Google search and we control like suddenly we control a huge portion of

01:12:13 ◼   ► the internet because say Chrome becomes way more popular or whatever. Like you don't want

01:12:17 ◼   ► to give the browser vendor so much control. And there are situations where any human beings

01:12:22 ◼   ► will have to deal with URLs in a non electronic form. And I don't want to scan a QR code,

01:12:26 ◼   ► So like the paper paper is not gonna go away and like I would be I wouldn't like a situation where

01:12:33 ◼   ► No matter what anyone types in that thing

01:12:35 ◼   ► It does a Google search because that that gives too much control to Google or any any browser vendor

01:12:39 ◼   ► I think you need to strike a bounce. Maybe the current thing is the right balance

01:12:44 ◼   ► Like I haven't I didn't use it enough. I immediately turned it off

01:12:46 ◼   ► Like maybe maybe that is the balance I'm talking about some people in the chat room is saying it more or less acts the way

01:12:51 ◼   ► I'm described I just that it's something to watch for

01:12:54 ◼   ► You don't want to make everything into a search because then whoever you choose to search vendor is like your gateway to the entire internet

01:13:00 ◼   ► But and unfortunately that is how most people use the internet anyway

01:13:05 ◼   ► Right and that that's exactly the point. I'm driving at is that why why stand on tradition?

01:13:12 ◼   ► Why not embrace the fact that if from from what I can tell anyone who wants to find out like the websites address

01:13:19 ◼   ► They're not going to think to type in facebook.com

01:13:21 ◼   ► they're gonna just type in Facebook to Google or have a bookmark perhaps and that's how they're

01:13:26 ◼   ► gonna get there. So let's just embrace the fact that the URL doesn't really mean much to anyone

01:13:30 ◼   ► but nerds. But on subsequent visits, if you type "app," it completes the apple.com. When you hit

01:13:35 ◼   ► "return," it doesn't do a Google search for apple.com, it takes you right to apple.com.

01:13:38 ◼   ► I see my parents do this all the time. Like, I mean, maybe it, again, if they change the auto

01:13:43 ◼   ► complete not to behave that way, but if you visit a site frequently and you start to type something,

01:13:47 ◼   ► people will figure out that like, oh, if I just hit return now, like it won't go through a Google

01:13:52 ◼   ► search, it will because you go to apple.com constantly or google.com or, you know, whatever

01:13:57 ◼   ► your local newspapers website is, or whatever, it will be the first auto complete completion,

01:14:00 ◼   ► not the Google search for it, right? If you're going to some random place, you just type some

01:14:04 ◼   ► a bunch of stuff, then yeah, you'll do a search. But if it matches the.com, that's usually the top

01:14:08 ◼   ► thing in the result. And I think people find like that better than going to Google and clicking the

01:14:13 ◼   ► top result. I think they like it saying, you know, they want to go Denver post to type DEN,

01:14:18 ◼   ► and it already has highlighted Denver post.com and hit return. They would be annoyed if it went

01:14:21 ◼   ► to Google, even if the top hit was Denver post.com, they just want to go to Denver post,

01:14:25 ◼   ► right? And I think bookmarks, nobody uses them anymore. Bookmark bar things, if people ever

01:14:30 ◼   ► figured out how to configure them or someone configures them for them, they use that a lot.

01:14:34 ◼   ► I think there is still a desire to go immediately where they wanted to go without going through

01:14:37 ◼   ► research when people know where they want to go.

01:14:39 ◼   ► Yeah, that's true, but why couldn't you, in this omnibar, why couldn't you match against

01:14:46 ◼   ► page titles rather than URLs?

01:14:49 ◼   ► Nobody knows what the titles of pages are. Half the titles are probably the same title.

01:14:52 ◼   ► Well, the titles are all spammed up with keyword crap anyway. Breaking news, world news.

01:14:57 ◼   ► That's true as well, but I mean, if you're looking for Apple and you've been to Apple.com

01:15:01 ◼   ► in the past, I'm assuming that the title on Apple's landing page is something that says

01:15:07 ◼   ► Apple Inc. or whatever.

01:15:09 ◼   ► Well, the top-level domain things that we talked about and laughed about in the last

01:15:13 ◼   ► show have not come through and wiped out all sanity and domain names.

01:15:16 ◼   ► So it currently is still a cache and association with something.com.

01:15:22 ◼   ► People know what .com is, and the reason they know about it is because they've been seeing

01:15:25 ◼   ► it in address bars.

01:15:26 ◼   ► And it is a way, something to hang your hat on.

01:15:28 ◼   ► You know, if someone says, oh, you can't, you know,

01:15:31 ◼   ► you should check out blahblahblah.com.

01:15:32 ◼   ► You know it's something you should go home

01:15:34 ◼   ► and type in your web browser and you know it.

01:15:36 ◼   ► It distinguishes it as like, this is the website.

01:15:38 ◼   ► Luckily we've gotten rid of the triple W more or less,

01:15:41 ◼   ► even Casey, but like, there's still something to, you know,

01:15:46 ◼   ► not just like reading off billboards,

01:15:48 ◼   ► but communicating with friends or whatever.

01:15:50 ◼   ► You don't want to tell someone,

01:15:51 ◼   ► oh, just type this into your thing

01:15:52 ◼   ► and I'm sure it'll be the number one result.

01:15:54 ◼   ► If you know, it's like, go to netflix.com,

01:15:56 ◼   ► you can sign up for Netflix.

01:15:58 ◼   ► What the hell is Netflix.com?

01:15:59 ◼   ► It's something you type in an address bar

01:16:01 ◼   ► that resolves to a hostname.

01:16:02 ◼   ► They don't know the details,

01:16:03 ◼   ► but they know that's different than saying

01:16:04 ◼   ► if you just search for Netflix, you'll find it,

01:16:06 ◼   ► which is also true,

01:16:07 ◼   ► but communicating in .coms with each other,

01:16:10 ◼   ► advertising them and telling other people about them,

01:16:13 ◼   ► I still think there's value in that.

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01:17:41 ◼   ► So I open sourced my blogging engine during the time between the last episode and today.

01:17:47 ◼   ► Does the name of your blogging engine end in "LISP"?

01:17:49 ◼   ► No.

01:17:50 ◼   ► Wow.

01:17:51 ◼   ► It's just called "Camel."

01:17:53 ◼   ► CamelLISP?

01:17:54 ◼   ► just camel, which I still don't know how to pronounce the word right, but it's a combination

01:17:59 ◼   ► of my first and middle names, Port-min something or other.

01:18:02 ◼   ► John, it's French, I think.

01:18:03 ◼   ► What, Portmanteau? Is that what you're talking about? I don't know how to pronounce it either.

01:18:07 ◼   ► I think that's it.

01:18:08 ◼   ► Well, thank you. Thank you for taking the fall for me this week. Anyways, so there's

01:18:11 ◼   ► not really that much to be said here, and I'm actually going to not say much, but

01:18:15 ◼   ► unlike usually. But I did open source it. It's on GitHub, and I already got a poll

01:18:21 ◼   ► request which I accepted which was a one-liner but it was a one-liner that I didn't think to include myself which was to set the

01:18:27 ◼   ► Content type for the RSS feed but but no it's it's been an interesting experience

01:18:33 ◼   ► it was very it was very stressful the thought of open sourcing it because I kind of wanted to but I was so scared that

01:18:40 ◼   ► by doing so everyone will realize that I don't really know anything about node or express and I just kind of hacked this together and

01:18:48 ◼   ► it's

01:18:50 ◼   ► held together in the same way that Myspace was as we were talking about earlier.

01:18:53 ◼   ► But nobody's really come out of the woodwork to say that I'm completely off the reservation, which is good. And granted everyone's code

01:19:01 ◼   ► does suck in some way shape or form. But no, it's been pretty cool. I've liked having it up there.

01:19:07 ◼   ► Now the biggest problem I have is that I feel like it's feature complete.

01:19:10 ◼   ► I don't feel like I really want to add anything. Since the last episode I added my

01:19:14 ◼   ► loose pagination, which you can't see yet because I haven't posted enough on my site yet.

01:19:18 ◼   ► But now I'm really into it, really excited about it,

01:19:23 ◼   ► but I don't have anything else to do.

01:19:26 ◼   ► So now I'm like, well, I guess I need a new project.

01:19:29 ◼   ► - You tweeted about the line counts,

01:19:31 ◼   ► and there was like 400 lines of code,

01:19:33 ◼   ► but it was you, what were the stats?

01:19:35 ◼   ► - Let me run it real quick.

01:19:36 ◼   ► It's gonna take me a second.

01:19:37 ◼   ► But what I tweeted was that I had

01:19:42 ◼   ► a roughly 405 lines, I'm trying to get there right now,

01:19:47 ◼   ► Hold on.

01:19:48 ◼   ► I had roughly 400 lines of code that I had written.

01:19:50 ◼   ► Let's see, clock, camel.

01:19:53 ◼   ► So let's see.

01:19:54 ◼   ► Okay, so 448 lines of code for me right now

01:19:57 ◼   ► that I wrote myself.

01:19:59 ◼   ► So now I'm gonna look at the node modules,

01:20:02 ◼   ► so all the third-party libraries that I imported,

01:20:04 ◼   ► and it is 956 unique files, 94,580 lines of code.

01:20:09 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:20:12 ◼   ► - See, now I feel less bad

01:20:13 ◼   ► about my ridiculous static content blogging thing

01:20:15 ◼   ► Because I was going to say, you wrote 400 lines of code.

01:20:17 ◼   ► And it was like, I don't have 400 lines of code

01:20:20 ◼   ► in any single file.

01:20:22 ◼   ► But then in the Perl world-- well, not in the Perl world.

01:20:25 ◼   ► But in my world, I like writing frameworks.

01:20:28 ◼   ► Unlike Marco, I have this problem.

01:20:29 ◼   ► I like writing tools.

01:20:30 ◼   ► I like writing frameworks.

01:20:31 ◼   ► So I'm not going to use someone else's framework.

01:20:34 ◼   ► First step in writing and making a blog

01:20:35 ◼   ► is first write a framework for making web applications.

01:20:38 ◼   ► Second, write a blog using that framework.

01:20:40 ◼   ► Third, you know, like-- and so I have

01:20:42 ◼   ► a tremendous number of lines.

01:20:44 ◼   ► but I have way less than 95,000.

01:20:45 ◼   ► But I've essentially made my own--

01:20:47 ◼   ► in Perl, you've got to make your own object systems.

01:20:50 ◼   ► I made my own object system.

01:20:51 ◼   ► I used that object system to make--

01:20:52 ◼   ► Wait, are you really serious?

01:20:53 ◼   ► What a great language.

01:20:54 ◼   ► Yeah, it's great.

01:20:55 ◼   ► Oh, that's fantastic.

01:20:56 ◼   ► Yeah, that's definitely the best language of all the moronic

01:20:58 ◼   ► languages we use.

01:20:59 ◼   ► Oh, you can't talk, Mr. JavaScript.

01:21:01 ◼   ► Yeah, JavaScript, you're making your own object system too.

01:21:04 ◼   ► So let's not throw stones here.

01:21:07 ◼   ► We can make a class-based system out of this prototype-based

01:21:09 ◼   ► system.

01:21:10 ◼   ► Anyway.

01:21:11 ◼   ► The amazing thing is that PHP actually has a really good

01:21:13 ◼   ► object system. It's probably the best between these three languages.

01:21:17 ◼   ► Well, the thing—not to go on a sidebar here—but the thing about Perl is like, the ability

01:21:21 ◼   ► to build your own object system means that people keep making new object systems in Perl,

01:21:25 ◼   ► and it has allowed us to have 5,000 different object systems and sort of, you know, evolutionary

01:21:30 ◼   ► kind of, let's converge on something that's good. So the bad ones go off and die and we

01:21:34 ◼   ► get new ones. Whereas if you have an object system built into a language and that's the

01:21:38 ◼   ► only way you can do it, if that object system is bad or becomes bad in the future, you have

01:21:42 ◼   ► no choice but to move to another language. But Perl, it's like, well, let's throw away

01:21:45 ◼   ► that one. It was crappy. We'll make a new one and go again and again. And so it is a

01:21:49 ◼   ► little test tube for different object-oriented experiments. And a lot of the experiments

01:21:54 ◼   ► that have been done in Perl 5 are what led to Perl 6. But anyway, I feel better about

01:21:58 ◼   ► my giant code base because it is still way less lines than all those node modules, even

01:22:04 ◼   ► though I happen to write all of them because I just like making frameworks.

01:22:08 ◼   ► Well, and so on the one side, I tweeted it expressly because I thought it was remarkable.

01:22:14 ◼   ► It was both remarkable that it took only 450 lines to write what I consider to be a full-featured

01:22:20 ◼   ► blog engine, at least for the needs that I have.

01:22:23 ◼   ► But it's also remarkable that I'm leveraging basically 100,000 lines of other people's

01:22:27 ◼   ► code in order to get there.

01:22:29 ◼   ► And on the one side, I would tell you that that is a completely terrible idea to use

01:22:35 ◼   ► that much code that you have no control over.

01:22:37 ◼   ► Granted, it's all open source, but I don't intend to open up any of that source.

01:22:43 ◼   ► But on the other side of the coin, most of this code, especially the Node community,

01:22:47 ◼   ► seems to be very into testing.

01:22:50 ◼   ► Let's show what the test coverage is, how many of the tests are passing as of right

01:22:54 ◼   ► now.

01:22:55 ◼   ► And so because of that, I would argue that using all of this code is like how Marco talks

01:23:00 ◼   ► about using MySQL because he's not the biggest user of MySQL.

01:23:04 ◼   ► MySQL has been proven, it's been tested, a million zillion people have used it, and we know it's solid.

01:23:09 ◼   ► And maybe that's not true of every package that I've chosen, but nevertheless

01:23:13 ◼   ► I got to assume that most of them are pretty well tested, pretty robust, and I really shouldn't have to worry about them.

01:23:20 ◼   ► So, like I said, half of me is freaking out about using 100,000 lines of other people's code,

01:23:24 ◼   ► but the other half of me is like, "Well, actually, it's probably for the best that I didn't roll my own on all that stuff."

01:23:29 ◼   ► No, you're supposed to be doing that. Everyone is using it.

01:23:31 ◼   ► That's not even the beginning of the count of number of lines

01:23:34 ◼   ► of other people's code you're using to run your blog.

01:23:36 ◼   ► And that's how everything works.

01:23:37 ◼   ► Like, I'm not saying it's a bad thing.

01:23:38 ◼   ► It's just like, you know, in fact,

01:23:40 ◼   ► I would say that's a good measure of the health

01:23:42 ◼   ► of the JavaScript ecosystem is like you only

01:23:45 ◼   ► had to write the code that was relevant to the thing you were

01:23:48 ◼   ► trying to make.

01:23:49 ◼   ► Yes, exactly.

01:23:50 ◼   ► Everything else, you could use a library

01:23:51 ◼   ► that was reasonably well known that you didn't have to, like,

01:23:55 ◼   ► you know, hunt around for something.

01:23:58 ◼   ► There was something suitable for your needs

01:23:59 ◼   ► it seemed like it was recently well supported.

01:24:01 ◼   ► So these are all good things.

01:24:03 ◼   ► I was just, you know,

01:24:05 ◼   ► when you had said it was 400 lines of code,

01:24:07 ◼   ► I was like, wow, maybe he's getting a lot more done

01:24:08 ◼   ► with a lot less lines of code,

01:24:10 ◼   ► but then at the top of your thing,

01:24:11 ◼   ► you have 8,000 require statements,

01:24:12 ◼   ► and like, oh, okay.

01:24:13 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:24:14 ◼   ► That makes sense.

01:24:15 ◼   ► Some of these libraries I recognize, hmm.

01:24:17 ◼   ► - It's not 8,000.

01:24:19 ◼   ► How many is it?

01:24:20 ◼   ► It's like 10-ish?

01:24:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, like your little comment for statics.

01:24:22 ◼   ► Wrong language, Casey.

01:24:24 ◼   ► - I put it in air quotes, come on.

01:24:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, the scare quotes, yeah.

01:24:27 ◼   ► - What would you relax?

01:24:29 ◼   ► Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Igloo, New Relic, and Nature Box, and we will

01:24:34 ◼   ► see you next week.

01:24:36 ◼   ► [MUSIC]

01:24:46 ◼   ► Oh it was accidental.

01:24:48 ◼   ► Accidental.

01:24:49 ◼   ► John didn't do any research.

01:24:51 ◼   ► Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.

01:24:54 ◼   ► Cause it was accidental.

01:24:56 ◼   ► Accidental.

01:24:57 ◼   ► It was accidental.

01:24:58 ◼   ► Accidental.

01:24:59 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm.

01:25:04 ◼   ► And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at

01:25:10 ◼   ► C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,

01:25:18 ◼   ► Auntie Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, USA, Syracuse.

01:25:25 ◼   ► It's accidental.

01:25:27 ◼   ► It's accidental.

01:25:28 ◼   ► They didn't mean to.

01:25:31 ◼   ► Accidental.

01:25:32 ◼   ► Accidental.

01:25:33 ◼   ► Tech podcast so long.

01:25:38 ◼   ► We talk about the format of your flower box comments here, too

01:25:41 ◼   ► Have you not decided but how you're gonna handle things in JavaScript

01:25:46 ◼   ► It's clear that you've adopted the JavaScript naming conventions and capitalization, but your little box thing is misshapen

01:25:52 ◼   ► What's wrong with them?

01:25:53 ◼   ► Is that a format using in C C++ or does that a special little thing that you made just for JavaScript?

01:25:59 ◼   ► I mean, I've done it occasionally in the past. I did it for just so in C sharp I would use

01:26:05 ◼   ► regions, which basically is code folding, the same way that you would use pragmas in

01:26:10 ◼   ► Objective-C, and that's what I would do there as well. Well, it's a little bit less cold

01:26:14 ◼   ► folding. God, I can't pronounce that. Code folding in Objective-C and more about the

01:26:20 ◼   ► dropdown at the top of the editor. But anyways.

01:26:22 ◼   ► That's for IDE integration, right? It's not a feature of the language. You're just...

01:26:25 ◼   ► Yes, yes, yes. Exactly what you just said. But for this, it's 450 lines, and I just wanted

01:26:30 ◼   ► something that would catch my eye as I'm scrolling down the file and so I thought

01:26:35 ◼   ► a big three-line comment would do the trick.

01:26:37 ◼   ► Hideous.

01:26:38 ◼   ► Well what would you have done?

01:26:40 ◼   ► Like, can we count the ways this is bad? Maybe it's just that they...

01:26:44 ◼   ► The flower box or my code in general?

01:26:46 ◼   ► No, the flower box, right? So it's not symmetrical because you've got the beginning end of the

01:26:50 ◼   ► comments like at angles to each other, upper left, lower right. So right away it's all

01:26:55 ◼   ► oddly shaped. The sides of the box, because of the way the font spacing is, there's giant gaps in the

01:27:01 ◼   ► side, but really tight things in the top. And then inside it, you have some text that's all caps.

01:27:07 ◼   ► Like, it's shouting at me. And the width, is it 80 columns? No. Is it 60? I don't even know.

01:27:13 ◼   ► It's just randomly... It's wide enough. It's sufficiently wide.

01:27:16 ◼   ► It's randomly sized. I give thumbs down to this format for writing comments.

01:27:21 ◼   ► John, I really think we have to see your code.

01:27:23 ◼   ► I do too.

01:27:24 ◼   ► Because I don't has the world ever seen your code and there's tons of tons of stuff on the CPAN

01:27:28 ◼   ► It's hideous. Feel free to go look at it and laugh

01:27:30 ◼   ► anything recent though

01:27:32 ◼   ► No, I mean like I update the things on CPAN

01:27:36 ◼   ► Frequently, so like if you look at the date will be like 2013 2014

01:27:41 ◼   ► But the vast majority of the code was written a long time, but that's not why it's hideous

01:27:43 ◼   ► Like it's just I mean if you look at what it does, it's crazy, you know

01:27:47 ◼   ► I mean this is code I originally wrote in the 90s like so I you know

01:27:51 ◼   ► I will put it up against anyone else's code they wrote in the 90s, but I look at it now and it's very bad

01:27:55 ◼   ► But you know aesthetically and formatting wise I'm very particular about that

01:28:00 ◼   ► I like my you know, I like my equal signs to line up and when there's a bunch of assignments with each other

01:28:05 ◼   ► I'm very sensitive with the formatting of comments. So they look nice and don't add visual noise and I

01:28:11 ◼   ► Get upset when there's no sane weight in dense stuff

01:28:14 ◼   ► Which is probably why I would go insane with objective C because sometimes it's just like look this is not gonna work out for anybody

01:28:20 ◼   ► Just like, these are really short and these are really long and no matter how you line it up it looks weird.

01:28:24 ◼   ► Yeah, it is tough. If you're a white space formatting purist,

01:28:28 ◼   ► Objective-C basically has no standard that's good.

01:28:32 ◼   ► That's actually useful. I try to wedge

01:28:36 ◼   ► KNRC style into it, which

01:28:40 ◼   ► does not work gracefully, but it works well enough for me, but it's weird.

01:28:44 ◼   ► Yeah, JavaScript has some similar problems in that there are some constructs that are

01:28:48 ◼   ► that are just always ugly and there's no system for formatting them that will, you know, you can't

01:28:54 ◼   ► see and simpler languages just have nicer rules, especially when the pieces you're moving around

01:29:00 ◼   ► are of similar size. Whereas if you're in a language where the size of these things can vary

01:29:05 ◼   ► wildly, like really long class names and really short outer names and really short class names,

01:29:09 ◼   ► and square brackets versus curlies versus parens, and just no decision works. I get upset about

01:29:17 ◼   ► that. I like my code to be aesthetically nice. Well, why don't you use Python? Isn't it part

01:29:21 ◼   ► of the language? So, yes, then everything can have underscores in front of it and it'll just be

01:29:25 ◼   ► stabbing me in the eyes all the time. Good grief. Awesome. Double underscores before and after.

01:29:31 ◼   ► That will show that this is a special method with meaning to the language.

01:29:35 ◼   ► And the funny thing about this code, my code in Camel, is that I tried my darndest—I think

01:29:45 ◼   ► I succeeded in doing the thing that I hate so much in objective C and C sharp,

01:29:51 ◼   ► which is when you have say like an if statement, having the opening

01:29:56 ◼   ► berry, a brace bracket, brace brace on the same line as the if statement, I

01:30:01 ◼   ► would prefer them so that the braces are all on the same in the same column.

01:30:05 ◼   ► And JavaScript is not that way.

01:30:08 ◼   ► And so, you know, like in a function declaration is another example.

01:30:11 ◼   ► So function all post paginated, you know some parameters open curly

01:30:16 ◼   ► New line and all it drives me crazy. Yeah, that's that's KNRC style. Like I've been doing that for a while

01:30:23 ◼   ► It's the worst. I hate it, but it's the JavaScript way and I'm trying to trying to learn and

01:30:29 ◼   ► If you look at all the pro code that they just posted in the chat room

01:30:33 ◼   ► Like that was my chosen style, you know always maxed up vertically opening closing curlies in any language

01:30:39 ◼   ► I did it in any C-like language, but in my job for the past five years, I've been doing it the

01:30:44 ◼   ► other way. And I have to admit that my fingers have been rewired. It's unfortunate. So now when

01:30:50 ◼   ► I have to go edit my own code to fix bugs in the C-band modules or whatever, I find myself doing it

01:30:55 ◼   ► the other way. And it's like, yeah, it's a lot of it is what you... I still maintain that that other

01:31:01 ◼   ► way is better, but I mean, it's not better enough that... The way where they vertically align?

01:31:05 ◼   ► Yeah, but it was not something I was going to argue. It's not better enough to make a difference.

01:31:11 ◼   ► So, you know.

01:31:11 ◼   ► God, you guys are nuts.

01:31:13 ◼   ► Oh, this code that I'm looking at of yours from Rose is absolutely terrible. Also,

01:31:18 ◼   ► aesthetically, because it—well, in the languages I'm used to, if is not a function call.

01:31:23 ◼   ► It should be if space open parenthesis.

01:31:25 ◼   ► Yes.

01:31:25 ◼   ► I—that is an example of a style that I've changed. I don't do that anymore. I put spaces after the

01:31:30 ◼   ► if. I don't know why I didn't put spaces after the my. There's many things that I look in this

01:31:34 ◼   ► code that I do not do anymore at all. What about the not operator? Uh, if space not space? No,

01:31:40 ◼   ► I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't put a space after the not. The not is stuck to the thing

01:31:44 ◼   ► that it's negating. I agree. Oh, that's weird. Yeah, so it'd be if space open paren not. Well,

01:31:49 ◼   ► look, look, we have, we may differ over these small things here and there, but at least we

01:31:52 ◼   ► can agree that we're not animals like the people who don't put space around binary operators. Like,

01:31:56 ◼   ► those people should just all be pushed off a cliff. I don't even know what, like, and there

01:32:00 ◼   ► And there are people out there who will defend that.

01:32:02 ◼   ► And it's like, what?

01:32:03 ◼   ► And you know, everyone can be, oh, braces here,

01:32:05 ◼   ► braces there, you know, space after the exclamation point.

01:32:09 ◼   ► But come on, space around binary operators?

01:32:11 ◼   ► Like, that's just disgusting.

01:32:13 ◼   ► Like, just jam everything up again.

01:32:15 ◼   ► And there are people out, you think they don't exist.

01:32:17 ◼   ► I don't know if you have met, I've met them,

01:32:19 ◼   ► these people who were like, no, no,

01:32:20 ◼   ► there should not be spaces around the equals sign.

01:32:22 ◼   ► Are you crazy?

01:32:23 ◼   ► Plus, equals, minus, they just jam it all together.

01:32:25 ◼   ► And you know, it doesn't matter what the context is.

01:32:27 ◼   ► And those people are just,

01:32:28 ◼   ► I don't know what happened in their life

01:32:30 ◼   ► that made them do that.

01:32:31 ◼   ► - You ever see a PHP code where,

01:32:32 ◼   ► so PHP had this stupid idea of,

01:32:34 ◼   ► let's make the string concatenation operator the dot,

01:32:37 ◼   ► which is also used for other things,

01:32:38 ◼   ► but we'll make that the string concat operator.

01:32:40 ◼   ► - Where do you think they got that from?

01:32:42 ◼   ► - What is that, is that the Perl way?

01:32:43 ◼   ► - Yes. - Stupid.

01:32:45 ◼   ► - That's not a compliment.

01:32:46 ◼   ► - Perl probably got it from awk.

01:32:47 ◼   ► It's great, it's much better than plus,

01:32:49 ◼   ► as you'll learn when you try to do stuff

01:32:50 ◼   ► in JavaScript with it.

01:32:51 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:32:53 ◼   ► Is this a number or a string?

01:32:54 ◼   ► You'll find out.

01:32:55 ◼   ► - Whatever, we'll wing it.

01:32:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, but yeah, so that was,

01:32:59 ◼   ► Oh, I also recently discovered the whole thing

01:33:01 ◼   ► about how JavaScript doesn't really have

01:33:04 ◼   ► a good integer type.

01:33:06 ◼   ► Like Brent Simmons tweeted, or blogged about--

01:33:08 ◼   ► - Everything's floats, yeah.

01:33:09 ◼   ► Well, welcome to JavaScript.

01:33:11 ◼   ► - Yeah, so you have basically the equivalent of,

01:33:14 ◼   ► I think, 53-bit integers at best.

01:33:17 ◼   ► So, yeah, if you were using it 64s in your app,

01:33:19 ◼   ► yep, good luck getting it into JavaScript.

01:33:22 ◼   ► - Yeah, no, this is one of the many reasons

01:33:24 ◼   ► that JavaScript sucks, and one of the many things

01:33:26 ◼   ► that people who tried to write serious applications

01:33:28 ◼   ► in JavaScript very soon discovered.

01:33:30 ◼   ► And by the time they discovered it, they were like,

01:33:32 ◼   ► "It's a formal part of the language, we're screwed."

01:33:35 ◼   ► - I just think it's so funny that,

01:33:37 ◼   ► just like when Gruber and Brent Simmons did that video

01:33:41 ◼   ► for Microsoft, I said, "Wouldn't it be funny

01:33:43 ◼   ► "if you went back to 2006 Gruber and showed him this?"

01:33:47 ◼   ► Wouldn't it be funny if you went back to 2006 programmers

01:33:52 ◼   ► and said, "In 2014, the cool new hip language,

01:33:55 ◼   ► "everyone's writing everything in is JavaScript."

01:33:58 ◼   ► If you told me in 2013 that I would take this on for fun,

01:34:03 ◼   ► I would have laughed in your face.

01:34:04 ◼   ► I absolutely would have laughed in your face.

01:34:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, like I saw many other things,

01:34:07 ◼   ► like Objective-C for that matter,

01:34:09 ◼   ► people are excited by what they can do with it.

01:34:12 ◼   ► Web applications are cool.

01:34:13 ◼   ► If you can write a web application,

01:34:15 ◼   ► modern browsers run JavaScript really well.

01:34:17 ◼   ► Everybody has them.

01:34:18 ◼   ► Suddenly, JavaScript, this crappy language,

01:34:20 ◼   ► you can do cool things with it.

01:34:23 ◼   ► People may hate Objective-C,

01:34:24 ◼   ► but what you can do with Objective-C,

01:34:25 ◼   ► you can write an iOS app.

01:34:27 ◼   ► iOS apps are cool.

01:34:28 ◼   ► That's appealing.

01:34:29 ◼   ► So that's what it all comes down to.

01:34:31 ◼   ► If JavaScript did not exist in browsers,

01:34:34 ◼   ► it would be about as popular as Perl.