Posts from Twitter

We have finally gotten videos up on the web from our Hacking Society event that happened in late April. A number of participants are going to blog this week about some of the specific topics and my contribution will be about our conversation about money and politics.

This 14min video clip starts with Larry Lessig outlining the issues around money and politics and then goes into some potential solutions. I advocated for a hack of the campaign finance system that starts with the internet industry contributing something like 5% of its combined ad inventory to a pool that is available to politicans who agree to certain conditions.

There was a debate about what those conditions should be. One group thought the candidates need to sign onto the Internet Freedom Pledge. Others thought that the candidates should renounce traditional campaign finance. Others thought candidates should do both.

Of course, this idea requires the Internet industry (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc, etc, etc) to allocate 5% of its inventory to this kind of a pool. I have had a few conversations with the industry leaders about this idea but honestly it hasn't gone anywhere. It would be great if our industry could rally around this idea and make it happen. Hopefully this post and other actions we are taking this week might get this idea rolling.

Here's the video:

By the way, interested folks should check out the Hacking Society web page. In addition to videos, we now have a transcript of the event as well as audio recordings, photos, and lots of quotes. There's a lot there and its interesting and engaging stuff.

I have written so much about free here at AVC that it should be called AVFree. In fact, I've even written a post with this exact same title (almost exactly seven years ago, the summer we invested in twitter, zynga, and tumblr).

I haven't touched this subject much in the past few years but given that the topic has been in the air in the tech blogosphere, I thought I'd address it again.

First, let me say this is specifically not about Twitter. Folks should be encouraged to compete with Twitter. Competition is good for everyone as we talked about here a week or so ago.

This post is in reaction to the idea that services should be paid to ensure that they are appropriately focused on the consumer/user as opposed to the marketer/advertiser/sponsor.

Let's start with advertising. I do not believe it is evil. In fact, I believe it is a fantastic way to support services that want the broadest adoption and want to be free. Think about the Super Bowl, the World Cup, the Olympics, the Oscars, the Presidential Debates, the news coverage of important events. These things are ad supported and free for anyone to watch who has a TV and an antenna. It is good for society for these things to be available to the broadest audience.

There is a paid TV business and it is flourishing. The fact that at its base level TV is free does not mean that all TV has to be free. Free TV does not commoditize paid TV. They co-exist nicely. But we had free TV well before we had paid TV. Free is the foundation that creates a paid tier. That's what Freemium (a term that was coined here at AVC) is all about.

Now let's examine services that have a free and paid tier. Spotify is a good one to look at. Spotify's core business model is a subscription music service. All you can eat music for a fixed price every month. And yet this is what they show you when you land at Spotify.com for the first time.

Why do they show you that? Because most people prefer free to paid. I don't have the exact numbers but I would suspect less than 10% of Spotify's users pay for music. Why is Pandora so successful? Because it is free. Why is over the air radio still the most popular way to listen to music? Because it is free.

Now let's look at servces where the users provide all the value. Wikipedia, Craigslist, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, etc, etc. There is no value to any of these platforms if the users don't create the content. The users create the service, curate it, and make it what it is. I do not believe it makes sense to charge users to create the value. We've seen folks try this model. Typepad (where this blog is hosted) charges to host a blog. How well did they do? Phanfare charged to host photos. How well did they do? The list could go on and on but I don't want to focus on failed services.

When scale matters, when network effects matter, when your users are creating the content and the value, free is the business model of choice. And I don't think anything has changed to make that less true today. If anything, it is more true.

I understand the frustration of certain folks about the commercialization of Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and a host of other services. I understand the frustration over the increasing lock down of the APIs and the control these platforms are exercising on their ecosystems. I would encourage folks to compete with them to keep the web, the mobile web, and the Internet free and open. But I would not encourage those same folks to build paid services. I think their goals will be undermined by that choice.

We've been talking a lot about mobile here lately and in one of those discussions, someone suggested we share our home screens with each other. I figured that would make for a fun friday.

Here's my home screen:

In case you can't make them out, from top left to bottom right; Kik, Tumblr, SoundCloud, Instagram, Google Maps, Foursquare, Gmail, Twitter, Camera, Google Calendar, Android Browser, Settings, Phone, Google Contacts, SMS, and all my apps.

Oh, and that's the start of The Highline at Gansevoort and Washington in the background.

This is a T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy. I am actually in the process of switching to a Galaxy Nexus running Jelly Bean and will switch to a Chrome Browser and the home screen might move around a bit. But this is what I've got right now.

To play this fun friday game, take a photo of your home screen and attach it to your comment in the thread below. And add any color commentary you'd like to add. This should be fun.

I've been reading sci-fi and thinking about sci-fi's relationship to technology innovation. I posted last week about Twitter and the Metaverse and noted that Neal Stephenson had imagined things in the early 90s that happened almost twenty years later.

But of course it is possible that many of the things that are built by technologists are reactions to reading sci-fi and wanting to realize the fertile imaginations of sci-fi authors.

So it's not entirely clear exactly who is inspiring who. Like most things, it is likely a bit of both. Technologists create new things. Writers are inspired and create stories that reflect these emerging new technologies. Technologists read those stories and are inspired by them.

It's a virtuous circle. Technology innovation doesn't occur in a vacuum. It happens in a dialog with society. And sci-fi writers are but one example of the way society impacts technology.

I think that's one of the reasons that many of the most interesting bay area startups are choosing to locate themselves in the city. And it is one of the reasons that NYC is developing a vibrant technology community. Society is at its most dense in rich urban environments where society and technology can inspire each other on a daily basis. Steven Johnson wrote about this phenomenon in his excellent Where Good Ideas Come From.

So if you want to know what is going to happen next in the world of technology, you need to be thinking about society and where it is going, how it is interacting with technology, and how it is inspiring technologists. Which is why I am reading a lot of sci-fi this summer.

I've been reading Snow Crash and there's this great passage when Hiro is in the Metaverse and he explains:

The Movie Star Quadrant is easier to look at. Actors love to come here because in The Black Sun, they always look as good as they do in the movies. And unlike a bar or club in Reality, they can get into this place without physically having to leave their mansion, hotel suite, ski lodge, private airline cabin, or whatever. They can strut their stuff and visit with their friends without any exposure to kidnappers, paparazzi, script-flingers, assassins, exspouses, autograph brokers, process servers, psycho fans, marriage proposals, or gossip columnists.

This book was published in 1992!

This is what social media in general and Twitter in particular has done for celebrities. They can "hang out with their fans" online without "physically having to leave their mansion, hotel suite, ski lodge, private airline cabin, or whatever. They can strut their stuff and visit with their friends without any exposure to kidnappers, paparazzi, script-flingers, assassins, exspouses, autograph brokers, process servers, psycho fans, marriage proposals, or gossip columnists."

I don't think I've seen Twitter's value to the big names that increasingly make up its content consumption explained so well. And this was written 14 years before Twitter was created.

I am heading back to Snow Crash for more insights now.

If you look at any of the top web properties on comScore, Quantcast, Alexa or any other third party reporting service you will see that they all have been fairly flat over the first half of the year. You might think that all these big web services are flatlining.

We have seen this in our portfolio too. From board meeting to board meeting, we are seeing a similar pattern. Web is flattish. But mobile is growing like a weed.

I alluded to this in a post last week where I wished for an aggregated audience measurement service across mobile and web.

There is a significant shift going on this year, much more significant than we saw last year, from web to mobile. It is most noticeable in games, social networking, music, and news, but it is happening across the board and it presents both great opportunity and great challenges.

Mobile native services like Foursquare & Instagram have the most to gain from this transition. Big feature rich web apps like Facebook and Google have the most to lose from this transition.

Mobile does not reward feature richness. It rewards small, application specific, feature light services. I have said this before but I will say it again. The phone is the equivalent of the web application and the mobile apps you have on your home screen(s) are the features.

That is why Facebook should (and it looks like will) break its big monolithic web app into a bunch of small mobile apps. Messenger, Instagram (not yet owned by Facebook), and Camera are the model for Facebook on mobile.

User experience is not the only big change/challenge for companies trying to navigate this transition. Monetization is different too.

Approaches like display advertising don't work as well on mobile as they do on the web. And they don't work that well on the web. ARPUs (avg revenue per user) on mobile are lower for display based revenue models on mobile across the board.

On the other hand, commerce works great on mobile if you have a well integrated (one click) purchase experience. The freemium model (whether it is virtual goods in games, in app upgrades, or something else) works very well on mobile.

If you are going to operate a media model on mobile, look at Twitter's model for inspiration. The ads are the default content object (the tweet) and are delivered right in the primary user experience (the feed/timeline). It's not surprising that more than half of Twitter's ad revenue is coming from mobile.

All of this is good news for entrepreneurs since they are in the best position to take advantage of all of these changing dynamics. It is not as good news for those who find themselves operating a big Internet business started more than five years ago. You are going to need to make a hard right turn super fast without flipping over the car.

In the past fifteen years, we have seen Microsoft go from being an unstoppable force to being a non-factor in many important new markets, we have seen Google go from being an unstoppable force to being a non-factor in many important new markets, and I suspect we are going to see Facebook struggle with the same thing. RIM is dying quickly now. Yahoo! is a question mark.

In technology the more things change, the more the stay the same. You cannot ever rest. Because the big change that is going to upset your nice apple cart is right around the corner. Today that is mobile. Tomorrow, who knows? I am trying like hell to figure out what that will be and jump on it. Because that's how you play this game.

I took at look at Google Analytics this morning and was a bit surprised to see the makeup of the top ten sources of traffic to AVC in the past month.

If we compare this to May 2010, when AVC got almost exactly the same amount of visitors, you can see that the makeup of traffic has changed a fair bit.

Search, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Facebook, and Disqus have all risen a fair bit as sources. Direct, Feedburner, Hacker News, and various specific sites have waned as sources of traffic.

Mobile visits have also doubled in the past two years from 11% to 22%. Frankly I thought they would be even higher by now.

What this tells me is platforms are ascendent as drivers of audience, particularly platforms like Twitter that are optimized for mobile.

It is also nice to see Disqus cracking the top ten. And the characteristics of the Disqus traffic is very different from the traffic that comes from the other top ten sources. The Disqus audience stays longer and is way more engaged. That makes sense. I hope to see Disqus rise in the top ten as they do more to drive traffic around their network.

It makes me think that Disqus could use a mobile reading app that shows Disqus users the interesting conversations happening in their network in real time. I would certainly be a big user of that.

But no matter how you slice it, we are in the era of mobile platforms. That is pretty clear to me this morning.

The new media world has its pros and cons. The pros are that I've got a blog to set the record straight and that everybody is recording everything. The negatives are that bloggers don't feel compelled to write accurate headlines and twitter can amplify the inaccuracies when those headlines get tweeted and retweeted.

Let's take the interview I did with Mike Arrington yesterday to kick off Disrupt NYC (starts at 51.09 in the stream). We had a great chat. Mike asked a bunch of interesting questions and I tried to answer them honestly and openly.

As I was heading back to the office, I saw this tweet in my timeline:

 

Google Missed The Boat On Buying Twitter. “Hasn’t Been Interested Since They Committed To Google+” Says Fred Wilson tcrn.ch/JgLVod

— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) May 21, 2012

 

I thought "Hmm, did I really say that?" Fortunately they recorded the entire interview and through a cool feature called snapid, you can go watch the exact one minute sequence where Mike and I discussed this.

As you can see, I never suggested that Google missed the boat on buying Twitter. Google is focused on G+ and Twitter is focused on building its business and staying independent. That's what is going on and that's what I said on stage.

A few weeks ago, Twitter released a new # Discover tab on its web app. I do not believe the feature has made its way into the android app yet. At least I don't think I have it in my android app.

But I really like the new # Discover tab. It has immediately caused Twitter Discover to join Hacker News and Techmeme as my first reads every morning.

What's great about Twitter Discover is that I get links I don't get on Techmeme and Hacker News. I see things about sports, NYC, music, and other things that the people I follow on Twitter care about that have nothing to do with tech, venture capital, and startups.

Twitter Discover had been, until recently, the same links for everyone, or at least the same links by geography. I am not entirely sure to be honest. But now Twitter Discover is personalized for every Twitter user. And, like Who To Follow which got yet another upgrade yesterday, Twitter Discover will continue to evolve and improve as Twitter adds more data science, more data, and more user feedback into its development.

Related articles

• Twitter's Discover tab makes its way to your inbox (sociable.co)
• Twitter's Discover tab now snags popular stories and commentary from those in your Twitterverse (engadget.com)
• Twitter tweaks 'Discover' tab to offer more personalized story recommendations (theverge.com)
• Twitter Improves Discover Tab To Surface More Interesting Content, Promises To Make It "Magical" (techcrunch.com)