It Never Died Because It Never Lived
John:
Well, someone say something funny first, and then that can be our opener, and then we'll start.
Casey:
Oh, I'll get right on that.
John:
So there's another case where we got a bunch of feedback that I thought talked about something we had covered in the previous show, but apparently we did not do a good enough job.
John:
So if we don't get the job done the first time, we'll go back and try again.
John:
This was about video games.
John:
And the topic came up when both of you had said that you had played video games when you were younger and didn't play them as much.
John:
Now we talked about why that might be.
John:
And I talked about the average age of a gamer.
John:
And then we brought out stats from the ESA, I think, on the last show and talked all about this.
John:
And a couple of people wrote in to talk about the difference between people who play video games and people who are self-identified gamers.
John:
Some people wrote in to say, oh, I just play a couple of iOS games now and then.
John:
I certainly wouldn't call myself a gamer.
John:
One of the best ones I thought was Joe Lyon, who wrote in to say,
John:
This is a section from what he wrote.
John:
Having put in hundreds or thousands of hours playing games over the past couple of years, I by no means consider myself a gamer.
John:
So, I mean, a lot of people put in the argument in terms of time.
John:
Like, oh, I just play once in a while, not a big deal.
John:
But this guy plays games all the time.
John:
On his own accounts, hundreds or thousands of hours, like in playing during the commute, just obsessively playing games, finishing games or whatever, but does not consider himself a gamer.
John:
And...
John:
the discussion was not about what i would call a self-identified gamer it was just about the idea that you know that 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 play them anymore as an adult self-identified gamer is a whole other ball of wax i mean as many people uh point out including joe lyon like i watch tv all the time do i identify as a television watcher no
John:
It's not it's not like it's not the games you play.
John:
It's not how long you play them.
John:
Identity is entirely up to the person.
John:
I would call myself a self-identified.
John:
I would call myself a gamer, but it's for reasons entirely outside how many games I play, how long I play them.
John:
I guarantee I play games less for less amount of clock time than than almost anybody else who considers themselves a gamer.
John:
So that's more of an identity and a cultural type thing.
John:
It has nothing to do with that.
John:
And it certainly has nothing to do with what we were discussing, which was, uh, is it common for people to play a lot of games when young and stop when they're older?
John:
And by going through the stats on, uh, gamers, we discovered that that's not the case that, uh,
John:
In fact, there was one of the stats before it was like twice as many adult women play games as males under 18.
John:
And the average gamer was like our age.
John:
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.
John:
Oh, hang on a second.
John:
I've got to go and say goodnight to one of my children, but I'll be back.
John:
You can just vamp for a second and make a nice cut point and I'll add something in, but this is something I have to do.
John:
I'll be right back.
John:
Alright, well now you're never going to be able to make a reasonable edit out of this, but tough luck.
John:
What was I saying before I left?
John:
I believe you had finished that follow-up bit.
John:
So we're moving on to other follow-up.
John:
Yeah, I guess that's all I had to say about video games.
John:
Basically, the message that we failed to get across was that
John:
The entire discussion was not about self-identified gamers.
John:
That was not part of this feedback from Joe Lyons so that we needed to define the terms better.
John:
If we did a bad job of that, I'm sorry, but we were not talking about self-identified.
John:
We were just talking about the phenomenon on is it common for people to play games when they're young and then stop playing them when they're older.
John:
uh regardless of during any of those times whether they consider themselves self-identified gamers and like i said i don't think that tag has anything to do with any criteria you might bring up that you could measure like how long you play what types of games you play how obsessed you are with games anything like that it's more you know you choose to identify yourself with you choose if that's some part of your identity again with television i don't my part of my identity is not that i watch television but part of my identity is that i play games why because that's what i choose to do and that's up to each individual person but that's not what we were talking about
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So we also got a lot of feedback about our discussion.
Casey:
What was really more your guys' discussion about, uh, comiXology and in-app purchase and Apple and who's at fault, who's on first, what's on second.
Casey:
I don't know if it's on third.
Casey:
And a lot of people wrote in to compare your arguments, John, to the arguments that
Casey:
I hope I got this right.
Casey:
I think I got this right against net neutrality.
Casey:
So this whole discussion about a fast lane on the Internet and, oh, if Netflix is pumping a crud load of data across Comcast pipes, then you know what?
Casey:
Netflix should probably have a discount or maybe even pay more, depending on who you ask.
Casey:
And so can you address how this is either the same or different than net neutrality?
John:
It doesn't really matter whether the people who are sending the feedback were for or against net neutrality.
John:
And in fact, I think what they wanted to say was that all those people who sent that feedback, I would guess the real debate they want to have is about net neutrality, because regardless of which side they are on the Apple thing, what they're trying to say is this Apple situation is similar to net neutrality.
John:
And if you don't have the same opinion about both situations, you're being inconsistent.
John:
Therefore, you're wrong about one of those two things.
John:
and it doesn't really matter if they think we're wrong about apple and comiXology if they think we're wrong about net neutrality or whatever they just wanted to see some consistency uh and i didn't like a lot of this was over twitter i didn't have time to send back tweets that explain this whole big long thing although i tried to a couple times on twitter before i realized it was pointless uh and for emails i figured we would address it on the show because like
John:
One or two responses came in.
John:
You're like, all right, no big deal.
John:
And one or two.
John:
But it was super common that everybody was like, you're going to give you're saying that Apple should cut a deal with Amazon.
John:
And how is that any different than the ISPs cutting a deal with Netflix or Amazon or anything like that?
John:
And I think it's different in a couple of ways, some very important and some less important.
John:
Well, you can decide which ones you find more convincing.
John:
The biggest and most important difference in what I tried to express on Twitter, because I thought, oh, here's a succinct way to express this is Apple doesn't sell access to the Internet.
John:
That was not convincing to anybody.
John:
It was like, so so what?
John:
What's different about the Internet and Apple selling access to its customers?
John:
You give us a 30 percent cut.
John:
We let you use our payment system and get access to our customers.
John:
And I wasn't about to try to explain in 140 characters what the difference between access to Apple's customers and the internet is, but I will try to do so now.
John:
The internet is...
John:
It's a series of tubes.
John:
Yeah.
John:
By definition, there is one Internet.
John:
Anything you connect to the Internet becomes part of the Internet.
John:
The Internet is the way we are all connected to each other.
John:
There are not multiple Internets.
John:
There's not one.
John:
There's not there's not two.
John:
There's not five.
John:
If you made a second one and it connected to the Internet, it would by definition become part of the Internet because every place in the Internet is reachable to every other place, plus or minus net and all this other stuff.
John:
But that's like conceptually.
John:
That's what the Internet is.
John:
it's how we're all connected to each other uh that is very different than getting access to the customers of the second place uh cell phone you know platform or any other type of thing like that like
John:
Maybe if Android didn't exist, and I guess if Microsoft didn't also exist, you would have a little bit more of an argument.
John:
But I would say that even in that case, the possibility of something coming up that would be similar to iOS, like if Android didn't exist, you're like, well, Google could enter the phone space and make their own operating system and platform and do something or Apple could or Amazon could or Microsoft could, right?
John:
No one is saying, well, what about when the competitor to the Internet comes along?
John:
because this whole internet thing could be you know replaced by just some hungry competitor comes up with the new internet the internet too which is the thing that exists look it up but anyway like does it still yeah i'm sure it does and i'm sure it will eventually be connected to the internet what about the ipv6 internet will come to replace the old internet uh that is not much of a possibility i don't think happening these days the internet access is the the internet itself is a very is like perhaps the only unique singular different than everything else in many many different ways uh
John:
I don't think it's unreasonable to say that the internet is so different from the iOS App Store that it doesn't apply.
John:
But if you don't find that convincing, they're basically the same thing.
John:
It's a bunch of people connected through tubes to each other.
John:
It should be the same.
John:
The second part of this thing, and this gets into the nitty-gritty details of net neutrality, is...
John:
In the United States, your choice for getting internet access are much more limited than your choice for cell phone provider.
John:
Pretty much anyone in the United States can get an iPhone or has the opportunity to assume they can afford an iPhone.
John:
They can get a phone that is T-Mobile prepaid.
John:
They can, you know, get an Android phone.
John:
You can get one of my dumb phones.
John:
Your choices for cell phone, tablets, so on and so forth, no matter where you live in the United States, you have many different choices.
John:
And a lot of places in the United States, you only have one choice for Internet access.
John:
And some of those places where you might have two choices soon, you will have one choice because there is constant consolidation.
John:
A lot of these places have local monopolies.
John:
uh and the reason they have local monopolies leads to the third reason in the united states anyway i don't know about the rest of the world but in the united states a lot of our internet infrastructure was built essentially with taxpayer dollars these broadband companies got billions of dollars in tax breaks in exchange for okay well we'll give you these tax breaks so we'll help you out here the government said as long as you build out your networks to provide more people with access because we as the government had decided it's for the good of the nation that more people have broadband access therefore here
John:
It's a billion-dollar write-off for you to continue to expand your networks.
John:
So these networks that the ISPs have, some of whom are a monopoly in their particular local markets, weren't just built by those ISPs.
John:
They were built with taxpayer money and have been operating for many years in a way that is neutral to that, where they don't decide whose traffic will be sped up and slowed down based on who will pay them.
John:
All of this, I think, makes the internet... It's complicated by the fact that, of course, the iOS app store runs over the internet.
John:
And if you want to think about that, you can think, well, okay, what if Comcast decides they want 40% of every purchaser of the app store?
John:
Everyone would go nuts, right?
John:
I think...
John:
They are extremely different situations.
John:
And I don't see any inconsistency in saying the Internet, this strange singular thing that in the United States is only accessible to people through a single broadband ISP in many locations and has been partially paid for by taxpayer money and has operated in this sort of common carrier situation for many, many years.
John:
should be treated differently than one vendor's app store uh and i i put a link in the we'll put it in the show notes to this recent uh via heart video trying to explain that neutrality which is kind of a boring weird thing to understand but she does these neat little things where she draws on a notepad and talks over it and
John:
Maybe it won't make it any clearer, but at least you'll be entertained.
John:
The fun thing about her example is, as Casey alluded to, I think he watched the video, the example she gives, the way she tries to draw an analogy, is that the customer who uses a lot, like Netflix, you know, it's like, wow, a huge amount of the traffic going through these ISPs is Netflix.
John:
The example she uses, the ISPs go to the Netflix and say, you know, 30% of our traffic is from your stupid movies.
John:
Why don't you pay us some extra money?
John:
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 in general, which is, hey, it looks like you're selling $20 billion worth of comic books.
John:
Would you guys like a volume discount?
John:
We'll take less of a percentage if you sell more because we want people to drive more and more business through our store.
Yeah.
John:
I don't think the direction you're turning the dollar makes so much of a difference.
John:
The bottom line is I think Apple should have the right to set whatever terms it wants for the people who sell through its app store.
John:
And I don't think there's anything magical about it being 30% for everybody.
John:
And as many people pointed out, it's not 30% for everybody.
John:
If you sell a commercial, a commercial physical product through the app store, you don't have to pay Apple anything.
John:
Why?
John:
Because Apple makes the rules of their app store.
John:
it's already not uniform and all i was suggesting was continue to make it not uniform come up with a different rate take a larger smaller percentage based on volume based on whatever the heck you want to do uh unlike the net neutrality thing if apple gives amazon a break and bad things start to happen uh they can change their mind apple can at any time change the terms and they control their own app store it is a private thing yes it happens over the internet but it is definitely a private thing
John:
And the only other two points I want to make in the Apple comiXology thing, which I didn't get a chance to put in the show notes, is for the most part...
John:
The only feedback we got were the net neutrality ones and people telling me that the app store has to stay the way it is, otherwise bad things will happen.
John:
Oh, and the third one was that Apple shouldn't budge because Amazon's in the wrong and why should Apple change anything?
John:
It's Apple's right to do whatever it wants, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Nobody wrote me in to say that it was better for users this way.
John:
That not being able to buy comic books through the Comixology app is better for users.
John:
Nobody argued that, which makes me think that that is a pretty slam dunk.
John:
Everyone agrees that's worse.
John:
So all the people arguing the opposite are basically saying...
John:
it's okay for things to be slightly worse on Apple's platform because, and then the greater good, like because they have to hold the line because if they give in now, they'll just be giving in forever and they'll lose control of the app store and so on and so forth.
John:
I think that slippery slope angle would be more convincing if this was the first time this happened.
John:
And if this hadn't been the case on the app store for years and Amazon had shown that it's not willing to budge.
John:
Uh, and yeah,
John:
I think the other point about the situation is that the way I think about it is, is this a bigger problem for Apple or Amazon?
John:
If, you know, Amazon says, okay, we're going to make you buy everything through a website and Apple doesn't get those sales anymore.
John:
Who is that a bigger problem for?
John:
Is it a bigger problem for Apple now that they're not getting a 30% of anything because Apple selling everything through the website?
John:
Or is it a bigger problem for Amazon and that people won't buy as many comics because they have to go to the stupid website?
John:
I think, and as I tried to argue last time, it is a bigger problem for Apple because
John:
It makes Apple's platform worse.
John:
And Amazon always has the excuse of, well, yeah, Apple's platform is a little bit worse.
John:
But hey, if you don't like it, buy Kindle.
John:
Like they have their own platform to promote in exchange.
John:
Right.
John:
And so, yes, Amazon is going to lose sales because people can't buy things easily.
John:
But their answer is so much more compelling than Apple's.
John:
Their answer is you shouldn't be buying the stupid iPads anyway.
John:
Buy Kindle Fire.
John:
We have an amazing looking screen.
John:
It's a great place to read comics.
John:
You can buy them right on the device.
John:
By the way, it's also cheaper than an iPad.
John:
Apple's answer is, yeah, it's worse, but trust us.
John:
We really need to hold a line on this because if we give in to Amazon, the world will come to an end.
John:
And I did get two different kinds of feedback from people who were like, oh, this happened.
John:
And they kept using their mom in the examples.
John:
I'm just the messenger.
John:
Don't shoot me again.
John:
It could be because their mothers are much more technologically advanced than their fathers and their fathers don't touch iPads.
John:
But anyway.
John:
They were saying this happened on my mom's iPad and I just put a shortcut to the, you know, to the website on her iPad and she just goes to that.
John:
It's no problem, but not a big deal.
John:
Another person said this happened.
John:
They're talking about when the Kindle store stopped having an internal web view for the website.
John:
This happened on, you know, back in 2011 for the Kindle store.
John:
And from from that point on, my mom always calls me when she wants to buy a book.
John:
And I buy it for her.
John:
And then other people saying this happened.
John:
And then someone, you know, stopped even buying things because they said, oh, this is stupid.
John:
It's broken now.
John:
I'm not going to do this anymore.
John:
So anecdotal evidence on all sides, whether this is a problem or not.
John:
I think it was only one person who said that that it's not a big deal.
John:
You just go to the web link.
John:
But anyway, I think this hurts Apple more than it hurts Amazon.
John:
And I think after several years, it's clear that Apple is not going to win this by holding strong.
John:
And I just don't see the point anymore in holding the line and making things worse for users.
John:
With the expectation with the argument that if you do anything else, just the app store will come crumbling down.
John:
If they do this and it turns out bad, they still have total control.
John:
Apple can change the rules at any time.
John:
I think it's worth an experiment, especially it could be a secret experiment where they have secret deals with Amazon and they call it off and they have NDAs and no one can talk about it or whatever.
John:
Like Apple is in the driver's seat here.
John:
I just think it's time for customers to stop suffering.
Marco:
Well, hold on, though.
Marco:
There was one other point that a few people pointed out, that one of the reasons why Amazon might not want to do Apple's in-app purchase system has nothing to do with the 30% cut, and everything to do with Amazon wanting to own that buying experience.
Marco:
And I alluded to that a little bit, but we've got a number of people pointing out specifics of why that's important to them.
Marco:
So one of the biggest, of course, is...
Marco:
they want your credit card information to be entered into Amazon.
Marco:
They want to have the most credit cards on file of anybody, and they want your default behavior to be, if you're going to buy something, buy it from Amazon with one click, done, done, done.
Marco:
And so for you to be using Apple's system, that's one more customer than Amazon might not have using them.
Marco:
Also, Amazon extensively, when possible, and this has become less possible with big name e-books because of the agency deal, but when possible, Amazon uses heavy price controls and price tweaking.
Marco:
And that's why if you go visit Amazon product pages for almost anything, it's kind of unusual to see the same price twice.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And the prices seem kind of random, especially on digital goods where they can fudge numbers.
Marco:
And they reserve the right on their app store to change the price of apps at will and stuff like that.
Marco:
There's all sorts of ways Amazon uses price control as a sales or data tactic.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
they can't really do that at the kind of granularity and volume they would want to do it at in an Apple system at all.
Marco:
So and again, so it's all I think with Amazon, it's much more about owning that transaction, getting user behavior, getting everyone using Amazon and paying through Amazon.
Marco:
I don't think even if Apple system was free, I don't think Amazon would use it.
Marco:
Now, it is Apple's fault for disallowing them from using their own.
Marco:
That certainly is something Apple could change if they wanted to.
Marco:
But again, I think that opens up a weird can of worms, and I think that would be a bad precedent to set.
John:
yeah i don't think i i still don't think allowing alternate payment systems is reasonable i don't think anyone suggests that a lot of people sent in email about this saying uh you know basically saying oh they should never allow alternate yeah they probably shouldn't allow alternate payment systems like you can see how that could be chaos and terrible and everything and if it's the case that all amazon wants is credit card numbers because apple has way more credit cards than amazon does that's someone threw around a stat recently but it wasn't even close and you would think amazon would have more credit cards but apparently not
John:
but if that's if that's the line in the sand that amazon is making i still think this is apple's problem and i think it's the even worse problem because it's like oh what can we do in fact if we made it free they still wouldn't buy like amazon has things that apple doesn't amazon has a popular store where people buy tons of stuff apple has a kind of semi-popular store where people buy some things and apparently ibook sells comics too but merlin was saying that it's a terrible experience and you know like the
John:
It's a problem.
John:
You know, it's a similar situation that Apple was with Google.
John:
Google has something that Apple needs.
John:
And Apple decided, well, we're going to make our own, which is a good strategic move because you don't want to rely on your deadly enemy to be providing you with essential functionality.
John:
But it's really hard.
John:
And Google is really good at what it does.
John:
And Apple tried to do some of the same stuff itself and didn't do that good a job.
John:
And it's getting better.
John:
What are they going to do now?
John:
it as a platform owner apple has to figure this stuff out they can't have a platform and say do everything our way but we're not gonna use anything from google and we're not gonna use anything from amazon and just everything's gonna be a little bit worse like their job as a platform is to encourage a rich ecosystem of people who provide awesome apps and if everyone knows if you're gonna buy stuff get go to amazon's platform and if you're gonna do anything with cloud stuff go to google's platform but i guess anything else you know like this is apple's problem long term and i don't know what the solution is i'm just arguing for at this point um
John:
uh being stubborn and holding the line for another three years as they've done with you know allowing you to purchase stuff inside applications is not is going to hurt apple more than it hurts amazon or more than it hurts google unless you know the other solution is apple could just tell tons of ios devices because if ios had 90 market share then suddenly this is back to being amazon and google's problem but they don't so for now it's apple's problem
Marco:
Well, they do have that kind of level of a lot of things like web browsing with purchase intent and stuff like that.
Marco:
The iOS platform does represent itself way larger than its installed base in things like what percentage of people doing actual online purchasing of goods are using Apple stuff or what percentage of people buying books online, buying movies online, that kind of stuff.
Marco:
I bet Apple's platforms actually...
Marco:
are big enough in those that Amazon, for instance, has to have an iOS app for their business to be healthy in that department.
John:
Well, I don't know if they ever broke those down by how many of these purchases were through apps versus how many were through mobile safari, someone going to amazon.com and just buying sweaters and stuff.
John:
I don't know if it's broken down by app.
John:
Amazon's perfectly happy to let you use your iPad as a web browser and buy stuff from Amazon.
Casey:
So can we go back a second to the is this or is this not net neutrality debate?
Casey:
Because I feel like you kind of fluff that off.
Casey:
Well, it's not the internet, thus it's not the same.
Casey:
So no, it's and I don't know if it's quite so simple.
Casey:
And the way I look at it, and it didn't occur to me until people wrote in about it.
Casey:
But if you look at the situation at my house today, if I want to watch some content, let's use Netflix as an example.
Casey:
Verizon is standing between me and that content.
Casey:
So somehow or another, I need Verizon to kind of orchestrate the exchange between Netflix and me.
Casey:
In a similar vein, if I have an iPhone and I want some content, be it a comic or be it an app or whatever the case may be, Apple is standing between me and the content I want.
Casey:
And I think what people are bothered by is
Casey:
is at this point, couldn't you make a reasonable argument that the same kind of common carrier stuff that applies to Verizon, aren't we almost at the point that that applies to Apple too?
John:
Verizon is not between you and the content you want.
John:
Verizon is between you and the internet.
John:
Sure.
John:
And that's that's an important distinction, because when you're buying something through Apple, like you're buying something from Apple Store, right?
John:
Someone uploaded to Apple.
John:
Apple has it.
John:
Verizon has nothing.
John:
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 want to go.
John:
I mean, you're going through the internet to get to the app store, if you want to think of it that way.
John:
Verizon is the gate between you and buying the thing.
John:
Why shouldn't Verizon get 40% of every purchase through the app store?
John:
They are your gate to the internet.
John:
And the internet is a different thing.
John:
It's how we are all connected to each other.
John:
Verizon does not own anything on the internet.
John:
Verizon does not run the internet.
John:
Verizon doesn't run Netflix.
John:
Verizon doesn't accept uploaded videos from movie studios to Netflix.
John:
Verizon doesn't manage the subscriptions of people to Netflix.
John:
Verizon has nothing to do with Netflix.
John:
They are a gateway to the internet.
John:
They like to put themselves in between and say, oh, well, the entire Internet is our oyster.
John:
No matter what you want to do there, we can extort money from whatever the most popular things are, because otherwise we'll cut off their access.
John:
And we can do that because in the U.S.
John:
anyway, in many markets, we have monopolies.
John:
And what are they going to do?
John:
Go to a different competitor?
John:
Verizon has nothing.
John:
Apple owns the App Store.
John:
They accept uploads.
John:
They have a developer program.
John:
They made the hardware.
John:
They made the software.
John:
They allow people to upload things.
John:
They accept your money.
John:
They do it like that is Apple.
John:
We are going through the Internet to get to Apple.
John:
It's not the same thing as the Internet at all.
John:
The Internet is a special, unique snowflake.
John:
I'm going to say that.
John:
It is different than everything else.
John:
The Internet is not the App Store.
John:
For crying out loud, the App Store is on the Internet.
John:
Without the Internet, nothing works.
Casey:
So simply because...
John:
apple made the app store it we have to play by their rules even if they're completely unfair and owns it and runs it and makes all decisions about it is is it a private entity it's basically private versus public and i think the internet works best and has historically been treated as a public thing that we all share together because it doesn't work if we like we cut ourselves off from it and try to divvy it up into little pieces and disconnect if you disconnect a sub network from the internet
John:
That's like, it's not that you're not on the internet anymore.
John:
It's pointless to anybody.
John:
If the Northeast says, well, we're not going to communicate with anybody who's not in the Northeast.
John:
Like, that's pointless.
John:
The whole point is we're all connected to each other through it.
John:
That's what makes the internet the internet.
John:
It is a unique thing.
John:
It should be treated differently than everything else.
John:
That's totally different than things that live on the internet.
John:
I mean, it is complicated by the fact that the app stores on the internet would be simpler if it was just like, you know,
John:
something something that wasn't involved the internet but everything's involved the internet now that's the whole thing with net neutrality is like if you allow regional isps to be gatekeepers and extort money for things they're already being paid for on both ends they're getting to choose the winners and losers 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 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 it's their thing
John:
But they don't choose whether you can get to the App Store.
John:
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.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
It's almost as if you're creating your own intranet.
Marco:
Speaking of which, our sponsor this week is Igloo.
Marco:
Igloo makes an intranet you'll actually like.
Marco:
Now, they gave me this different read this time, but I figured I'd throw them there anyway.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So, it's quarterly earnings season.
Marco:
Time to read those highly scripted texts about revenue, margin, and earnings data.
Marco:
With that in mind, Igloo, the makers of an intranet you'll actually like, wanted to present a quarterly report that you'll actually like.
Marco:
They're a private company, so they decided to present the numbers you care about in a way that's easy to understand.
Marco:
It's how they design their software, too.
Marco:
The quarterly report takes the form of an infographic with fun stats about how customers use their intranet every day.
Marco:
One blog post every minute, 144 meetings every hour, 995 wiki articles added every day.
Marco:
And it's blended with quirky facts about the people that work at Igloo.
Marco:
For example, they've consumed 6,144 cups of coffee in the past three months.
Marco:
The site's developed with a cool parallax experience and some cool animations, so check it out.
Marco:
Check out what's been happening at Igloo this year.
Marco:
igloosoftware.com slash earnings.
Marco:
Once again, check out Igloo Software, the makers of the internet you'll actually like, at igloosoftware.com slash earnings.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Igloo for sponsoring our show once again.
Marco:
They're pretty cool people there.
Marco:
All right, the last bit of follow-up is on app links.
Marco:
Quick little thing.
Marco:
We talked about the Facebook project App Links last week, and we got a bunch of feedback from people who are much more familiar with it than we are, saying that really the point of app links is mostly not about going from browsers to apps, which is what we were mostly talking about.
Marco:
It's mostly to more intelligently link from apps to other apps without bouncing through the browser.
Marco:
So, for instance, if, you know, like in the Twitter app, if they integrated app links and you link to an Instagram link, well, assuming Twitter and Facebook were talking, I bet Twitter would actually explicitly disable the Instagram link from working.
Marco:
But anyway, suppose it was some other service that Twitter is friendly with, like...
Marco:
Okay, suppose it's the Tumblr app, and the Tumblr app wants to link to Instagram, because I don't think they hate each other yet.
Marco:
So the Tumblr app would link directly to Instagram instead of bouncing through the web browser.
Marco:
So you still have to fetch the page, but they have a library that handles that for you.
Marco:
So it's still kind of iffy.
Marco:
It's still...
John:
You don't have to fetch the page.
John:
Well, they have to fetch the HTML.
John:
No, you don't, because that's part of the API.
John:
That's one of the things that people were pointing out to us.
John:
Casey brought that up as well, and I was looking at the doc.
John:
The stuff is still in the page, but that's the protocol.
John:
How do you provide this information to the thing?
John:
But Facebook or somebody provides a library that, like they said, you can crawl the pages yourself and extract the information, but we also provide an API that basically, you just give us a URL and we give you the equivalent app link.
John:
Oh, that's right.
John:
Yeah, the
John:
discovery service that's right right so like so they'll crawl them and they'll like so then you don't have to go out to a page and get it if you're lucky it'll be in like a cache or a local thing or you know i i don't know it boils down to the same thing but basically like they they want to be able to given uh you know given a url that i would go to on a web page instead of going to that web page have something else that has already been to that web page extract the information needed to build the app link and that take me deeply into another application
John:
And hopefully, the thing doesn't have to actually go to that web page, pull it up, and do that thing.
John:
Hopefully, something has done it before.
John:
But that's the equivalency.
John:
That's, I think, the piece that I was missing in this thing is basically like, given a URL that works in a web browser,
John:
That would work just fine.
John:
Like it shows you the thing you're going to buy or whatever.
John:
Tell me what is the equivalent location inside an application and form that into an app link that I can use to get to the equivalent page inside another app.
Marco:
Boy, that is a fantastic way for Facebook to capture tons of click data on all the URLs people are clicking in apps.
Marco:
See, now I know why they launched this.
Marco:
There we go.
Marco:
That's the reason right there.
Marco:
It's just a discovery service.
Marco:
It's just an implementation detail.
Marco:
Don't worry about it.
John:
Well, you're right, because they want to bypass the web page, because the only way you could get to places where protocol helpers are going to your web page and redirecting you to whatever protocol handler that iOS says belongs to your application.
John:
It's like, no, no, no.
John:
We'll get that.
John:
Given a URL, we will tell you what the equivalent application
John:
application page is based on all this metadata that is in the url and that's why this stuff is on a web page and it makes more sense to me now that like you know if you don't support app links you'll just go to the page and the page will show you details for that book but if that page has app link information and you tap on an app that supports app links we won't show you that detail page for the book instead we'll take you directly to the book selling application that uh you know the page that shows the detail inside the app instead of going to a web browser
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And for every single link you tap in any application that supports this, it's going to first check with the Facebook discovery service.
Marco:
And yeah, anyone else can run a discovery service, but this is going to be the default one that's already built in and free.
Marco:
So of course, everyone's going to just use that.
Marco:
And that way, every single link you ever tap in an app that supports this will first tell Facebook that you're clicking on it.
John:
That's fantastic.
John:
but but it's there i mean it may only tell facebook but you know facebook wants to have this constellation of applications surrounding their data and so they they want to use it for their purposes and like okay well if they don't have the facebook whatever app installed take them to facebook.com whatever but if they do have the facebook whatever app installed don't bother sending them to facebook.com instead send them to the app because they think their big thing now is like you know customize experiences in native applications instead of sending people to one big blue website
Marco:
we also have t-shirts for sale we have t-shirts for sale for a very short time remaining we only have right now there's as we record there's like four days remaining when we release this it'll be more like one or a day and a half remaining so please if you want a t-shirt which you greatly appreciate because we'll make a few dollars on each one um if you want a t-shirt please get it quickly because you're almost out of time um
Marco:
But thank you very much to everyone who's bought them so far.
Marco:
The numbers have really surprised me.
Marco:
We've sold, as we record, just under 1,000, which is amazing.
Marco:
I think I was estimating like a few hundred maybe at best.
Marco:
And so I'm very happy.
Marco:
So thank you everyone for buying our shirts.
Casey:
Yep, that's very awesome of everyone who has, and we appreciate it.
Marco:
So if you want one, go to atp.fm slash shirt.
John:
And we did announce this on last week's show, and that was like your advance notice.
John:
So if you're hearing this show and it's like Sunday, you probably missed it already.
John:
Yeah.
John:
This is only for the people who are going to download the show when it comes out on Friday or I think Saturday you might have time.
John:
So you did have an entire week to try to get these shirts.
John:
I know people are going to be sad because they missed it because people wait to the last minute and they can't decide if they want it or not.
John:
So if you're listening to this now and you think you might want a shirt, just pause the podcast and go see if the sale is still on.
John:
They're priced to move, people.
John:
Some people were asking if they thought the source code in the back would come out.
John:
Our answer is we have no idea, but we really hope it does.
Marco:
Otherwise... Yeah, we have no way to tell.
Marco:
I mean, I made it as big as possible.
Marco:
I intentionally made the lines very short so that I could scale the text up and have it fit in the back.
Marco:
I also used Monaco Bold.
Marco:
So everything should be a little bit thicker, which should make it a little bit more likely to come out, I think.
Marco:
Um, so, and we only used a few colors so they can, they can reuse the color without having to like dither it or anything weird like that.
Marco:
So I thought you were using Menlo.
Marco:
You didn't use Menlo.
Marco:
Uh, oh, sorry.
Marco:
It is Menlo.
Marco:
You're right.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I use Menlo.
Marco:
So it, so it doesn't look stupid, but, um, yeah, so it's, it should be relatively thick.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
So it should turn out, but we aren't screen printers and we aren't Teespring.
Marco:
And because of the way Teespring works, we can't really get a sample first.
Marco:
We have to put them for sale before any are printed, including ours.
Marco:
And we will get them when everyone else does.
Marco:
So we think the code on the back will turn out, but we really can't know for sure until it does.
Marco:
So we can't really guarantee that, but we'll find out.
Marco:
If it doesn't, think of it this way.
John:
You'll have the t-shirt equivalent of the upside-down airplane stamp.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, like, and I have a few other shirts from Teespring, and their quality seems really good.
Marco:
Like, they're a real screen printing shop.
Marco:
It isn't doing, like, what CafePress does, where it's basically like a transfer, almost.
Marco:
They're actually, like, it's a real screen printer.
Marco:
And, you know, they were able to get quite a lot of detail on the shirts I've had previously from them.
Marco:
So I have high hopes, but we'll see.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So we got some news about app.net yesterday.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Yesterday when we record this anyways.
Casey:
And it sounds like they're sunsetting their brand without sunsetting their brand.
Casey:
Oh, no, they're winding down.
Casey:
My apologies.
Marco:
No, no, sorry.
Marco:
They're winding down just the developer incentive program.
Marco:
App.net will continue operating on a forward basis.
Casey:
With nobody actually dedicated to it.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
See, this is sad.
Marco:
I mean, I can't really say that no one saw this coming because we all saw this coming, I think, but...
Marco:
I just don't... I think they should have just killed it.
Marco:
Because I'm sure they're going to kill it.
Marco:
Maybe they haven't killed it yet because they want to wait out people who have paid so they don't have to try to deal with issuing refunds for partially fulfilled subscriptions.
Marco:
That's a pretty good reason.
Marco:
Although if they were going to do that, they should stop taking subscriptions now.
Marco:
Maybe that wasn't their plan, but...
Marco:
Now, what they basically said is – so a few weeks ago in mid-April was when all of the initial subscriptions expired.
Marco:
So if you were one of the backers at the very beginning, which is where I think most of their user base came from, at least most of their paying user base.
Marco:
If you were one of those original backers that they did kind of like a Kickstarter-style thing –
Marco:
And then they lowered the price and then you got extended.
Marco:
And so anyway, all those subscriptions were up this a few weeks ago in early April.
Marco:
And so of that massive original wave of backers, they basically said they didn't get enough renewals to be able to afford any other or any full time employees anymore.
Marco:
So there are now no more employees.
Marco:
They will use contract work here and there occasionally as the budget permits, which is a fancy way of saying if you subscribe some more.
Marco:
And so it's basically like there's basically no one working on it anymore.
Marco:
And they said it's financially healthy enough to keep going indefinitely.
Marco:
But that statement is probably based on the number of subscribers that it has today.
Marco:
And now that they've announced that it's kind of dying or dead, I suspect the number of subscribers will continue to go down.
Marco:
So I suspect that an actual shutdown is likely within probably, I don't know, six months.
Casey:
So did either of you guys renew when the renewal happened?
Marco:
I did, and now I regret it, of course.
Casey:
Same here.
Casey:
Same here.
Marco:
I didn't, actually, because I just never use it.
John:
I do use it.
John:
I still use it every day.
John:
And, you know, I'll be sad to see it go away.
John:
But, you know, what can you do?
Casey:
Yeah, I don't really actively use it.
Casey:
Well, I use it to announce that we're live.
Casey:
And there's somewhere to the order of 200 people that subscribe to that.
Casey:
And actually 204.
Casey:
And I use it when somebody mentions me.
Casey:
But that's it.
Casey:
I never actively go to app.net to just see what's cracking on app.net.
Casey:
The only time I ever go is if somebody is addressing me or I'm announcing that we're live.
Marco:
Yeah, I discovered when my renewal was coming up, I decided, you know what, I don't use this anymore.
Marco:
So I don't want to pay for it again.
Marco:
So let me convert my paid account to a free account.
Marco:
And to do that, you have to stay under a certain following limit.
Marco:
I think it's like 40 people that you can follow.
Marco:
It's something like that.
Marco:
And so I had to reduce my following list down to that number.
Marco:
And so what I did was I went through the following list and I just opened up all those people's timelines on app.net and anyone who had not posted anytime recently, I assume, had abandoned the service and therefore I could safely unfollow them.
Marco:
And it was really, really easy to get the number down by that method because so many people...
Marco:
I was actually kind of surprised how many people who I initially had followed were no longer using the service.
Marco:
So many people hadn't posted in months.
Marco:
Some of them hadn't posted in over a year.
Marco:
The service is about two years old.
Marco:
Some of them hadn't posted in over a year.
Marco:
Some of them had never posted.
Marco:
I had followed them because of a Twitter friend finder kind of thing.
Marco:
And it was...
Marco:
it was kind of sad and it was kind of sobering.
Marco:
I really think, you know, there are people who use it every day, no question, but I think it's a really small group.
Marco:
And I've heard from developers of app.net.apps that it just, there were just never enough users to really make development for it feasible.
John:
You needed a critical mass of your friends to be there for it to be viable for you.
John:
And I went over there and it became very clear very quickly that a critical mass of the people I interact with did not make it over there from Twitter.
John:
And so for a while, like there was a tiny little bubble of people over there that I would talk with in that in that arena.
John:
uh but it was clear that most of my interactions were still going to have to take place on quitter on twitter because that's where everybody was and app.net became kind of like a back channel for twitter because of the small subset of people who are you know driven to app.net by anger at twitter or by just you know desire to have things like that could be interesting back channel for commentary and stuff but it was never going to be like enough people didn't move uh and with with things like this with you know with
John:
with platforms where you are seeing things other people write and other people are seeing things that you write, uh, audiences is king.
John:
And if, you know, if the people you want to follow aren't posting on app.net and the people you want to read what you're writing aren't on app.net, then you just, you're just not going to go there.
John:
And, you know, I, I didn't read, uh, Brianna's post yet, but she did a thing of basically like, uh, I have an Instapaper, of course, that, uh,
John:
It's not a technology problem.
John:
It's a social problem.
John:
And as unfortunate as that is, like we thought they had some of the social aspects from the developer facing side, they had better than Twitter.
John:
They figured out how can we make it, you know, how can we make a win-win situation for developers to use this platform?
John:
But the biggest win they didn't put in there, which Marco pointed out, is you've got to have a lot of users because there has to be a large potential customer base.
John:
And if you can't get that, it doesn't matter that you do all those other things right.
John:
Everything else flows from, well, yeah, but who's there?
John:
How many users do you have?
John:
and we make fun of that like oh eyeballs and big growth rates and you know it's like but you don't have to make everything free for everybody and just make the entire world use it but you do have to meet some minimum and they just never met it and then we can go you know 20 20 hindsight and say what should they have done to get more users margo i think has uh talked about probably the biggest reason which is waiting way too long to do a free tier and that just put a stop around the entire service for like an entire year
John:
Yeah, I mean, that was the big thing.
Marco:
Like, you know, it was noble of them to try a paid model, you know, so they could avoid the weird advertiser creepiness phenomenon that all these free services have to return to to make money.
Marco:
You know, that was an interesting idea.
Marco:
But the problem is, and, you know, we all, I think, knew it at the time.
Marco:
The problem is that...
Marco:
For a social product like that, you need as many people as possible.
Marco:
And by putting up the paywall right at the beginning and having no free tier, having everything be paid only at the beginning for almost the whole first year, that was really, really fatal.
Marco:
And furthermore, even after they made a free tier in, I believe, early last May or last April, but for a while, you had to have an invitation from somebody else, and there were a limited number of invitations, so you had to be invited by a paid member.
Marco:
Now...
Marco:
That, I think, was fatal also.
Marco:
Even more fatal.
Marco:
Beating a dead app.net.
Marco:
Even more fatal because when they did finally go free, there was this big asterisk.
Marco:
Well, it's free, but you can't just go sign up.
Marco:
It's free, but you have to be invited.
Marco:
And there's very few invites.
Marco:
And they eventually removed the invitation requirement.
Marco:
but everyone had already been told that this was now free but you need an invitation so it's like and no one no one got the memo when that requirement was lifted and so even people who were on the fence about it once they learned it was free and then were kind of turned away by that by the invitation requirement they probably didn't go back after to check oh is that requirement still there it's really hard to strike that balance though because it can't you know the whole thing we're talking about if you make it
John:
free for everybody and nobody is ever motivated to do the pay thing you've just killed your service like that's the whole point they were trying to make a service that was sustained by the people uses you have to try you have to strike that perfect balance free that it gets people in the door but that the you know sort of like Dropbox has found I assume the balance for themselves which is yeah you can use Dropbox for free until you reach a certain quota and enough people are going to reach that quota and pay for it that it pays for all the freeloaders right and that is really difficult to strike that balance and
John:
Making everybody pay on a service that is going to live or die by the number of people who use it is really difficult.
John:
Maybe they were fooled by the initial enthusiasm of an alternate service at Twitter, but everyone who joined quickly found out, well, most people I know don't care about what the hell Twitter are doing to developers, and they're back over there on Twitter, so I guess I'm going to go back there, too.
John:
Yeah, I like...
John:
The invitation thing could have been, you know, throttling for load or trying to build hype or a combination of them.
John:
A lot of big services do that Gmail was invite only in the beginning.
John:
Like that's not an entirely crazy thing, but it's all about timing and balance.
John:
Did you do it for too long?
John:
Is the balancing correct?
John:
All those people who found they could go to free, all like those dedicated people like I use app.net all the time, but I can get by with the free tier.
John:
Well, that's bad.
John:
Like the fact that you found it easy to get to the free tier, like that is an incorrect balance.
John:
But at that point, it was probably too late anyway.
John:
But I was thinking of the things they could do, things they could have done.
John:
A lot of people, and I think Marco, as you as well, blogged about this, like focus, they seem to try a lot of different things.
John:
And a lot of people have said.
John:
Oh, well, they were all over the place, but no one knew what they were.
John:
They didn't concentrate on any one thing.
John:
That's why they messed up.
John:
But the other side of that coin is what if they had tried to do one of those things for the entire time?
John:
We would have been saying you should have tried different things.
John:
You should have tried file hosting.
John:
Maybe you could have been an API for applications.
John:
So, I mean, it all stems back to the same problem.
John:
They did not find a way to get people onto the service.
John:
And every other problem they have is like, you know, falls out of that.
Marco:
Maybe, but I don't know.
Marco:
I mean, at the same time, all these different things, that was all effort that was expended that was not trying to get people on the service.
Marco:
It was trying to add value for people who are already there to maybe in the future, maybe get some more people to sign up.
Marco:
But every one of their major API pushes, every one of their major new products or aspects of the service is the kind of thing where it's like, oh, this will be great once more people are here.
Marco:
But that never came.
John:
Well, they were trying to get new customers.
John:
They would say, okay, we can't get people to come and use it like Twitter.
John:
Maybe we can get app developers to use it as their back end, kind of like Symperium or something.
John:
It was trying for another user base.
John:
Okay, we can't get enough regular people.
John:
How about it?
John:
Can we get enough developers of applications?
John:
Well, we can't get enough of them.
John:
How about people who just want to host their files?
John:
And the thing that might have undone them is instead of doing the pivot thing where you just like, this is where we're going to go now, they never got rid of the old things.
John:
They just added to them.
John:
So it became this big, long list of things that it did.
John:
And that becomes difficult to support.
John:
You know, it's not as if they said, okay, well, we were a Twitter-like service, but now we're a file hosting service.
John:
We were a file hosting service, but now we're an API connecting thing.
John:
Like, they did all those things at once.
John:
And to their credit, engineering-wise, they seem to do a good job on all those things.
John:
Like, Manton is very happy using them as an API and a back-end.
John:
But...
John:
Again, you have to be able to show that you are sustainable or show that you get so many customers that some VC is willing to pour money down your throat forever until someone buys you out.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Well, and engineering is one of the least important things when it comes to growing a social product.
Marco:
Like, look at MySpace.
Marco:
MySpace, you know, it's easy to laugh at them now.
Marco:
But before Facebook was big, MySpace basically ruled the Internet for a few years.
Marco:
And they had the worst technology in the universe powering that thing.
Marco:
They still do.
Marco:
And it's like, it is comical just how much in shambles that company always was.
Marco:
MySpace has always been comically dysfunctional before and after acquisition.
Marco:
And, you know, their site was like held together by tape and glue.
Marco:
And, and yet it was the biggest social site on the web for a long time and, and still is no slouch.
Marco:
And,
Marco:
The technology matters very, very little.
Marco:
What matters for anything that is social is just the social network effect.
Marco:
It's getting the people who you want to talk to and reach on there.
Marco:
There was never any hope for something that was paywall only for every single user.
Marco:
to ever get that big you know if they were going to get big they they should have had a free tier at the very beginning but that's hard like it like the reason they did invitations was probably not to build hype it was probably because they were afraid of things like spam and abuse from bulk registrations which is a major problem it's hard to deal with um
Marco:
But like that's that's the game like that's that's the game you're signing up for if you want to have any kind of socialization or have anything that requires you know strong network effect here or that needs to overcome a strong network effect.
Marco:
So you know really what they I think what they should have done instead was had no social products at all.
Marco:
And focus purely on the developer API stuff.
Marco:
Because then they have a lot fewer direct competitors.
Marco:
But even then, the model of having the users pay instead of the developers is weird.
Marco:
And I don't think that ever really had a chance.
John:
To App.net's credit, the success they had surprised me.
John:
When they got real app developers to make real App.net clients instead of just some random person doing it as a lark.
John:
The NetBot thing.
John:
Granted, maybe they just reused a lot of the work they had done for TweetBot and everything, but they got actual attention from real developers and they got some pretty darn high-quality applications.
John:
Even if it was someone's first application, those people honed their App.net clients and shaped them up into...
John:
You know, applications that I would put up against any third party Twitter client, you know, and some of them, you know, some of them weren't just like tweet bot ported net, but some of them are brand new applications out of whole cloth.
John:
And they were pretty darn good.
John:
Granted, there was prior art in terms of people had seen what Twitter applications are like, but just think they managed to make something that was big enough to do that.
John:
And that was part of their goal.
John:
Like we're going to make an awesome platform for developers.
John:
They did every part of that except for the part where there's tons of customers.
John:
And they tried to make up for that by giving them a share of the money they were getting.
John:
Like, it worked much better than I thought it would for longer than I thought it would.
John:
And so I give them credit for even achieving that level of success.
John:
Because if you think about that...
John:
You know, who else has tried that and been even remotely successful?
John:
It is especially on something like a social network.
John:
It is.
John:
It's a tough sell.
John:
So they they have nothing to be ashamed of in terms of they had the guts to do this.
John:
They made it happen and they they got a reasonable level of success.
John:
They just didn't get over the hump.
John:
And they just now they're sliding back down the hill.
Marco:
Yeah, agreed.
Marco:
I mean, you know, they're... And, you know, I've talked to Dalton.
Marco:
Like, these are good people and I'm trying to, you know, be constructive here.
Marco:
Like, they... I don't think they're idiots.
Marco:
I know they're not idiots.
Marco:
And I don't think they...
Marco:
I think they just... They were trying something really, really hard and it did not work.
Marco:
And again, I agree.
Marco:
It lasted longer and got further than I thought it would.
Marco:
I didn't even think it would get backed.
Marco:
I didn't think they would even make their goal because it seemed pretty high at the time.
Marco:
And they did.
Marco:
And they blew right past it.
Marco:
I mean...
Marco:
And to last two years, I mean, I certainly wouldn't have guessed that either.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
And I think now the way they're kind of, you know, winding it down, I think they should just kill it because now it has nobody working on it and the user number is just going to go down because now it's like a sinking ship.
Marco:
Like, it's almost like, you know, like Merlin was talking about it briefly on Back to Work this week, so listen to that.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
It's a little weird.
Marco:
It's like you're hanging out at a bar with your friends and there are people filtering out for a while and now the owner has just turned the lights on and left.
Marco:
And now you're all just sitting there with the lights on in this empty room.
Marco:
How long are you really going to stay there?
John:
Somebody tweeted today that if you don't like using something that doesn't have full-time people working on it, then you should trash half the iOS applications on your phone because...
John:
Yeah, it is a difference because like obviously a service is different than a bunch of bits on you.
John:
But, you know, this is this is a problem all over.
John:
Like this is why people are wary about signing up for things or using applications.
John:
And that's why big, you know, big successful companies have some kind of advantage because, you know, it's not like a fly by night thing.
John:
You're like, well, if.
John:
you know, depending on the company, like Apple, Microsoft, Google, you figure if this thing goes away, it won't be because the company went out of business.
John:
It'll be because, you know, it could be because they changed their mind or whatever, but you're not worried about the viability of the company because they have billions of dollars and you figure that gives them at least a couple of years before they go down the tubes, right?
John:
Whereas things like this, it's all just, you know, how much do you believe in these scrappy group of people and how, you know, and they made it two years, which is like longer probably than some Google projects.
John:
So good on them.
Yeah.
Casey:
So something Marco said a few minutes ago actually really made me think for a moment.
Casey:
You had said something along the lines of, well, they kind of screwed up having the users pay for App.NET rather than having the developers pay.
Casey:
And it occurred to me that...
Casey:
You could make a really legitimate argument that app.net was further up the stack than a lot of the things we're working with.
Casey:
So if you look at the lowest level, we've got a physical machine that, say, Marco owns for Instapaper or Overcast or what have you, that is co-located at somebody's data center.
Casey:
And then you get a little less...
Casey:
close to the metal and you have a virtual machine that's still at somebody's data center and so on and so forth so it's a shared resource then you move up the stack a little more you have something like heroku or azure is perhaps in the middle maybe but something like that where you have sort of a platform as a service thing well that's what app.net could have been i feel like it would be even further up the stack from like a heroku where you have this entire platform waiting for you and it seems
Casey:
In retrospect, it seems obvious to me now, after hearing Marco say that, that that would have been really powerful for developers.
Casey:
And if the pricing wasn't god-awful, that would be a really, really great way for a developer to get, say, user accounts set up easily or data storage, like you had mentioned.
Casey:
There's so many things that App.NET eventually ended up doing.
Casey:
or ends up doing.
Casey:
I don't know if I should use past tense or not.
Casey:
But anyway, there's so much that they do that as someone who has no interest in running his own servers like myself, that is something that's very powerful.
Casey:
And I think Manton touched on this.
Casey:
And I keep getting reminded of, I think it was Brent Simmons had posted about, hey, why don't we have an API kind of like this?
Casey:
And I think his point was a little bit different.
Casey:
But
Casey:
It's a similar idea, and it really could be a wonderful thing if you don't want to go through the hassle and effort of completely rolling your own stuff.
Marco:
Yeah, totally.
Marco:
I mean, that's... And I think part of the problem with App.net, you know, App.net, the name and domain, started out as something else.
Marco:
And Dalton and company kind of merged it in with this idea.
Marco:
You know, when Twitter started being a dick, they started merging it in with this and kind of took over...
Marco:
and you know became something else because it was a new cool thing that there was a need for and then as they ran app.net they kept doing more and more of those kind of things like hey let's take this this thing and add this other thing to it and this other kind of product and other kind of service and keep let's add this on and add this on
Marco:
And I think that lack of focus really hurt them a lot.
Marco:
But I think if they would have skipped that second step, if they would have skipped the step of let's make this into a Twitter alternative, or let's make this into a platform that could power a Twitter alternative, please don't email me.
Marco:
If they would have skipped that and gone directly from the old app.net developer services company into...
Marco:
What you just described, like a high-level developer backend services company, where the developers would pay them to host their backends on this infrastructure, and users would never have to know about it.
Marco:
Just the same way users don't want to know if your backend is on AWS or Parse or Microsoft Azure.
Marco:
Users don't need to see that.
Marco:
It's an implementation detail.
Marco:
And you, the application developer, would do your own user management in the sense that you would say, all right, create a user.
Marco:
And here's an email and password.
Marco:
Give me a user account for this.
Marco:
And then with every call you'd make, you'd say, all right, give me the files for user ID XYZ.
Marco:
That's for my application.
Marco:
That's a level up.
Marco:
And I think that's probably a better business to be in, given...
Marco:
all the services they were building on top of it like it seems like they would have been better off targeting only developers and making the developers pay and and making all these great services they added to it um just just developer services really that'd be boring though i mean like there are services out there like i mentioned simperium but there's also wasn't there that one before game center came out that did all the game high scores and leaderboards what the hell was that called
John:
yeah i know even everyone i always had to say no to it yeah whatever but anyway uh and you know azure of course is one and like all sorts of all sorts of services that are like this that are essentially offering alternatives to either alternatives to icloud or alternatives to core data and of course all the alternatives to icloud don't have the advantage that icloud does and that your your users are probably already logged in open faint was the game that's it
John:
Yeah, like, but that's, you know, and Symperium is like for, you know, a sort of alternative to core data, simpler kind of document data storage.
John:
And App.net was even more general.
John:
But the thing is, I don't know any of those services are like burning up the charts and those companies are being wildly successful.
John:
At the very least, App.net got to do something different, which was this weird Twitter-like thing.
John:
They got to run the experiment of...
John:
How does 256 characters feel compared to 140?
John:
My answer to that is it feels pretty good.
John:
I like it.
John:
I wish Twitter was like that.
John:
What about out-of-band metadata?
John:
The answer to that was it's really hard to get clients to support it, but it's kind of a good idea in theory.
John:
The conversation threading, lots of all the experiments they ran.
John:
I mean, if Twitter wasn't a bunch of butts, they would use it as like, hey, these guys did all the research for us by trying a whole bunch of crazy things, and some worked and some didn't.
John:
But Twitter doesn't care about any of that stuff anymore, unfortunately.
John:
But if they did...
John:
App.net did a good service to them.
John:
And I think the user goodwill, the people who did enjoy App.net and did enjoy the community that was there and everything, is probably going to have a more lasting impact on all the experiments there and more lasting impact than if they had just become another company in line with all those other companies.
John:
that I mentioned.
John:
And I don't know how those companies are doing well.
John:
Maybe they're doing fabulously well, and I just don't know about it.
John:
But it seems like there's a whole bunch of them, and every once in a while, one of the big dogs comes and squishes them.
John:
Like, I don't know how OpenFaint is doing now.
John:
The Game Center is out.
John:
Maybe they're doing great.
John:
I don't know.
John:
But like...
John:
Azure and stuff, Microsoft has the advantage that like, you know, app.net would have to pay, you know, S3 or AWS or Azure or something because they don't, you know, they are a reseller of other services with software on top of them.
John:
Whereas Microsoft itself or Amazon itself or Apple itself doesn't have that extra margin in the middle to give to some other party in the chain.
John:
So they're always going to beat you on price.
John:
And people who own platforms are always going to beat you on platform integration.
John:
And that's a tough business to be in.
John:
So yeah.
John:
Maybe they would still be in business if they had chose that model, but I don't think it's a recipe for runaway success.
Marco:
Oh, I don't know about that.
Marco:
I mean, they would be a value-added provider.
Marco:
They would have this great system built on top of raw hardware.
Marco:
If you look at a service like Heroku...
Marco:
the markup is insane i mean they there's tons of profit to be made there by by adding convenience and by building in functionality that developers don't have to write themselves like that yeah but they're never going to do like they don't they would have to pay amazon if they use ec2 to deploy on they would have to pay you know doesn't heroku do that well
John:
Yeah, I don't know what I'm saying.
John:
Hiroko's not burned up the chart, too.
John:
Like I'm saying, you're always going to, there's always going to be someone who can offer the same service for cheaper or the same service with better platform integration.
John:
So it's a tough business to be in.
John:
Like you're always kind of, you're trying to find the little area that someone isn't covering.
John:
Like OpenFaint probably thought it was like, great, Apple's never going to do anything with games.
John:
We're all set with this.
John:
And they were doing well for a while.
John:
And then Game Center comes, which sucks and I hate, but it really took the wind out of their sails.
John:
Yeah, I mean, I suppose it is a harder business, but do you think it's harder than a paid social network?
John:
Well, I mean, it's, you know, it's risk reward.
John:
Like they went for the riskier play initially that had the bigger potential upside.
John:
And like I said, I think the things they did with it are more interesting experiments than if they had, you know, tried to sell services because they...
John:
And maybe they would have done something more interesting there, but it just seems like it would have been more of the same.
John:
Like, are we over something similar to these other companies, but with different services or whatever, whereas no one tried to make... Well, no one made as successful a sort of Twitter-like application as App.net.
John:
I think, what was the other one?
John:
Tent, it used to be called.
John:
Tentus.
John:
Yeah, they changed the name to something else.
John:
Anyway, like they had a federated system or whatever.
John:
Maybe...
John:
you know that's the thing about leaving this thing running i think tent is still running because it's like not centralized and you know it's called cupcake now or whatever like it you know it'll never die because it never lived right at app.net if it just limps along for years like sleeping who knows it could be like irc other people forget about it until you realize oh yeah irc is still there and it still works and still does what it's supposed to do and especially if they open source everything um
John:
App.net, the protocol and technology could rise again in the distant future.
John:
Stranger things have happened.
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Casey:
All right, so let's talk about one more thing tonight.
Casey:
And this actually broke before the last episode, maybe even the day that we recorded the last episode.
Casey:
We didn't have time to talk about it.
Casey:
And our friend Alan Pike wrote about how in a preview release of Chrome, they've removed the URL bar.
Casey:
or the Omnibar, whatever you call it.
Casey:
And so we'll put the link in the show notes.
Casey:
And basically where currently you have a full board URL and it highlights the top level domain and so on.
Casey:
So it highlights like amazon.com, for example.
Casey:
Well, now what it would be is it would show that you're on amazon.com and that's it.
Casey:
And then everything else is just a search Google box.
Casey:
And the internet seems to be really upset about this.
Casey:
And I got into a couple of conversations on Twitter with a couple of people about this and people who are really fired up and really angry about it.
Casey:
And not Alan.
Casey:
Alan seems to be kind of ambivalent about it from what I recollect from reading this.
Casey:
But anyways, while I don't like it personally, I'm not so sure this is such a terrible idea.
Casey:
And I'm curious to hear what you two think about it.
John:
I saw it come up in my beta because I'm on the beta channel and immediately did.
John:
I should have done this first, but now I've learned that by the time something shows up in the beta channel, there are 8,000 web pages explaining how to turn it off.
John:
So you just got to type Chrome restore address bar and like the number one hit is someone telling you how to do it.
John:
But at this point, I just go immediately to Chrome.
John:
colon double slash flags and then find the little setting that turns it off and do relaunch and i restored it then but like the reason i have to restart as a web developer i need to see the address bar like it's kind of important to see that and i'm assuming they will always include the feature to turn it on because some people are web developers but most people are not and that's where we get into like is it a good idea to hide this to this degree
John:
And I'm not so sure, like not because I think, oh, you always have to show the address and people like I don't think people care about the address.
John:
I don't think people ever even look at it.
John:
And I don't like the idea of people fishing with the things with the big long username with an ad that username looks like a host name and people think they're at Apple dot com.
John:
They're not.
John:
And that's why EV certificates for SSL are good because they put the little green thing like there's a lot of important progress we should make in terms of the UI of highlighting the parts that are important to people and making it not be free form text.
John:
But by the same token, the web works on URLs.
John:
And you may not need to expose all the nitty-gritty details, but there needs to be something up there that not looks like a URL necessarily, but that all the parts of the URL show through in all their glory.
John:
Because...
John:
url design and you know and urls is a thing you can copy and paste out of an area and send around i think is still an important part of the web and like i mean it could work without it i can see a scenario where you have all the same features you don't need to swipe over some text and copy and paste it you can just use a sharing link and say copy url and paste it into an email and then when you paste into the email it could look different and you never need to see those parts but
John:
I think the path of least resistance for this thing that we have, like URLs are not going away and people are going to want to share them over text mediums.
John:
So they have to exist in some form.
John:
So I'm all for stopping all the things that are bad that people do with URLs and pinning down different parts of it.
John:
But I still think you have to be able to deal with it as text, even users who don't know or care what it is, because even those people might want to send an email about it at some point.
Casey:
Yeah, but the problem I have with what you're saying is I don't see any need to look at the full URL outside of when I'm trying to share it.
Casey:
And people in the chat are pointing out the behavior that Chrome is having or will have theoretically is exactly how Safari works in iOS 7 today.
Casey:
So if you look at a website, all you see at the top is the...
Casey:
is the host name and top you know and so case list.com for example and that's it and it's not until you tap in the url bar or if you go to share that you actually see the rest of the url and what i'm saying is i don't think there even needs to necessarily be a tap in the url bar to see the rest of url the only time i think an average person
Casey:
would need to see the URL is just like you said, John, in like a share sheet or something to that effect.
Casey:
Web developers or developers in general absolutely agree with you that, yeah, we're going to want to see it.
Casey:
But your average user, I just don't think it's relevant.
Casey:
And additionally, from anecdotal experience, I can't think of anyone other than my dad, who's pretty geeky, who would ever type in a URL.
Casey:
Most people I know just go to Google to look for what they want.
John:
yeah like i'm not saying it has to remain plain text i mean in the ios situation obviously you do it for space constraints uh i think the ipad i think i don't remember what the ios 7 ipad app looks like but i mean on the phone it makes perfect sense like you don't have room to show all that stuff but like and i'm not saying you need to show it as full bar text but there are portions of it like i would like you know how like sometimes they have something that ends up being raw text but they show for example if it's like a comma separated list but they show those little capsule bubbles because
John:
The theory is that people can deal with those capsule bubbles individually instead of, you know, behind the scenes, it's just comma-separated text.
John:
You talk about it like email?
John:
Yeah, like in the same way that they do with the EVSSL certificates where they show the big green box that says Apple.com, so you can be sure it's from Apple.com.
John:
Like, by all means, turn the address into a series of bits of UI, but I think you'd still want people to be able to, like...
John:
back up one level in the hierarchy like you can by command clicking the title bar in Safari.
John:
I don't want people to be afraid.
John:
I don't want it to become sort of like the thing that you don't touch.
John:
I don't want people to be afraid to go up there and backspace or...
John:
It's not for the average person, but for regular people, there's no reason to shut out more people.
John:
People who are currently comfortable messing with the address bar, who are just on that borderline, locking it down like this will scare them away.
John:
And I think that just is reducing the pool of people who care about URLs.
John:
And that way lies the madness of URLs as generated by terrible web content generators in the early 90s.
John:
Front page URLs for the original... What is it?
John:
The original CityDesk URLs.
John:
Remember those, Marco?
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
All the zeros.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, URL design is part of the web.
John:
And yes, very few users ever touch it, but I don't think it's worth locking it down more.
John:
They're already ignoring it.
John:
Locking it down more doesn't help them.
John:
It's like, well, previously they were screwing things up.
John:
No, they weren't.
John:
They don't even know that thing is up there.
John:
Those people can hide that if they want, right?
John:
But if you're going to have it visible at all...
John:
I would like you to get rid of the bad things that are about the current URL.
John:
You shouldn't be able to fish people with it.
John:
It should be parsed out and made into some kind of UI, but I would like to strike a balance that it still allows it to be piecemeal editable and selectable and manipulable by the people who do care about the edit bar.
John:
And people who don't care about the edit bar, just hide it completely.
John:
Like, don't even include a token for it or anything.
John:
Just make it like it is on iOS.
John:
Make that the default if you want to.
John:
It's just that I think that there's no reason to... There's no reason to scare away the people who are on the borderline now who just tweak it a little bit.
John:
Because I think...
John:
I think that is a reasonable interface.
John:
Like, oh, we don't want people to use a command line or text or whatever.
John:
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 are actually useful for text.
John:
Just think of all the email clients that let you start typing in a to address.
John:
And then we like autocomplete and turn it into a little token.
John:
that is a text interface with augmentation rather than saying oh every time you want to send to somebody you have to open up this widget and scroll through and find the person or something like that we these hybrid interfaces that allow you to type freeform text and also give you you know affordances to quickly turn that into a sort of an immutable capsule so you're not afraid you're going to screw it up or whatever that type of design for the address bar seems appropriate and in the same way that
John:
The text fields for to CC subject in an email client don't go away.
John:
We just make really good versions of those.
John:
And I think that's what the address bar should be is a really good version of a place where people see and manipulate text who care about it.
John:
And if you don't care about it, then yeah, just hide it.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, it's a hard problem because we, you know, we as geeks recognize the significance of URLs and the power of URLs.
Marco:
But, you know, in reality, in real world use, they are a significant usability problem.
Marco:
And they're very confusing to people.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
what Chrome did in this beta.
Marco:
And I've heard from various people on Twitter who have said this is probably not going to stick around.
Marco:
But it was an experiment.
Marco:
But we'll see.
Marco:
I bet it'll get there eventually because it does benefit Google tremendously.
Marco:
But I think it's hard for us to accept, but this is how people use the internet.
Marco:
And not just super novices, almost everyone.
Marco:
And there's lots of problems with URLs like security and, you know, the phishing attempts and stuff like that.
Marco:
But the fact is, showing the little lock icon for SSL pages, showing the big green bar for EV SSL certificates with a company name in it, telling people to look for, you know, make sure you're on PayPal.com before you type in your PayPal password.
Marco:
The fact is that doesn't work.
Marco:
Most people don't check for those things.
Marco:
In practice, these efforts really are not worth a whole lot.
Marco:
We think they're effective.
Marco:
To us, they make sense as nerds, but the vast majority of people don't even look at this stuff.
Marco:
They don't pay attention to URL security.
Marco:
They can't tell whether they're on PayPal or not.
Marco:
If it looks like PayPal, it is PayPal to them.
Marco:
Stuff like that.
Marco:
It's really hard...
Marco:
It's really hard to meaningfully improve URL security.
Marco:
And it's all down to just actual human nature and human behavior.
Marco:
And there's not a lot we can do about that.
John:
You want to be able to tell them, like, people won't do the right thing.
John:
But in the case where someone is asking...
John:
i want to do the right thing tell me what the right thing is if you can't easily describe it to them that's a problem so i think at the very least that the bar should be if someone is on the phone with you and saying i can't telephone on paypal.com if you know what browser they're using you should be able to tell them something quickly instead of telling them scroll really far right in the address bar and make sure there's no at sign because that's just a gigantic username that begins with www.paypal.com or something you know what i mean
John:
Like, if you could tell them, look at the big green thing to say PayPal.com and the Chrome UI, like, that's not nothing, right?
John:
I mean, getting back to how this is good for Google, though, I think that's one of the dangers of this is that, yeah, people use the internet that way, but
John:
For example, when you see a billboard with a URL or something in it, imagine with Google, you know, being evil in the future of saying, even if you type in HTTP colon slash slash triple W dot Apple dot com, we will do something different with that.
John:
We'll never take you to Apple dot com.
John:
Even if you saw that in a magazine ad, even if you saw it on a billboard, everything is a Google search.
John:
And we control like suddenly we control a huge portion of the Internet.
John:
They say Chrome becomes way more popular or whatever.
John:
Like.
John:
you don't want to give the browser vendor so much control.
John:
And there are situations where any, where human beings will have to deal with URLs in a non-electronic form.
John:
And I don't want to scan a QR code.
John:
Right.
John:
So like the paper paper is not going to go away.
John:
And like, I would be, I wouldn't like a situation where no matter what anyone types in that thing, it does a Google search because that, that gives too much control to Google or any, any browser vendor, uh,
John:
I think you need to strike a bounce.
John:
Maybe the current thing is the right bounce.
John:
I didn't use it enough.
John:
I immediately turned it off.
John:
Maybe that is the bounce I'm talking about.
John:
Some people in the chat room are saying it more or less acts the way I'm described.
John:
It's just that it's something to watch for.
John:
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.
Marco:
But and unfortunately, that is how most people use the Internet anyway.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And that's exactly the point I'm driving at is that why stand on tradition?
Casey:
Why not embrace the fact that from what I can tell anyone who wants to find out the website's address, they're not going to think to type in Facebook.com.
Casey:
They're going to just type in Facebook to Google or have a bookmark, perhaps.
Casey:
And that's how they're going to get there.
Casey:
So let's just embrace the fact that the URL doesn't really mean much to anyone but nerds.
John:
But on subsequent visits, if you type APP, it completes the apple.com.
John:
When you hit return, it doesn't do a Google search for apple.com.
John:
It takes you right to apple.com.
John:
I see my parents do this all the time.
John:
Like, I mean, maybe, again, if they change the autocomplete not to behave that way, but if you visit a site frequently and you start to type something, people will figure out that, like...
John:
oh if i just hit return now like it won't go through a google search it will because you go to apple.com constantly or google.com or you know whatever your local newspaper's website is or whatever it will be the first autocomplete completion not the google search for it right if you're going to some random place and you just type some a bunch of stuff then yeah you'll do a search but if it if it matches the dot com that's usually the top thing in in the result and i think people find like that better than going to google and clicking the top result i think they like it saying you know they want to go to denver post to type d e n
John:
And it already has highlighted DenverPost.com and hit return.
John:
They would be annoyed if it went to Google, even if the top hit was DenverPost.com.
John:
They just want to go to Denver Post, right?
John:
And I think bookmarks, nobody uses them anymore.
John:
Bookmark bar things, if people ever figured out how to configure them or someone configures them for them, they use that a lot.
John:
I think there is still a desire to go immediately where they want it to go without going through a search when people know where they want to go.
Casey:
Yeah, that's true.
Casey:
But why couldn't you, in this Omnibar, why couldn't you match against page titles rather than URLs?
John:
Nobody knows what the titles of pages are.
John:
Half the titles are probably the same title.
Marco:
Well, the titles are all spammed up with keyword crap anyway.
Casey:
Breaking news, world news.
Casey:
That's true as well.
Casey:
But, I mean, if you're looking for Apple and you've been to Apple.com in the past, I'm assuming that the title on Apple's landing page is something that says Apple Inc.
Casey:
or whatever.
Casey:
Let me...
John:
Well, the top level domain things that we talked about and laughed about in the last show have not come through and wiped out all sanity and domain names.
John:
So it currently is still a cache and association with like something.com.
John:
People know what .com is.
John:
And the reason they know about it is because they've been seeing it in address bars.
John:
And it is a way, something to hang your head on.
John:
You know, if someone says, oh, you can't, you know, you should check out blah, blah, blah.com.
John:
You know, it's something you should go home and type in your web browser and you know what...
John:
it distinguishes it as like this is the website luckily we've gotten rid of the triple w more or less even casey but like there's there's still something to you know commute not just like reading off billboards but communicating with friends or whatever you don't want to tell someone i'll just type this into your thing and i'm sure it'll be the number one result if you know it's like go to netflix.com you could sign up for netflix
John:
What the hell is Netflix dot com?
John:
It's something you type in an address bar that resolves to a host name.
John:
They don't know the details, but they know like that's different than saying if you just search for Netflix, you'll find it, which is also true.
John:
But communicating in dot coms with each other, advertising them and telling other people about them.
John:
I still think there's value in that.
Marco:
Our final sponsor this week is New Relic.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thanks a lot to New Relic for sponsoring.
Marco:
Once again, go to newrelic.com slash ATP for a 30-day free trial.
Casey:
So I open-sourced my blogging engine during the time between the last episode and today.
Marco:
Does the name of your blogging engine end in lists?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
It's just called camel.
Casey:
Camel-less?
Casey:
No, just camel, which I still don't know how to pronounce the word right, but it's a combination of my first and middle names, portman something or other.
John:
John, it's French, I think.
John:
Well, portmanteau, is that what you're talking about?
John:
I don't know how to pronounce it either.
John:
I think that's it.
Casey:
Well, thank you.
Casey:
Thank you for taking the fall for me this week.
Casey:
Anyways, so there's not really that much to be said here, and I'm actually going to not say much, but unlike usually.
Casey:
But I did open source it.
Casey:
It's on GitHub, and I already got a poll request, which I accepted, which was a one-liner, but it was a one-liner that I didn't think to include myself.
Casey:
which was to set the content type for the RSS feed.
Casey:
But no, it's been an interesting experience.
Casey:
It was very stressful, the thought of open sourcing it, because I kind of wanted to.
Casey:
But I was so scared that...
Casey:
By doing so, everyone will realize that I don't really know anything about Node or Express, and I just kind of hack this together.
Casey:
And it's held together in the same way that MySpace was, as we were talking about earlier.
Casey:
But nobody's really come out of the woodwork to say that I'm completely off the reservation, which is good.
Casey:
And granted, everyone's code...
Casey:
does suck in some way shape or form but uh but no it's been pretty cool i've liked having it up there uh that now the biggest problem i have is that i feel like it's future complete i don't feel like i really want to add anything i've since since last episode i added my uh loose pagination which you can't see yet because i haven't posted enough on my site yet but uh but uh now that it's now i'm like really into it really excited about it but i don't have anything else to do so now i'm like well i guess i need a new project
John:
You tweeted about the line counts, and there was like 400 lines of code, but what were the stats?
Casey:
Let me run it real quick.
Casey:
It's going to take me a second.
Casey:
But what I tweeted was that I had roughly 405 lines.
Casey:
I'm trying to get there right now.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
I had roughly 400 lines of code that I had written.
Casey:
Let's see.
Casey:
Clock...
Casey:
Camel.
Casey:
So let's see.
Casey:
Okay, so 448 lines of code for me right now that I wrote myself.
Casey:
So now I'm going to look at the node modules.
Casey:
So all the third party libraries that I imported, and it is 956 unique files, 94,580 lines of code.
John:
See, now I feel less bad about my ridiculous static content blogging thing because I was going to say, you wrote 400 lines of code and it's like, I don't have 400 lines of code in any single file.
John:
But then, you know, in the Perl world, like, well, not in the Perl world, but in my world, I end up, I like writing frameworks.
John:
Unlike Marco, I have this problem.
John:
I like writing tools.
John:
I like writing frameworks.
John:
So I'm not going to use someone else's framework.
John:
I'm going to write, first step in writing and making a blog is first, write a framework for making web applications.
John:
Second, write a blog using that framework.
John:
Third, you know, like, and so,
John:
i have a tremendous number of lines but i have way less than 95 000 but you know i've essentially made my own in pearl you got to make your own object systems i made my own object system use that object are you really serious what a great language yeah it's great oh that's fantastic yeah that's definitely the best language of all the moronic languages we use oh you can't talk mr javascript yeah the javascript you're making your own object system too so let's not throw stones here
John:
We can make a class-based system out of this prototype-based system.
John:
We'll just... Yeah, anyway.
John:
The amazing thing is that PHP actually has a really good object system.
John:
It's probably the best between these three languages.
John:
Well, the thing... Not to go on a sidebar here, but the thing about Perl is, like, the ability to build your own object system means that people keep making new object systems in Perl.
John:
And it has allowed us to have 5,000 different object systems and sort of, you know...
John:
you know, evolutionary kind of let's, let's converge on something that's good.
John:
So the bad ones go off and die and we get new ones.
John:
Whereas if you have an object system built into a language and that's the only way you can do it, if that object system is bad or becomes bad in the future, you have no choice but to move to another language.
John:
But Pearl, it's like, well, let's throw away that one.
John:
It was crappy.
John:
We'll make a new one and go again and again.
John:
And so,
John:
It is a little test tube for different object-oriented experiments.
John:
And a lot of the experiments that have been done in Perl 5 have led to Perl 6.
John:
But anyway, I feel better about my giant code base because it is still way less lines than all those node modules, even though I happen to write all of them because, you know, I just like making frameworks.
Casey:
Well, so on the one side, I tweeted it expressly because I thought it was remarkable.
Casey:
It was both remarkable that it took only 450 lines to write what I consider to be a full-featured blog engine, at least for the needs that I have.
Casey:
But it's also remarkable that I'm leveraging basically 100,000 lines of other people's code in order to get there.
Casey:
And
Casey:
On the one side, I would tell you that that is a completely terrible idea to use that much code that you have no control over.
Casey:
And granted, it's all open source, but I don't intend to open up any of that source.
Casey:
But on the other side of the coin, most of this code, especially the Node community, seems to be very into testing.
Casey:
Let's show what the test coverage is, how many of the tests are passing as of right now.
Casey:
And so because of that...
Casey:
I would argue that using all of this code is like how Marco talks about using MySQL because he's not the biggest user of MySQL.
Casey:
And MySQL has been proven, it's been tested, a million zillion people have used it, and we know it's solid.
Casey:
And maybe that's not true of every package that I've chosen, but nevertheless, I got to assume that most of them are pretty well tested, pretty robust, and I really shouldn't have to worry about them.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
Like I said, half of me is freaking out about using 100,000 lines of other people's code.
Casey:
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.
John:
No, you're supposed to be doing that.
John:
Everyone is using that.
John:
That's not even the beginning of the count of number of lines of other people's code you're using to run your blog.
John:
And that's how everything works.
John:
Like, I'm not saying it is a bad thing.
John:
It's just like, you know, in fact, I would say that's a good measure of the health of the JavaScript ecosystem is like you only had to write the code that was
John:
relevant to the thing you were trying to make.
John:
Yes, exactly.
John:
Everything else, you could use a library that was reasonably well-known, that you didn't have to hunt around for something.
John:
There was something suitable for your needs that seemed like it was reasonably well-supported.
John:
These are all good things.
John:
I was just...
John:
When you had said it was 400 lines of code, I was like, wow, maybe he's getting a lot more done with a lot less lines of code.
John:
But then at the top of your thing, you have 8,000 require statements.
John:
I'm like, oh, OK.
John:
That makes sense.
John:
Some of these libraries I recognize.
Casey:
It's not 8,000.
Casey:
How many is it?
Casey:
It's like 10-ish.
John:
Yeah, like your little comment for statics.
John:
Wrong language, Casey.
Casey:
I put it in air quotes.
Casey:
Yeah, the scare quotes, yeah.
Casey:
Would you relax?
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Igloo, New Relic, and NatureBox.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Margo and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N
Casey:
We talk about the format of your flower box comments here too.
John:
Have you not decided about how you're going to handle things in JavaScript?
John:
It's clear that you've adopted the JavaScript naming conventions and capitalization, but your little box thing is misshapen.
John:
What's wrong with them?
John:
Is that a format you use in C++ or is that a special little thing that you made just for JavaScript?
Casey:
I mean, I've done it occasionally in the past.
Casey:
So in C Sharp, I would use regions, which basically is code folding, the same way that you would use pragmas in Objective-C.
Casey:
And that's what I would do there as well.
Casey:
Well, it's a little bit less cold folding.
Casey:
God, I can't pronounce that.
Casey:
Code folding in Objective-C and more about the dropdown at the top of the editor.
Casey:
But anyways.
John:
That's for IDE integration, right?
John:
It's not a feature of the language.
John:
You're just...
Casey:
Yes, yes, yes.
Casey:
Exactly what you just said.
Casey:
But for this, you know, it's 450 lines, and I just wanted something that would catch my eye as I'm scrolling down the file, and so I thought a big three-line comment would do the trick.
John:
Hideous.
Casey:
Well, what would you have done?
John:
Like, can we count the ways that this is bad?
John:
Maybe it's just the... The flower box or my code in general?
John:
No, the flower box, right?
Okay.
John:
It's not symmetrical because you've got the beginning end of the comments at angles to each other, upper left, lower right.
John:
So right away, it's all oddly shaped.
John:
The sides of the box, because of the way the font spacing is, there's giant gaps in the side, but really tight things in the top.
John:
And then inside it, you have some text that's all caps.
John:
Like it's shouting at me.
John:
And the width, is it 80 columns?
John:
No.
John:
Is it like 60?
John:
I don't even know.
John:
It's just randomly.
John:
It's wide enough.
John:
It's sufficiently wide.
John:
It's randomly sized.
John:
I give a thumbs down to this format for writing comments.
John:
John, I really think we have to see your code.
John:
i do too because i don't has the world ever seen your code and there's tons there's tons of stuff on cpan it's hideous feel free to go look at it and laugh uh anything recent though uh no i mean like i update the things on cpan uh frequently so like if you look at the date will be like 2013 2014 but the vast majority of the code was written a long time but that's not why it's hideous like
John:
It's just, I mean, if you look at what it does, it's crazy.
John:
You know, I mean, this is code I originally wrote in the 90s.
John:
Like, so I, you know, I will put it up against anyone else's code they wrote in the 90s.
John:
But I look at it now and it's very bad.
John:
But, you know, aesthetically and formatting wise, I'm very particular about that.
John:
I like my, you know, I like my equal signs to line up in when there's a bunch of assignments with each other.
John:
I'm very sensitive with the formatting of comments.
John:
So they look nice and don't add visual noise.
John:
And
John:
I get upset when there's no sane way to indent stuff, which is probably why I would go insane with Objective-C, because sometimes it's like, look, this is not going to work out for anybody.
John:
These are really short, and these are really long, and no matter how you line it up, it looks weird.
Marco:
Yeah, it is tough.
Marco:
If you're a whitespace formatting purist, Objective-C basically has no standard that's good, that's actually useful.
Marco:
I try to wedge...
Marco:
K&RC style into it, which does not work gracefully, but it works well enough for me.
Marco:
But it's weird.
John:
Yeah, JavaScript has some similar problems in that there are some constructs that are just always ugly, and there's no system for formatting them that will... You can't... C and simpler languages just have nicer rules, especially when the pieces you're moving around are of similar size, whereas if you're in a language where the size of these things can vary wildly, like really long class names and really short parameter names and really short class names, it's just...
John:
And square brackets versus curlies versus parens, and just no decision works.
John:
I get upset about that.
John:
I like my code to be aesthetically nice.
Marco:
Well, why don't you use Python?
Marco:
Isn't it part of the language?
John:
Mm-hmm.
John:
Yeah, so then everything can have underscores in front of it, and it'll just be stabbing me in the eyes all the time.
John:
Good grief.
John:
Awesome.
John:
Double underscores before and after.
John:
That will show that this is a special method with meaning to the language.
Casey:
The funny thing about this code, my code in camel, is that I tried my darndest.
Casey:
I think I succeeded in doing the thing that I hate about.
Casey:
so much in Objective-C and C Sharp, which is when you have, say, like an if statement, having the opening brace bracket, brace, brace, on the same line as the if statement, I would prefer them so that the braces are all in the same column, and JavaScript is not that way.
Casey:
And so, you know, like in a function declaration is another example.
Casey:
So function, all post-paginated, you know, some parameters, open curly.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
new line and oh it drives me crazy yeah that's that's knrc style like i've been doing that for a while it's the worst i hate it but it's the javascript way and i'm trying to trying to learn yeah no i i if you look at all the pearl code that they just posted in the chat room like
John:
That was my chosen style, you know, always matched up vertically, opening, closing curlies in any language that I did in any C-like language.
John:
But in my job for the past five years, I've been doing it the other way.
John:
And I have to admit that my fingers have been rewired.
John:
It's unfortunate.
John:
So now when I have to go edit my own code and like, you know, to fix bugs in the C-band modules or whatever, I find myself doing it the other way.
John:
And it's like...
John:
yeah it's you know it's a lot of his way yeah i still maintain that that other way is better but i mean it's not better enough that the way where they vertically align yeah like i but it was not something i was going to argue like it's not better enough to make a difference so you know god you guys are nuts
Casey:
Oh, this code that I'm looking at of yours from Rose is absolutely terrible.
Casey:
Also, aesthetically, because, well, in the languages I'm used to, if is not a function call.
Casey:
It should be if space open parentheses.
John:
Yes.
John:
That is an example of a style that I've changed.
John:
I don't do that anymore.
John:
I put spaces after the if.
John:
I don't know why I didn't put, and spaces after the my.
John:
Like, there's many things that I look in this code that I do not do anymore at all.
John:
what about the not operator uh if space not no i don't i don't i don't put a space after the not the not is stuck to the thing that it's negating i agree oh that's weird yeah so it'd be if space open paren not well look look we we may differ over these small things here and there but at least we can agree that we're not animals like the people who don't put space around binary operators like those people should just all be pushed off a cliff i don't even know what
John:
And there are people out there who will defend that.
John:
And it's like, what?
John:
You know, everyone can be, oh, braces here, braces there, you know, space after the, you know, exclamation point.
John:
But come on, space around binary operators?
John:
Like, that's just disgusting.
John:
Like, just jam everything up again.
John:
And there are people out, you think they don't exist.
John:
I don't know if you have met, I've met them, these people who were like, no, no, there should not be spaces around the equal sign.
John:
Are you crazy?
John:
Plus, equals, minus, they just jam it all together.
John:
And, you know, it doesn't matter what the context is.
John:
And those people are just...
John:
I don't know what happened in their life that made them do that.
Marco:
You ever see PHP code?
Marco:
So PHP had this stupid idea of let's make the string concatenation operator the dot, which is also used for other things, but we'll make that the string concatenation operator.
Marco:
Where do you think they got that from?
John:
Is that the Perl way?
John:
Yes.
John:
Stupid.
John:
That's not a compliment.
John:
Perl probably got it from awk.
John:
It's great.
John:
It's much better than plus, as you'll learn when you try to do stuff in JavaScript with it.
John:
Is this a number or a string?
John:
You'll find out.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
We'll wing it.
Marco:
yeah but yeah so that was oh i also recently discovered the whole thing about like how javascript um doesn't really have a uh a good integer type like like brent simmons tweeted or blogged about everything's floats yeah welcome to javascript yeah so you have like you have basically the equivalent of i think 53 bit integers at best so yes if you were using it 64s in your app yep good luck at the javascript
John:
Yeah, no, this is one of the many reasons that JavaScript sucks and one of the many things that people who tried to write serious applications in JavaScript very soon discovered.
John:
And by the time they discovered it, they were like, it's a formal part of the language we screwed.
Marco:
I just think it's so funny that, like, you know, just like when Gruber and Brent Simmons did that video for Microsoft, and I said, like, wouldn't it be funny if you went back to, like, you know, 2006 Gruber and showed him this?
Marco:
You know, wouldn't it be funny if you went back to 2006 programmers and said, in 2014, the cool new hip language everyone's writing everything in is JavaScript?
Casey:
If you told me in 2013 that I would take this on for fun, I would have laughed in your face.
Casey:
I absolutely would have laughed in your face.
John:
I mean, like so many other things, like Objective-C for that matter, people are excited by what they can do with it.
John:
Web applications are cool.
John:
If you can write a web application, modern browsers run JavaScript really well.
John:
Everybody has them.
John:
Suddenly, JavaScript, this crappy language, you can do cool things with it.
John:
People may hate Objective-C, but what you can do with Objective-C, you can write an iOS app.
John:
iOS apps are cool.
John:
That's appealing.
John:
So that's what it all comes down to.
John:
If JavaScript did not exist in browsers, it would be about as popular as Perl.
Bye.