Took the train downtown this afternoon. Nice to take it on an off-day when not much is going on in Austin, so it’s easy to get a table to work.
Took the train downtown this afternoon. Nice to take it on an off-day when not much is going on in Austin, so it’s easy to get a table to work.
Congrats @hartlco on shipping Icro 1.1! Nice update to this beautiful third-party Micro.blog app for iOS.
Late but hopefully worth the wait, this week’s episode of Core Intuition starts with a discussion of sandboxing in Mojave, then we take the rest of the show to discuss Twitter, blogging, and the role of social networks.
Lots of new people joined Micro.blog this week. Welcome! iPhone folks who were Tweetbot fans, I recommend checking out Icro too. @hartlco has done great work on the app.
If you’re in the Minneapolis area, there’s a Micro.blog lunch meetup at Common Roots Cafe today, noon - 1:30pm. @macgenie and @patrickrhone will be there!
Expecting a lot of new Micro.blog users over the next few weeks. This week: Twitter mismanages how to deal with Alex Jones and Infowars. Next week: Twitter streaming API gets shut down for third-party developers.
On the new Timetable: an update on microcast improvements, plans for Sunlit, and more thoughts on recent articles about curation on the big social networks.
This week we rolled out a few improvements to podcast hosting on Micro.blog. I talked about some of it on yesterday’s episode of Timetable. Here are the changes:
Speaking of podcasts, check out the latest episode the Supertop podcast. In addition to updates about their podcast client Castro, they cover my blog post about Anchor and other thoughts on what impact Anchor might have on the podcast industry.
Two quick follow-ups on my post yesterday about Apple removing Infowars from their podcast directory, and related actions by Facebook and YouTube. First, Alan Jacobs summed it up really well on his microblog:
What Alex Jones is being deprived of is amplification. Not the right and freedom to speak, but multiple megaphones.
And I love this quote from the Onion:
What we see here really could be the beginning of a slippery slope towards a horrific ordeal in which any citizen who violates hate speech policies or blatantly spreads lies that cause other individuals to receive death threats will immediately be discredited and, perhaps, even asked to host their demonstrably false content on a website that they actually own.
The best satire is often true. We’re seeing a major shift in how mainstream users view the role of these huge social networks.
BuzzFeed has an article about Apple removing Infowars from the Apple podcast directory:
Apple’s decision to remove all episodes of Jones’ popular show — rather than just specific offending episodes — is one of the largest enforcement actions intended to curb conspiratorial news content by a technology company to date. Apple did not host Jones’ shows, but it offered an index that allowed anyone with an iPhone to find and subscribe to them.
This is the way the web is supposed to work. Alex Jones can continue to host his podcast and his fans can subscribe manually. But Apple has no obligation to index it in their podcast directory and make it easy for people to find it.
More from the New York Times today:
Some tech companies, including Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube, had appeared reluctant to remove Mr. Jones’s pages entirely and were instead taking action against specific videos.
Google has now decided to terminate his YouTube channel. And:
Tech companies have long been wary of censoring speech, but an increasing amount of hate speech and misinformation — and louder protests from critics — have forced them to take action. Moves by the tech companies against Infowars and its peers have spurred a debate over free speech.
Facebook and YouTube are conflicted about how to handle this because their model is wrong. Unlike podcasts and blogs, which can live at a custom domain and move between hosting companies, videos on Facebook and YouTube are served directly on those platforms. If the videos are blocked, especially by YouTube which controls nearly all video on the web, there’s no obvious migration path away.
We’ve also seen this hesitation to curate with Twitter. My post about pulling the weeds covers the same issue.
Over the last dozen years we have let massive centralized social networks gain far too much power. We started paying the price with the 2016 election and the fallout continues today. The solution is clear: post to your own site, encourage other people to get their own domain name, and support smaller social networks like Micro.blog that are empowered by design to curate.
Posted a new episode of Timetable about podcasting improvements and follow-up discussion from the Supertop podcast.
When I started using Twitter again for cross-posting, I made a few rules for myself so that I wouldn’t get pulled back into the platform. One is that I let Micro.blog post everything for me automatically, and I only favorite or reply to people when I get asked a specific question. I don’t follow anyone.
But every once in a while I feel compelled to jump in to a discussion. In reply to Joe Cieplinski’s blog post today about Apple having all the leverage, I posted this tweet:
The sad part of this is that developers actually do have leverage, but we’re just not organized and can’t agree on what is fair. It would take the whole community coming together. Most developers think that Apple’s tight control over app distribution is fine. (Spoiler: I don’t.)
Long-time readers of my blog will notice that I complain about Apple as often as I praise them. I hold Apple to a very high standard because they’ve earned it through great design and products.
I know Micro.blog isn’t perfect yet. There are many things we’d like to improve. But I’m proud that the values for the platform are consistent with everything I’ve been blogging about for 15+ years. Complaints I have against the power of big companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter… The entire design of Micro.blog’s architecture is to do the opposite of what those companies do.
Catching up on the Distributed Web Summit. Great lightning talk from @t introducing the IndieWeb. Here’s a link directly to the start of his talk in the YouTube stream.
We just posted Core Intuition 339: Apple services revenue, the App Store’s 30% cut, @danielpunkass getting back into iOS development, blogging features, and more.
Posted a new Timetable with a quick follow-up on the Facebook API and recapping last night’s Homebrew Website Club.
Jason Snell posted about Apple’s record services revenue:
As someone who’s interested in products, I find the focus on Services revenue to be a bit dispiriting. I get excited at the prospect of new products and seeing how consumers are accepting or rejecting products in the market. But the discussion of Services, especially in a financial context, is essentially a conversation about how Apple can grind more money out of every single person who uses an iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
Back in 2011 I explored the App Store’s 30% cut from the perspective of supporting free app downloads:
I’ve argued that Apple’s 30% tax is about growing that to significant profit at the expense of developers, but in the back of my head I’ve also been concerned that maybe it’s just to keep the App Store from falling into the red. Maybe they are really struggling under the weight of what they created, and long app review times and lack of focus around the Mac App Store launch are just symptoms of that.
In hindsight, 7 years later with $9.5 billion in services revenue per quarter, my attempt in that post to reconcile Apple’s cut seems like a stretch. To echo what Jason says above, I still believe that services should complement Apple’s core products.
iCloud storage is there to make the experience of saving files or backing up your iPhone better, not to nickel-and-dime users who need more storage for a backup. The App Store is there to make discovering apps easier, not to turn developers into a profit center. The more these parts of Apple’s business dominate their revenue, the more divorced their product planning becomes from what users and developers need.
$9.5 billion. As I’m posting this their stock price just pushed the company to $1 trillion in market cap. Many developers can’t make enough to support even a 1-person indie business full time.
As an exclamation point on the discussion around services revenue, Apple has also cancelled their affiliate program. Stephen Hackett sums up what I think many people in the community are thinking:
Payments made to people linking to apps with affiliate links comes out of Apple’s share of revenue generated by app sales and in-app purchases. How much money it costs them is unknown, but the idea that the reasons behind this move could be financial in nature feels pretty gross. Apple is a for-profit company, and it has no bottom-line reason to keep this program open, but sometimes doing the right thing comes with a cost.
And John Voorhees on Apple’s statement that the App Store no longer needs affiliate links:
If that’s the case, it’s short-sighted, but it’s certainly Apple prerogative to run its programs as it sees fit. Still, it’s not the right way to address the publications, developers, and others that have generated millions of dollars of referrals over the years in exchange for a modest 7% cut.
I’ve argued since the first days of the App Store that Apple’s 30% cut is too high. This tax on developers is completely out of line with the value that Apple provides. The fact that Apple is bringing in so much money from services — nearly as much as the Mac and iPad combined — shouldn’t sit well with developers who are still struggling. It’s even worse now without the affiliate program, which developers could use to recoup some of that 30%.
Note what I’m not saying. I’m not saying that Apple should lower the rate to match Stripe’s 3%, or that Apple should operate the App Store at a loss. It costs real money to maintain the App Store infrastructure and commit to featuring apps every day. But there should be a middle-ground that gives developers the best shot at a sustainable business.
Introducing a 15% tier for in-app purchase subscriptions (after the first year) was a good start. Most developers thought we’d never see that. We should be calling for an across-the-board 15% rate for all App Store transactions. It’s the right thing for Apple to do. As Apple’s services revenue continues to grow — and the TV streaming service will only add to that — the time to make this change is now.
Good afternoon, Austin! Reminder that Homebrew Website Club is at Mozart’s Coffee, 6:30pm - 7:30pm. I’ll be wearing my new IndieWeb t-shirt.
Nick Heer has a comprehensive post on how web pages have become so slow despite huge improvements in our internet speeds. He covers JavaScript tracking, Google’s AMP, and a CNN web page that takes 30 seconds to load:
The vast majority of these resources are not directly related to the information on the page, and I’m including advertising. Many of the scripts that were loaded are purely for surveillance purposes: self-hosted analytics, of which there are several examples; various third-party analytics firms like Salesforce, Chartbeat, and Optimizely; and social network sharing widgets. They churn through CPU cycles and cause my six-year-old computer to cry out in pain and fury. I’m not asking much of it; I have opened a text-based document on the web.
As a contrast, consider my blog post from yesterday. All requests for the page (1 for HTML, 3 for CSS files, and an image) total only 34 K. The page loads completely in 1/3 of a second.
This is how most web pages should be. Lightweight, fast. It’s how all Micro.blog-hosted sites are designed. If you’ve let your blog become too bloated with JavaScript includes or images, it’s worth some time to trim out extra resources that don’t really matter.
Homebrew Website Club tomorrow! 6:30pm at Mozart’s Coffee. We’ll keep it informal as we get back into holding this meetup. Time to review recent IndieWeb events, Micro.blog progress, or talk about updates to our sites.
Last week I added a new archive page to Micro.blog-hosted sites. It includes dates and the first part of each post, marked up with Microformats. Jonathan LaCour used this to write a script that parses the HTML looking for posts on today’s date in previous years, then pulls the full content for each post it finds and assembles them together.
But it gets better. After Jonathan mentioned that it took quite a while to parse the large HTML file, I added a JSON Feed version of the archive page. If you’ve posted to Micro.blog since yesterday, this has been created for you at your-domain.com/archive/index.json. Jonathan updated the script to use the JSON Feed and it can now return the “on this day” posts very quickly, with no configuration needed because it’s all driven from a JavaScript include on your blog.
You can see this in action on my own blog’s on this day page. It works for any Micro.blog-hosted blog by pasting in a few lines of HTML from the Micro Memories project on GitHub.
This is the potential for indie blogging and simple formats. Adding a feature to Micro.blog-hosted blogs enabled a new tool I hadn’t even thought of. There was some discussion in the IndieWeb chat, but it took very little coordination because all of this is built with web stuff, not proprietary APIs.
You can add any Micro.blog timeline to Feedbin and it looks really good, with profile icons next to each post and inline photos. Check out this screenshot over on Feedbin’s blog.
On my almost-daily podcast, Timetable, today I talk about rebuilding the Facebook integration in Micro.blog and getting organized.
Monday morning, lots of phone calls. Not my favorite thing.
It’s a little late this week, but we published Core Intuition 338 today. Thanks for listening!
Loved the new episode of Internet Friends. Covers a lot: @drewcoffman coming to terms with using Twitter too much, how the user base has changed, what we need from a community, staying creative, blogging, and how @ablaze is using Micro.blog.