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European Tech Analysis

Facebooks ‘Removing The Ability To Pull Friends’ Data’

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Facebooks ‘Removing The Ability To Pull Friends’ Data’

The why part here is important:

“Removing The Ability To Pull Friends’ Data
Facebook announced plans to stop letting developers pull data from users’ friends, such as their photos, birthdays, status updates, and checkins.

Why? Because the idea that anyone could give someone else’s data to a developer without their permission was always kind of shady. This should boost a perception of privacy on the Facebook platform, but also deny developers the ability to build apps like photo album browsers, search engines, calendars, and location maps that could compete with Facebook’s own products.”

Privacy leads to less data portability which in turn leads to potential monopoly rents.

Twitter’s Marketing Problem

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Twitter’s Marketing Problem

Ben Thompson:

“What Twitter has is a marketing problem. To be clear, while advertising is a part of marketing, marketing is about much more than advertising. It’s also about understanding your market, what their needs are, and how your product meets those needs. I continue to see little evidence Twitter has any idea, and I think their accidental success is largely to blame.”

Twitter was more or less an happy accident. Accidents don’t breed strategy, it seems.

(Twitter also is special in another regard: It is a simple product, meaning it always had few but important features. Every small change can bring with it significant consequences. Doesn’t make it any easier.)

Monthly Apple Users

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Monthly Apple Users

Horace Dediu:

“This view shows just how different the economic value of users can be. In the case of Apple, it’s growing its user base at (literally) exponential rates. The revenues per user does, understandably, decline. This is because new/later users don’t spend as much as early users. There might be some stability toward the later stages of adoption in revenue per user. The other point about iTunes data is how the mix of revenues has shifted from music to Apps and Services pointing out how users can be migrated across revenue sources over time.

In the case of Amazon it’s growing its user base at a linear rate (note equation). The revenue per account remains very steady however.”

Twitter and Facebook indirectly exposed to any changes to in-app purchases

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Twitter and Facebook indirectly exposed to any changes to in-app purchases

Ben Thompson:

“While Facebook’s ad network is, I’m guessing, broader than just app installs, the reality is that app installs dominate Facebook’s mobile revenue as well. And, the primary types of apps that advertise for installs are free-to-play games, looking for the specific customer type who will potentially spend hundreds of dollars on in-app purchases.

This, then, raises a frightening specter for both Twitter and Facebook: they are indirectly exposed to any changes Apple or Google may make in their policy with regards to in-app purchases”

Fascinating point.

Toughest nut for Google to crack is not penetration but emerging market monetization

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Toughest nut for Google to crack is not penetration but emerging market monetization

Horace Dediu:

“The disproportionate weight of US/UK income and the low growth of income from rest-of-world vs. the far faster growth of usage outside the US/UK means that the toughest nut for Google to crack is not penetration but emerging market monetization.

The disparity is enormous. US/UK revenue is on average $86/user/yr (2012) and rising. The rest of the world only manages $12/user/yr. That Rest Of World includes many wealthy countries such as all of Europe and Japan. So the problem for Google is that it has an order of magnitude less income per user in the part of the internet which remains unpenetrated and the trends show that they are not narrowing the gap.”

The playbook: why Amazon’s Fire TV is a guaranteed hit | The Verge

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The playbook: why Amazon’s Fire TV is a guaranteed hit | The Verge

The Verge:

“Amazon doesn’t innovate by crafting new product categories, like Apple does. It also doesn’t make much money selling its hardware. Instead, it takes all the data it gathers as the world’s biggest online retailer, breaks down exactly what’s available and what consumers want, then produces a piece of hardware that it can sell cheaply in order to bring consumers into its ecosystem. Just as Netflix created House of Cards to satisfy the particular tastes of its viewers, Amazon made the Fire TV because millions of buyers are already looking for it. To understand the Fire TV is to take one glance at Amazon’s best-selling electronics list: two Roku models, Google’s Chromecast, and the Apple TV are the only non-Amazon devices in the top 10. The world’s largest online retailer just took on all three.”

The decline of the mobile web

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The decline of the mobile web

cdixon:

People are spending more time on mobile vs desktop:

image

And more of their mobile time using apps, not the web:

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This is a worrisome trend for the web. Mobile is the future. What wins mobile, wins the Internet. Right now, apps are winning and the web is losing.

Moreover, there are…

Hallelujah, there’s a $30 bluetooth module for wearables on Kickstarter

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Hallelujah, there’s a $30 bluetooth module for wearables on Kickstarter

Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOm:

As Om Malik and I discussed on a podcast a while back, wearables are not a tech product. They are a fashion product with some tech inside. Thus they need to be cheap and varied so a wide array of people can match them to their outfits. To that end I wonder if the focus on wearables from tech firms like Motorola, Google and Intel really makes sense.

The guts may come from a tech giant, but the actual product should come from the fashion or design world. Even though the tech world is getting design religion, I can’t see it overtaking Gucci or Prada when it comes to fashion.

That is exactly right. It also begs the question wether a more modular approach to wearables would make more sense then what we see now as smartwatches.

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According to several people I’ve spoken to, Facebook found during testing that users who were switched to the new News Feed tended to spend less time on the site. Specifically, they spent less time browsing areas outside of the News Feed, like their friends’ profiles and event pages, which are currently some of the most visited parts of Facebook. After an investigation into the problem by Facebook’s data team, they discovered that the new News Feed was performing too well. It was performing so well from a design standpoint that users no longer felt the need to browse areas outside of the News Feed as often, so they were spending less time on the site. Unfortunately, this change in user behavior led to fewer advertisement impressions, which led, ultimately, to less revenue.

Dustin Curtis in Whatever goes up, that’s what we do

Fascinating if true. Facebooks once famously introduced the news feed despite its function of decreasing page views in the short term. German competitors like studiVZ did not introduce something similar because they didn’t want to lose any precious page impression.

If Facebook reached a point where they don’t innovate on the news feed because it is too successful it is time to worry about the company.

It makes them ripe for disruption. Especially now with the shift to mobile where the greatest feed will win.

https://newnetland.com/2014-03-according-to-several-people-ive-spoken-to/