52: Necessary But Not Sufficient
14 Feb 2014Gesture explanations, usability ceilings, Flappy Bird, Comcast, and beacon.plumbing.
Episode Description:
- Facebook Paper's gesture usability, in-app tutorial videos, and the design challenge of gestural interface.
- RootMetrics testing real-world wireless speeds.
- Despite constant effort to improve usability, what if computers just aren't for everyone? (There's a similar long-standing debate with programming. See 4GL.)
- The Flappy Bird saga: Whether it's a good game and why the developer pulled it. (See also: Super Hexagon.)
- Is free-with-in-app-purchase ruining the game industry?.
- Comcast buying Time Warner and the implications on U.S. broadband competition.
- The stupid new top-level domains (TLDs).
- iBeacons and Bluetooth LE in stores and .museums.
- After-show: Bionic on new TLDs (at 26:50) and whether the TLDs are just a scam by ICANN, Patreon, and yet more on the Mac Pro.
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Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m drinking tea tonight. I feel like Dignation.
⏹️ ▶️ John What? That’s like, it’s not, I know it’s not actually the 90s,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s like the 90s equivalent of Internet World. Dignation? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So you guys really, I mean, Casey, you really honestly don’t know what Dignation is? Or was?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve heard of it, but I never paid attention to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use a computer in 2006? Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Have we not already completely established that both of us, myself especially, have no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knowledge of anything that either of you considers worthwhile.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I guess, but I mean you’re at least a nice guy. I
⏹️ ▶️ John thought we established it was like me and then you two in another camp over there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Dignation was a podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, let’s talk about Facebook Paper.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I talked about it last week. There was the startup movie and the crash and all those bad things and we talked more about the
⏹️ ▶️ John app itself. But I hadn’t really used it for more than a couple seconds. So after
⏹️ ▶️ John the podcast, or sometime in the past week, I tried to use it some more, and I’m flipping around and doing
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. And it keeps interrupting me with like video
⏹️ ▶️ John and audio instructions to tell me what I should do on any given screen. Like it’s bad enough when you get the
⏹️ ▶️ John coach marks, you know, like the like the iPhoto style thing or whatever, or sometimes on startup, and sometimes at the
⏹️ ▶️ John hit of a button, but they’ll show sorts of like magic marker kind of drawings with arrows. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John someone wrote on your screen, like it’s a whiteboard and Comic Sans text telling you like click over here and tap
⏹️ ▶️ John over there. This is worse because it’s audio. It’s like, you’re sitting there trying to use your thing and someone starts talking
⏹️ ▶️ John to you and this little animation comes on the screen, swipe to the right to get to the next thing. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, all right, whatever. And you don’t know what to do to make it go away because there’s no X or maybe there is, I didn’t see it. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John do I have to do what it’s telling me? But eventually it goes away. I’m like, okay, yeah, I’ll start using this. go to the next screen, it says, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John move this up for like, no, stop talking to me. Stop. It’s, I know, it’s trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John be helpful. But now I think it’s over the line of like, it may be someone would find
⏹️ ▶️ John a startup animation or movie interesting or charming for the very first time you launch the app and never see it again.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if it’s like, there’s like a pause, it’s like now you get to use the app, and you start using it. And then it says,
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, I’m still here, this disembodied voice in these animations. And then it goes away again. And you keep
⏹️ ▶️ John using the app. And then you’re on another new screen and and the thing pops up, that really, really bothered me. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that is, it’s trying to be helpful, but it’s failing. It’s like the worst
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of help. If I had asked for that, if I had asked for a guided tour, sure, but if I’m just, if I think
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve passed through the front door or the splash screen, and now I’m really using the app and it keeps interrupting me,
⏹️ ▶️ John no good. So I give that a big thumbs down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems like these, I mean, we’re in this era now of these very highly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco progressive experimental gesture-based interfaces on so many apps, really mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on iOS, let’s be honest, but you know, so many iOS apps, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of feel like, you know, gestural interfaces are really appealing to designers because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can look amazing, they can be really cool, users who get used to them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can love them, but it’s it’s really really hard to have any kind of affordances that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also look good and that are discoverable. And so you end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up needing things like this on any… like, you know, people… universally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve heard people love paper. Well, this paper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They love the other one, kind of, and the last one they never heard of. But they love this one, the Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. And a lot of that is because it has this, like, new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experimental, you know, progressive gestural interface, but if you have to tell people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how to use it with these things, like, to me that’s just so annoying. It’s such a failure of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design, really. And, you know, I wonder, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are periods in software fashion where you can point to really tacky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that were that kind of, like, were iconic of that era, like the flash intro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco page on websites you know or in this or clippy in Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Office and I wonder if this this is that thing for our current era
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like that the stupid overlay that you have to show or little tutorial videos and a little little intro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you have to show on on gesture based iOS apps because nobody could figure out if we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking at them what to do and I wonder if we’re ever gonna move past that I mean this is this is a big problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in all gesture interfaces because… and it’s just like keyboard shortcuts. Gestures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are just as discoverable as keyboard shortcuts for the most part. Although actually in some ways they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit less, but because there’s no there’s no list. At least keyboard shortcuts you can like open
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the menus and you can eventually some people figure out that those little things next to the commands tell you the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard shortcuts. Anyway, so you know I wonder if we’re gonna move past
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this really and how long will it be until we look at an app like this that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so like, you know, too cleverly designed for its own good almost. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so different from what we’ve had before that it has to have all these overlays and these help dialogues, which we’ve seen, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paper’s not the first thing to do, as we’ve seen this a lot in the last few years, but it just seems like a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad hack. It seems like a really terrible design flaw to have to require these
⏹️ ▶️ John think paper’s the first one to interrupt me. Like I’m used to either having it be something you go through
⏹️ ▶️ John on initial launch or having it be something you ask for on demand. I’m not used to thinking I’m through
⏹️ ▶️ John with that part of the first launch experience, proceeding to use the app and then having it come
⏹️ ▶️ John back unprompted and say, I’ve got to tell you something else now and then having it go away again and then
⏹️ ▶️ John having it come back like that. It’s not even so much the audio and the video that is grading. It’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the idea that you are never free of it. Like I don’t know how long it goes on. Does it keep reminding you? When does it decide
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’ve that I know that you swipe up to do this thing or swipe left and right to do that thing that that’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John But for the gestural you eyes, I think one of the problems I don’t think paper really solves
⏹️ ▶️ John this is you really need to have some kind of model
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t necessarily have to be physical model, but it has to be a model that matches up with most of your users mentally
⏹️ ▶️ John where the motions mean something or can have some sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John connection. And it’s really difficult to do that. I mean, you can see it in your flipboard or in paper, any of the
⏹️ ▶️ John other apps. So paper like left and right is how you go through things. And that’s like, all
⏹️ ▶️ John right, so they lined up left to right, and you go from side to side. That’s that in itself is already a little weird, because most of us are used
⏹️ ▶️ John to vertical scrolling, but scrolling, but okay, I can kind of handle that. But then they have the thing where like folds over itself when you push
⏹️ ▶️ John upwards to see like, if you want to see more on this flip out, like this little panel folds down, and there’s no sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of analog in real life, certainly not in the physical world, and not in any computer you eyes that would indicate to you
⏹️ ▶️ John that that is a memorable motion for like, Oh, push up, push down with my thumb that does that. Uh, you
⏹️ ▶️ John really need to have some kind of connection to hang on to. The only way, the only way you can get away with
⏹️ ▶️ John not doing that is if it’s not people use obsessively and constantly and they’ll just learn them because you use
⏹️ ▶️ John it all the time. And maybe Facebook has that going for that. People are gonna use it all the time that eventually those motions will just become second nature.
⏹️ ▶️ John Kind of like in your favorite twitter rap, everybody knows is which way slide to
⏹️ ▶️ John see the conversation is and which way slide to reply is. And it’s different in different Twitter apps, and whichever one you use all the time, you eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John just get used to it. But it really helps to have a physical model, kind of like the webOS cards
⏹️ ▶️ John metaphor or the iOS 7 task switcher, where
⏹️ ▶️ John you can kind of envision them as individual entities that you can throw off the screen or something like that, some kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of thing to hang your hat on. Because otherwise, imagine if every app was like paper. I think eventually you’d get confused,
⏹️ ▶️ John and your thumb would be like, oh, I thought it was slide left, but it’s slide right. And you don’t want to have to think about it on a conscious
⏹️ ▶️ John level. And you’re like, what is slide up in this app? Does that show more detail? Or is that get rid of this item? And how do I
⏹️ ▶️ John get back to where I was? Is that slide to the left? Or do I pull down? And you only have a few axes to work with.
⏹️ ▶️ John And especially these whole screen or kind of grab the whole thing gestures, is there’s really, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody fighting over up, left, right, and down. No one has had the guts to really do 45 degree angles. Or not 45, because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a rectangle. But anyway, no one’s had the guts to do specific angles. But I mean, eventually, maybe that’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to come. And it’s going to be a revolutionary new thing. Not only can you fold it up and make some new panel come out and fold it down and make it
⏹️ ▶️ John flip over and fold it left and right to make it twist and slide, but at 45s, it folds up into a little swan and flies
⏹️ ▶️ John away. And you know, I don’t know. It’s really difficult. And I will confess that
⏹️ ▶️ John since I use enough different Twitter apps and app.net apps and everything, that occasionally I do flick the wrong direction.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I wanted reply, but I got show conversation. Because it’s different in different apps. And there’s nothing particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John right or lefty about show conversation and reply, physically speaking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. All right. What’s this root metrics thing that one of you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey added? I glanced at this earlier, and it actually looked very interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, do you remember on the last show, I think I mentioned about Google, like a project
⏹️ ▶️ John Google could do with all its Android phones is it could measure the signal strength
⏹️ ▶️ John and the data throughput of various ISPs, and then report that back to Google. So you’d have an idea
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, if I live in this exact spot in this house, and I work in this building right here,
⏹️ ▶️ John what service has the best throughput and the best reliability and that type of information.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s the only information you can get if you have tons and tons of people all over the country in various
⏹️ ▶️ John locations, because you can’t just have one person in each city. You really want to know specific data.
⏹️ ▶️ John After mentioning that show, someone whose name I lost, sorry, sent me the URL of this place
⏹️ ▶️ John called RootMetrics, and this is apparently a company, and that’s what they do. They send people around
⏹️ ▶️ John to test the connectivity at various different ISPs from different places all over
⏹️ ▶️ John the United States and I guess also the UK. And they said they’ve driven over 132,000 miles and done 3.5 million tests.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can look at their website. It’s rootmetrics.com.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not a sponsor. I read through their methodology and their claims and it seems like they’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John it right. Like they’re not affiliated with any network as far as I can tell. Or if they are, they’re hiding it very well. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they try to be objective and make sure they have enough samples to be statistically sound.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this apparently is a good idea, and someone’s already doing it. So if you want to find out, I guess you go to this website.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t even explore the website enough to know, is this an app I download? Is this a service I sign up for? Whatever it is, it seems like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They have an app. So it says that they have driven actually 540,000 miles. They’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tested in 137 markets. Well, I’m assuming that means they have done that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But additionally, you can download their app and do a test. And I’m assuming that’s how they aggregate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of the consumer information like you were describing, is that the idea is I’ll download
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this app, I’ll test, I’ll report in that I’m on AT&T, and they will add
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that to their database. Oh, info.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they point out another thing. They don’t do user surveys. They’re not asking people how they think the connectivity is, because that would
⏹️ ▶️ John be terrible. And they emphasize that they have people looking at the statistics and making sure that they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John achieved a proper level of significance and all that good stuff. From the five minutes I spent on
⏹️ ▶️ John the website, it looked interesting. And I’m glad someone is doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, next up, I had this iPad Pro thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Listener Mike Z wrote in asking, we were talking about the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro and moving towards the needs of regular people and everything always has to get better. And Mike Z said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are we sure that usability is infinitely improvable? What if computers, including mobile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platforms, just aren’t for everyone? And I thought this was worth considering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because we kind of faced a similar issue with programming languages and programming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in general, where for a while, especially like, you know, late 90s, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before that really, but for a while, there were these efforts to bring programming to every computer user.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, everyone can be a programmer. And there were these efforts to make simpler and simpler languages that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did more and more stuff for you, where we had experimental types of syntaxes and commands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and were very simple and really made for quote everyone. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason why everyone isn’t a programmer today is not because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the languages aren’t simple enough, it’s because programming, just conceptually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco programming is complicated. And even if you don’t have to do that much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to tell the computer what you are trying to do. You still have to deal with the reality of things like the computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not going to be able to really reliably guess if you don’t tell it very well or if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ambiguous, you know, it doesn’t really deal with that very well or if you don’t really necessarily know what you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want or you tell it what you want but that’s actually not what you want because you didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell it correctly. Like it’s all these problems that that make programming hard even for those of us who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know how to do it. And so I think the reality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the conclusion of those kinds of efforts is that you can make programming easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up to a point, but after a certain point, just the inherent nature of programming,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the inherent complexity of doing a programming-type task does keep a lot of people out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it because they just can’t think that way. They can’t—
⏹️ ▶️ John I like how you think this was a 90s phenomenon. You should go to the 4GL Wikipedia page and do some
⏹️ ▶️ John reading. Back from when I was first reading about programming, this was—I guess it goes in cycles like anything
⏹️ ▶️ John else. But yeah, 4GLs were the new big thing and they were going to make it so you didn’t have to do all that nasty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so this is not a new thing really. But it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of died down in recent years as everyone’s kind of realized that, yeah, sure, our programming languages are not perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these days and there’s always going to be room to improve programming languages, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inherently programming is complicated. And there are these concepts and realities involved with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it that no matter how easy you make the language, it still has this built-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco degree of complexity that you can never fully get rid of. So, back to Mike Z’s question,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does usability fall into this category, as he asks, what if computers just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aren’t for everyone? And I think that’s a really interesting point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because we see, I’ve been banging this drum for for a while now on the show, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see issues that Apple’s run into with iOS, where the realities of being a computing device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get in the way of their pretty abstractions. Things like, you know, we talked about storage space being an issue, and managing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photos and backups and stuff like that, and how you kind of slam into walls with that with iOS because they try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make it simpler and better for everyone, but then reality kicks in at some point and has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a problem with that. And computers inherently, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are kind of complex, and it doesn’t really matter. Even the Chromebook,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which uses just web services for everything, even that has complexity because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re talking about complexity of data and having data,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having accounts that you log into or data that you manage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The concept of documents and files and where do you put them, where are they when you want to look for them?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How do you copy stuff, move stuff? How do you manage things? Where is the stuff backed up?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it’s backed up? All of these things, I think, are just inherent complexities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of computers. And even if you have fantastic backup services, cloud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services, cloud interfaces, great interface design, I think the reality is you’re still dealing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this is a computer. It does exactly what you tell it to and no more for the most part.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you tell it, save this thing I just typed, name it this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll have that. And if you can’t remember anything in it or the name, you’re going to have a hard time finding it unless you browse. But there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be a million things to browse through because you’ve been doing this every single day for the last 10 years. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just inherent complexity in just having data in a computing system and managing it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some way, no matter how good that system is. So I think while there is tons of room for improvement, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is a ceiling. And we are hitting that already. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we can kind of get logarithmically closer to it, but I think we’re never going to, or asymptotically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco closer, whatever, you know, the asymptotes in math. We’re going to get closer to it, but I don’t think we’re ever going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really be able to break through the ceiling of, you know, there’s this inherent complexity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with these things.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is a bogus question, though, because he starts off, are we sure that usability is infinitely improvable? Did any of us ever
⏹️ ▶️ John say it was infinitely improvable? I don’t think anyone said or implied that. I mean, that’s a crazy thing. If it was infinitely
⏹️ ▶️ John improvable, it would result in the technological destruction of the world, because every single person on the planet would be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John do everything that every computer is capable of without any real effort.
⏹️ ▶️ John If they could think it, they could make it happen. And even just given current technology, that would just destroy the Earth,
⏹️ ▶️ John because they would immediately hack into nuclear missile silos, because they know that it’s something they want
⏹️ ▶️ John to do. And computers are infinitely usable. No, it’s not infinitely usable, whatever the heck that means, obviously.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t, and if there’s some sort of, you know, some sort of inherent complexity
⏹️ ▶️ John with current technology, like given the hardware that we have and the limitations of that hardware, how usable
⏹️ ▶️ John can you make it? I believe, yes, there is a limit there as well. I don’t think we’re anywhere near that
⏹️ ▶️ John limit, even for the given hardware, and hardware is, you know, getting better
⏹️ ▶️ John over time. So I think that we will always be chasing that, and we can always make them more usable. But more to the point
⏹️ ▶️ John of the iPad Pro thing, we already have seen that, like, maybe computers Computers aren’t for everyone. Computers
⏹️ ▶️ John totally for everyone. If we had not learned that computers are for everyone, even before smartphones, PC has proved
⏹️ ▶️ John that computers are pretty much for everyone in the same way that anything can be for everyone. Yes, you have to live in a first world country where
⏹️ ▶️ John you can afford to have a computer and all that stuff, but we’ve basically proven that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John given the resources, if you give a computer to everybody, they can find something useful to do with it. And yes, they’re crappy
⏹️ ▶️ John and annoying and they have problems, but so do cars, so do houses, so do clothing, so does everything else that
⏹️ ▶️ John regular people can have. And smartphones, forget it. They are computers, they are for everyone. So yes, computing
⏹️ ▶️ John is definitely for everyone. Computers can get easier on the current hardware. And on the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad Pro thing, are iOS devices more usable than personal computers? I
⏹️ ▶️ John think they are. So I don’t, I don’t see, I kind of see where he’s getting at here, but I think it’s kind of a
⏹️ ▶️ John straw man and doesn’t really shed any light on the question we were asking, but I think we do all agree that
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS devices are easier than personal computers. How much easier or whatever. I think we also all
⏹️ ▶️ John agree that computers are for everyone, even if they may be annoying. It’s proven by the existence
⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, everyone has one now. Almost everyone has one. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t find this question as enlightening as Marco did. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, do you want to tell us about something that’s pretty cool, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love to. Our friends at Transporter are back. Now, we’ve had Transporter on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show before, and here’s a quick rundown. Transporter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is by Connected Data, this company that was spun off, it was created by some ex-Drobo people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it got so good Drobo bought them. So that’s how good this thing is. The Transporter is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like an external, it’s an external hard drive that you buy and then you own it outright. There’s no monthly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fees, it’s just a hard drive that you buy and it sits on your network. But then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has software and a web service that allows you to access
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it from anywhere from any of your computers over the internet and also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sync things between multiple transporters and multiple computers. And all this happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the files only being stored on your transporter or on any number of transporters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you choose to sync it with. They don’t store your files in their cloud service or anything. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have the data, you own and control the drive it’s sitting on, and it’s fantastic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for privacy, everything’s encrypted end to end when it’s being transmitted, so you got a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of privacy stuff covered here, regulatory concerns if you can’t use something like Dropbox.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But they know that realistically Dropbox is the competitor here, that Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the alternative and what you’re gonna think of, well I could just use Dropbox, and they address that head on. They don’t try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hide that, don’t mention the competitor, no, no, no, no. There’s lots of advantages here and they’re very happy to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell you about them. So one of the biggest, in my opinion at least, One of the biggest is just the economics at stake here when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have big data needs. So the Transporter Sync for just $100, that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one with the USB port, you plug in your own hard drive and it has a network port on the other side and it turns any drive you already have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into a Transporter. They also have 500 gigs for just $200, 1TB for just $249, and 2TB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for just $349 if you don’t already have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a drive to use with it. So these things are very affordable and they made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a special coupon code this week. If you want to buy the little one, the Transporter Sync, where you plug in your own drive, you buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the little one, use coupon code ATPSHARE for the whole month of February, you can use this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code, ATPSHARE, and you get it for just $75. Really fantastic deal. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so anyway, back to why you want this thing. I’m kind of all over the place with this one, because there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much to talk about with Transporter, they can do so many things, you really should check this thing out. So when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compare this pricing, and there’s no monthly fees, you just buy it up front, that’s it. pricing to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you wanted to store stuff on Dropbox or any other cloud services. It’s nowhere near this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap. And, you know, there’s privacy concerns with a lot of this stuff too and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Transporter has all these new features. So they’re actually having, they’re in the advanced beta here for their desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software, their little client that accesses this stuff and helps you with sync and everything like that. They’re in an advanced beta,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it should be out probably by the end of the month, but you can, the beta’s public, you can go download it now if you want to, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will sync your desktop, your documents folder, downloads folder, movies, music,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and pictures, optionally, they’re all optional, you can have it automatically sync those folders with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your transporter and then with any other Macs that you want to log in with. And so you can kind of have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your Mac special folders, desktop, photos, all that stuff, you can have those things synced automatically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without having to like explicitly store them on your transporter yourself. So it’s even better than Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a way because you don’t have to change your habit of, oh, I want to start storing these files in the Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco folder rather than just keeping them on the desktop or keeping them in the Photos folder or whatever. They automatically sync all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those things with this new beta software due out by the end of the month and I believe available now for anyone who wants to try it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They also have this great iOS app where you can access through the little Cloud Reflector service you can access
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your files right from the iOS app. Anything stored on the transporter you can access right there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from anywhere. So really great service here. So check
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out FileTransporter. There’s so much to say here. I’ve been talking for a while now. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s just so many possibilities. You can sync folders, you can collaborate with multiple people, you can have a transporter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at home and a transporter at work and have them sync, do an automatic offsite backup. So many great options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. Go to FileTransporterStore.com and then that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you can find out more about the transporter, You can find that about the great prices they have for us. And if you use code ATPSHARE
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before the end of February, you can get the Transporter Sync for just $75. Otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for any other Transporter model, you can save 10% by using the coupon code ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So once again, go to filetransporterstore.com and check these things out. Use coupon code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATPSHARE. You can even give these things… Oh, that’s, once again, the purpose of the share. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give one of these as a gift. can say, hey, happy Valentine’s Day, my special someone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got you a Transporter Sync. They really, you know, they’re really pushing this. They want you to share these things with everybody. Just 75
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thanks guys. Okay, so somebody has added
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Flappy Bird Saga, question mark, to the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which one of you is non-committal about talking about Flappy Bird?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I added it. I’m committal. The question mark was just to allow you guys to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know that there’s much to say, which means take a look at the time stamp now and we’ll come
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back and say, well, that was good, in an hour. But I mean, it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me like a guy, a kid. Do we know how old the developer is? 28 or 29,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey barely older, so I can say kid. The kid that wrote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this tried to do something that people say may or may not be good, but certainly was popular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and didn’t like the aftermath, which to some degree, to a very small degree, I think the three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us can sympathize with. Well, not John, because everyone loves John, but you and I can sympathize with that, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And John doesn’t have anything in the App Store either. Also true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, so he put something in the App Store. you know, went berserk about it, both good and bad, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he pulled it because he wanted to go back to an easy and normal world and everyone got mad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about that. Like, I feel bad for the guy, I guess is what I’m trying to say. It just seems like a really crummy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey situation that didn’t have to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s that’s kind of why it’s a topic. I mean the game itself was basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a meme. Like it wasn’t, like no one actually really loved it as like, oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco god, this is the most amazing game ever. They but it’s it is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a funny addictive game, and I think it wasn’t really Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure when this guy made this game. I’m sure he did not expect to be number one in the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And and I I checked I made a little post with us earlier And I checked using our friends at app figures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I have an account there You can look up the rankings for any app in the store So I checked to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure and it was still number one It was number one for many days straight beforehand, and it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number one at the moment he took it off the store. I mean, has this ever happened before where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody who had this extremely high-profile iOS app in the middle of its massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wave of popularity pulls it off the store for, you know, it wasn’t a legal reason as far as we know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t like any compelling reason except that he just couldn’t take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the barrage of of hate and flames that he was getting and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attention he was getting as a result of being in that top position.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why was he getting the hate and flames?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So people were looking, like he was getting hundreds and hundreds or possibly thousands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Twitter messages, like because once he figured out his Twitter username, he was getting tons of messages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying like, you know, damn you for getting me to do this game, I’ve lost my life because of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco game, I’ve lost hours
⏹️ ▶️ John to this but those are but those are like supposed to be funny like those aren’t real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well But a lot you know a lot of people online are Not funny in their
⏹️ ▶️ John criticism. I saw when he said he was gonna pull it then he started to get the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, yeah I got one
⏹️ ▶️ John only because people don’t understand what pulling from the App Store means I had I have to imagine that
⏹️ ▶️ John they Don’t understand because obviously if they care at all about flybeaver It’s they’ve already got it him pulling it from the store doesn’t take it away
⏹️ ▶️ John from them and people don’t understand that. But it’s a shame that people are so
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible, but they are. And any time you are high profile in any
⏹️ ▶️ John way, you get more exposure to the good and the bad. And
⏹️ ▶️ John this is just some guy, presumably, and he didn’t like it and wasn’t prepared for it, and he
⏹️ ▶️ John pulled out of it. I don’t think it’s, I mean, it’s terrible, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John see, like, we all see terrible stuff like that all the time. Doesn’t make it better or anything, but like I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the story is the phenomenon of the game and the person’s reaction to it is
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like the reaction lots of people have. Lots of people will do something online that gets a little tiny bit
⏹️ ▶️ John of notoriety and they get lots of negative feedback about it and how they react to it
⏹️ ▶️ John is depends on are they used to that? Are they used to getting lots of negative feedback from strangers? Do they have the ability
⏹️ ▶️ John to not look at it and not worry about it? You know, we talked about this before, about how you deal with
⏹️ ▶️ John negative feedback from people. And there’s a scale to all of this. Obviously his scale was massively bigger than someone who just writes a
⏹️ ▶️ John blog post that a few people read and complain about, but everyone has different tolerances. So the individual personal story
⏹️ ▶️ John of how he handled crazy internet criticism,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not as interested in that as I am in the story of how a random game
⏹️ ▶️ John rocketed to the top of the charts on the App Store and why that
⏹️ ▶️ John happened. And truthfully, as a gamer, I’m interested in debating the merits of the game itself. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like the human interest story is dominating the news these days. Like when you put down the Floppy Bird saga,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think people understand that phrase to mean, let’s talk about this guy’s feelings
⏹️ ▶️ John and the terrible things that have been said to him over the internet versus let’s talk about the game, because I think people
⏹️ ▶️ John are over the game part.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think there’s two stories here. There’s an article on Forbes, they interviewed him,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they claim, apparently in the article he said that he took it down because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was an addictive product. And that’s a problem, so it’s best to get rid of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And I read a few things, I didn’t have a whole lot of time, I read a few things today talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about, you know, the differences in cultures here. This is a guy in Vietnam, and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco culture over there there about around video game addiction is very different than it is here and apparently because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video game addiction is actually a pretty serious problem it for a lot of for a lot of Asian countries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and and so it’s you know it’s looked upon almost the way like alcohol addiction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is here like video game addiction is is like serious and so to to make something where everyone is telling you they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco addicted to it is is a more serious thing you know here it’s just a fun lighthearted thing you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there it’s more serious so that’s kind of bad but so you know I think one story
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here is the story of basically harassing this guy and and I mean it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wasn’t just people saying it was addictive it was like all sorts of stories going up on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco major websites saying like this is the worst game ever made and it’s popular like just trashing in the game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and it’s a real it was a real I mean I have it on my phone I actually I actually downloaded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it after he said he was going to pull it so I’m like well I I might as well get it so I at least know what I’m talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about. But so you know one problem is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the flames that went into forcing this guy to take this down basically and and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a pretty serious cultural problem but I don’t think it’s one we can really deal with easily unfortunately.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The other interesting story about this is why did this game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get so popular and and the reactions that other iOS developers and other game developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have had as a result. And I think that’s potentially even more interesting because like to me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I’ve wrote this in my post today it to me this it’s very obvious why it got popular. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it was like cute and charming and kind of crappy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In fact really crappy. But it was it was exactly what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco succeeds in the App Store. It was quick, it was simple, there was no learning curve, you could play it for six seconds and be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done or you can play it longer than that if you want to. Like it was, and you just launch it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the most part you just launch it and it goes. There’s not a million different splash screens, there’s not a huge menu system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like console games, stupid things. There’s not, there’s no in-app purchases and it’s free.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It just has an iAd at the top. It’s hardly ever even populated because iAd has apparently a terrible fill rate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at this scale. Like it was, it was exactly what succeeds in the App
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Store. It was kind of retro, kind of new. Of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco course it succeeded. And the game developers are all so upset
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they put so much more time and money into their games that most of them don’t do this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. But I think what this really is is kind of a wake-up call to the game industry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying, look, this is the kind of thing that does well. This is the kind of thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people actually play and download on the App Store. And so all you guys
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there, you know, trying to make like really, really high budget productions and these really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deep games, trying to sell into this particular market, or people who are trying to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gum everything up with in-app purchases and try to, you know, psychologically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screw people that way. You’re trying to do all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that in a market where this is really the kind of thing that succeeds. And that’s very frustrating to hear,
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t you think there’s tens of thousands of other games that have all those criteria? Like I would say,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, there are now. No, no. Before that, like I’m saying that may be necessary
⏹️ ▶️ John for massive app store success, but it is not sufficient. Far from it. And the interesting question that I
⏹️ ▶️ John think is why did this particular terrible, addictive application that has nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John to it succeed when the tons of other preexisting
⏹️ ▶️ John applications that fulfill all those same criteria didn’t? There’s so many thousands
⏹️ ▶️ John and thousands of apps, something made this particular one snowball.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it may be just happenstance, like it was some random fluctuation
⏹️ ▶️ John of things that caused this to snowball out of control. But I don’t think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John anything about the application itself, other than having those qualities you described, which I do
⏹️ ▶️ John not think are uncommon. I think there are tons of terrible, short, simple, fast to play,
⏹️ ▶️ John free, ad supported games with addictive mechanics on the App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this particular one happened to snowball. And I’m not talking about the clones that came
⏹️ ▶️ John after. I’m talking about for years before, like the App Store has so many apps, tons of apps to fill these criteria.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so the devious story is like, oh, there’s some sort of, you know, conspiracy going on here or you hacked the App
⏹️ ▶️ John Store or you got paid reviews or whatever. The more the more banal story is
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t know exactly why it snowballed like this. It could have been any other app, but it happened to be this one. If someone could
⏹️ ▶️ John track that down to show like the download tree of the individual people and how
⏹️ ▶️ John did this spiral up to be this thing? But it’s you know, I think I think you got it right first when you said
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a meme. How do memes become popular? There are tons of funny things written on the Internet all the time, but every
⏹️ ▶️ John once in a while, a few of them catch hold. Are they funnier or more culturally relevant or do they have
⏹️ ▶️ John qualities about them that other memes don’t? Usually not. Usually they’re pretty much all one big giant
⏹️ ▶️ John meme stew. And any of them, if you look at them in isolation, you could say are equally dumb,
⏹️ ▶️ John equally funny, appeal to the same sort of base instincts of people. Why is one massively popular
⏹️ ▶️ John and the other one not? And it’s just, it’s like, you know, chaos theory. It’s like some butterfly flaps its wings somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ John and this guy’s game in Vietnam goes. And that’s why it’s kind of, you know, a tragedy that he gets all this negative
⏹️ ▶️ John feedback because it really, I don’t I don’t think he did, I haven’t seen any evidence that he did anything nefarious
⏹️ ▶️ John to get his rankings. So he’s like a victim of a tornado or a lightning strike, in the
⏹️ ▶️ John bad way. In that he could not have had any expectation that his game would go like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John because if he had looked on the App Store before publishing this game, he would have found tons of games with all the same qualities
⏹️ ▶️ John that went nowhere. And yet his game didn’t go nowhere, it went all the way to the top. And it’s, I would like to understand
⏹️ ▶️ John that phenomenon, But I think that I’m more in favor of the butterfly flapping its wings
⏹️ ▶️ John Theory of how this became successful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see I would I would actually say that it is very it’s very obvious when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you sit down and look this game with the exception of the IAD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Occasionally interfering the top part of your view which doesn’t even mess with the game at all and I don’t know how he’s making that much money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on ads because I don’t know how anybody would ever tap on that ad but But with the exception
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of iAd, the game was actually like impeccably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco implemented. Oh, I disagree. Wait, wait, wait. It was impeccably implemented
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the essence of what makes App Store games addictive and what people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually want. I think that’s what is driving everyone crazy. I totally disagree.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s driving everyone crazy is that they don’t want to believe that this is what the the market is, but this is what the market
⏹️ ▶️ John is. The market is not, this game is not, I understand what you’re getting
⏹️ ▶️ John at, but you could tap into those same bad instincts in people more efficiently
⏹️ ▶️ John than this game with a better game. This is not, it’s not a terrible game. It’s not like a piece of garbage game.
⏹️ ▶️ John He doesn’t deserve to have people telling him he made a bad game or anything like that. It’s just that obviously it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s so successful people want to tear it down. But where I draw the line is people trying to say that this game succeeded because
⏹️ ▶️ John it was good. Implementation-wise in this game, there are many complaints you could have on it from a game design
⏹️ ▶️ John perspective, and even from a, let’s plug into the worst instincts in people and exploit
⏹️ ▶️ John them, I would say that terrible ripoff, you know, clone things like Candy Crush are more
⏹️ ▶️ John efficient, and better at plugging those buttons, because, well, Candy Crush is too complicated, this was so simple,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. Again, I think you could go to the App Store and find many games with similar
⏹️ ▶️ John mechanics that are… I mean, very similar. Maybe you’re not going through pipes or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you’re trying to jump over something, but kind of not very well implemented, difficult for bad reasons,
⏹️ ▶️ John very quick. The reason this game became popular is because everyone was playing it. Now that’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John no one goes there anymore. It’s too crowded. That type of statement makes no sense. But seriously, the phenomenon
⏹️ ▶️ John here is that it snowballed. That it becomes relevant as larger groups of people did it. If you were the only person
⏹️ ▶️ John on the planet, and you had access to the entire app store, app store and you downloaded this game you would
⏹️ ▶️ John throw it away and not play it a lot. It’s only interesting because you know this is the game that everybody’s talking about and
⏹️ ▶️ John because you can compare your score with everybody else. And comparing your score with everybody else only happens because everyone else is playing it. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not, people aren’t playing it because it’s awesome. Like it’s, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. So the quality
⏹️ ▶️ John of this game is not what caused it to be the phenomenon. Again, necessary but not sufficient. So it had
⏹️ ▶️ John barely the necessary qualities to be a mega hit, but that is
⏹️ ▶️ John not sufficient to be a mega hit. And if you look at this individual game, and if you go back in time and substitute
⏹️ ▶️ John Flappy Birds with any of the other games, perhaps some of the better games that fulfill all those same criteria,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’d be having the same conversation about them. I don’t think it has anything to do with game quality. And that’s why I would advise
⏹️ ▶️ John people not to copy the attributes of this game in terms of the implementation. For example, people are like, oh, the collision
⏹️ ▶️ John detection, it’s brutal but fair. It’s… it may be fair,
⏹️ ▶️ John technically speaking, but to give just one game design tip that anyone would pick, when you die from hitting something,
⏹️ ▶️ John good games will show you where you hit. Did you hit too high? Did you hit too low?
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ll sort of pause the animation long enough for you to realize the error of your ways. This one doesn’t even do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that doesn’t add to the game. That makes the game worse. But, you know, like, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not enough to derail it because everyone’s playing this game. No one’s going to say, well, I was playing Flappy Birds, but I played the Flappy Birds clone
⏹️ ▶️ John that does a competent job of showing you where you hit something. No, no one cares about that. It’s just an unimportant detail.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that does not make this a good game.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really think that you’re wrong. I think you’re right that what carried it and what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gave it this massive later boost and what pushed it into number one was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the social effect. You’re totally right about that. I completely agree. And also you know the fact that it had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco social game center leaderboards so you can you can like be and and because it was so hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like you know you can try to beat your friends high score of six. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John so… Well if you want to talk about hard games have you played super hexagon?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, well hold on but before we go that so like all of that worked with this game. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly Like sticky with people it it it got people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco engaged into this stupid game And I think this see this is where I think that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re not giving it enough credit You’re totally right the social aspect carried it and and boosted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it up to number one and kept it there but what got what got it the initial traction at all is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it is a really like fun cute game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though it’s terrible it’s like it has the little like 8-bit Mario like graphics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has the cute name flappy bird like it you know it’s it and it is execute
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for for what it is you know like it’s very similar to the old helicopter flash game that everyone’s seen a million times right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the helicopter flash game was also a terrible game but we all played Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what this is, he nailed the formula exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whether he knew he was doing it, and he probably didn’t realize he was doing it, whether he knew or not, he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nailed what people like in iOS and current trends. With the 8-bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco graphics and the name and everything. He didn’t nail them though.
⏹️ ▶️ John He barely crossed the bar for them. That’s what he did. He did not nail them. He barely limped across
⏹️ ▶️ John the bar of the few criteria that matter. Necessary but not sufficient how many times do I have to say that you’re still
⏹️ ▶️ John not getting you’re like yeah But he met all those criteria. Yes, he did but so but meeting those criteria is
⏹️ ▶️ John not sufficient for you to be the game It’s everything else that makes it the game and he just barely
⏹️ ▶️ John made it. It’s like it’s barely competent, right? It you know, it has no progression
⏹️ ▶️ John it the collision detection and the animations are Barely
⏹️ ▶️ John sufficient to get the job done when the game center banner comes down over the screen. It does stutter on my iPod
⏹️ ▶️ John touch So it’s not like he’s even smooth 60 frames per second performance the whole time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using iPod touch though
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just it is it is barely sufficient super hexagon is my best example of like
⏹️ ▶️ John a very difficult game That is a good game But did not cross the bars the sufficient bars
⏹️ ▶️ John for it to be massively popular because it is too complicated and too abstract and does not Have a cute name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right yeah, it’s it’s not cute It’s not like it doesn’t draw people in
⏹️ ▶️ John no it’s too complicated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean like that’s what I’m saying here is not that he did everything perfectly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that all the elements to to having a hit he got them all like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah There’s there’s thousands of other games in the store that have many of these but very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have all of them. They have all of them very few have all and that’s that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John No, they they have all of them, and they do them better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I really I strongly disagree. I’ve downloaded so many games,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the title of this episode needs to be necessary, but not sufficient. Holy cow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So many games have like most of these elements and then they really blow one They give it a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco name or a terrible icon or terrible art style or like it’s just a little bit too much friction To get into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it or it’s a little too long or a little too like it so many games you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know are like 90% there and then they blow the last 10% in some way and that keeps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them from becoming a mega hit and I really think that he had all the elements here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he nailed it well he if you
⏹️ ▶️ John had a time if you had a time machine I would send you back in time before flying birds was created I would
⏹️ ▶️ John give you a week to make this exact game and then I would laugh as nobody downloaded it I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couldn’t make it I mean now I could now that I have something to copy
⏹️ ▶️ John you could make that yes I’m saying go back in time make make a clone of flappy birds before flappy bird exists
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll give you a month to develop it you’ll put it out you’ll probably do a better job with the animations than this did
⏹️ ▶️ John and no one will download it and it will not become a phenomenon because that’s not what made it successful it would have sit there languishing with the
⏹️ ▶️ John rest of the crappy free games that have similar qualities to them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I still disagree but I think we should move on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well what would you like to talk about should we talk more about games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hold on before we do we have more sponsors I to get through before we’re three hours into talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the exact talking about flappy birds. This was gonna be a quick topic. I told
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey could keep going. I told
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. Now, how about you tell me about something cool?
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of games, I had seen via a friend of the show, Ben Thompson, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really interesting post about how in-app purchases, did you know they’re ruining the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey game industry? I was not aware of this. And by not aware of this, I mean, I’ve been witnessing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. So anyway, there’s this post where they have two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey links to two videos. One of them is a review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the original Dungeon Keeper from 1997, although I guess it’s been updated slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to run on modern hardware. Well, anyways, it’s this video review of Dungeon Keeper and it’s quite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long, but you get the idea after about five or ten minutes about what the game is about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then further down on the same post, you see a review from the same individual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Dungeon Keeper for iPad and Android from this year. And that review is about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eight minutes and is filled with profanity, which immediately I enjoyed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it because of that. But it shows how unbelievably woefully
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad the company that put this game out ruined the game. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in short, you kind of dig out stuff. I’ve never played it, but I guess you dig things out in a dungeon,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go figure. And in the original game, the game cost, you know, five or 10 bucks or something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you could just play it well in the modern version of the game. It costs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember if it costs money or not, but anyway, whether or not it costs money to even get the game, when you dig
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things out, which is the whole point of the game, it’s on an artificial time lag, so you have to wait
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a day or whatever it is in order to dig out another square of, of dungeon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And guess what? You can pay to make this quicker. And even as someone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who doesn’t play very many games, with the exception of 3s, which I’m addicted to, even as someone who doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey play very many games, be it console or computer or iOS, even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could tell that this was unbelievable, and to me, the most egregious example
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of just ruining a game for the purpose of in-app purchases. So I don’t know. Did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either of you guys see this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, of course, it was everywhere. John, what do you think about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think you and I will actually agree on more, Marco. And the analogy I was thinking of,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, before I get to the analogy, I think the explanation for this is the same as the analogy I’m going to make, is that
⏹️ ▶️ John the App Store and all that stuff has reduced the barrier to entry for people making
⏹️ ▶️ John games. And I know we all like to think of the big bad App Store, Apple, as the gatekeeper,
⏹️ ▶️ John and we can’t sideload apps and they decide what comes on and everything. But
⏹️ ▶️ John compared to what it used to be like to make games, Apple’s gate is way more
⏹️ ▶️ John open than other gates were. For the most part, Apple doesn’t control
⏹️ ▶️ John for quality, as we see from just looking at the app on the App Store, do a search. Like, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John they control for malware and like a few things like porn and stuff like that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John for the most part, if your game compiles and complies with their rules, even if it is the worst
⏹️ ▶️ John thing ever, they’ll put it on the store. And the analogy always comes to mind is
⏹️ ▶️ John network television. It used to be there was this limit to access to television. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was limited because there was no cable. So it was limited to the, you know, the spectrum and the spectrum
⏹️ ▶️ John was not particularly wide for old television technology. So you had a sort of, not an artificial
⏹️ ▶️ John limit, but a sort of a hard limit due to technology on how many television networks there could be in the United
⏹️ ▶️ John States. And the power to broadcast things on television was in the hands of
⏹️ ▶️ John relatively few people who controlled the major networks, only a couple channels
⏹️ ▶️ John and some very powerful people who controlled all of that. And those
⏹️ ▶️ John few people, however, we may think of them, relatively speaking, they were
⏹️ ▶️ John some high minded individuals in some respects, and that because there was only
⏹️ ▶️ John four or five or six of them, old, bald, white men somewhere deciding what gets to go on television,
⏹️ ▶️ John they could afford to have principles about things that
⏹️ ▶️ John that they all sort of agreed on. So, network TV news was sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John a not a loss leader, but like they felt it was important to inform the public. And it was probably actually might
⏹️ ▶️ John have been part of some FCC mandate and stuff like that, where they would, they would make news programming that by
⏹️ ▶️ John modern standards is boring, but they would tell us the things that we thought we needed to know kind of a paternalistic,
⏹️ ▶️ John we know best, we control access to the airwaves. We have high minded ideals about
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s important for you to know and what is rubbish and you shouldn’t see. And yeah, we’ll run soap operas during the day and all that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I love Lucy and all that other stuff. But the network news is where we’re going to really concentrate on this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Compare that to today, where there’s tons of channels, cable has eliminated the fight for spectrum
⏹️ ▶️ John and opened it up to many more networks, starting with like CNN doing news and all the other things. And
⏹️ ▶️ John now this this 24 hour news just made it there’s so much more room for news,
⏹️ ▶️ John And increased competition, lower barrier to entry, more news to be made
⏹️ ▶️ John has caused them to compete with each other to figure out what it is that people want. And what they want to see
⏹️ ▶️ John is OJ riding around in a white Bronco and coverage of celebrities and all those other things
⏹️ ▶️ John that we all say are just terrible that we shouldn’t be watching. But
⏹️ ▶️ John letting more news and television flow out has caused this to happen. Like, it
⏹️ ▶️ John is freeing us from the totalitarian, well, it’s not totalitarian,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the rule of those few bald white men controlling what we have on. And you can no longer afford
⏹️ ▶️ John to have these high-minded ideals, because if you want ratings, you have to show the stuff that people want. And it’s not like, oh, I
⏹️ ▶️ John blame those people for making the content, or I blame the people who want the content for wanting it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s simply the reduction in friction and the App Store has so massively reduced friction
⏹️ ▶️ John in the market of gaming compared to how hard it was to get a game on a console or how hard it was
⏹️ ▶️ John to get a computer game published or whatever. The friction is so low now that inevitably you see
⏹️ ▶️ John the exact same thing even worse, more accelerated, just figuring out what it is that people want.
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s the equivalent of, you know, the trashy 24-hour news channels that just show
⏹️ ▶️ John things like Nancy Grace and stuff like that as opposed to like, you know, the nightly use with Ted Koppel, you could afford
⏹️ ▶️ John to be more sophisticated. And so the question is, is free ruining
⏹️ ▶️ John the game industry? Free is ruining the game industry in the same way that cable has ruined
⏹️ ▶️ John news, in the same way that to pick an industry that the technological barriers
⏹️ ▶️ John went away sooner, like McDonald’s has ruined the food industry. When you remove all the friction and you
⏹️ ▶️ John let everybody compete, you will necessarily get a redistribution of quality. Whereas if you artificially
⏹️ ▶️ John limit it and put some people in charge of it, they have the power to make it the average
⏹️ ▶️ John better, but the number much smaller. When you reduce the friction, the number becomes massive,
⏹️ ▶️ John the average goes way down, but I still think there is more good stuff. So overall, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John free has not ruined the game industry. I think net-net there are more good games now than there were before. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John that there are so many more games, and so many more games that appeal to the worst in us,
⏹️ ▶️ John that that’s what we see. most people are going to be playing the crappy games that appeal to the worst of them. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a law of numbers. But I think there are more better games now than there were before. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think free is ruining the game industry. It just seems that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. I don’t even know how to review that. I agree.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there you go. All right. Well, moving on. So apparently, business happens after
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours or gets quietly leaked after hours. Late-breaking Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shared something with us moments ago Apparently Comcast is buying Time Warner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because that sounds wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t everyone hate Time Warner doesn’t everyone hate Comcast well not more I think people hate Time Warner more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not possible. I don’t know I think people hate Comcast I see I’ve never actually had I’ve never lived in a Comcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area I have lived in two Time Warner areas, and they’ve been fine. You know not not great,
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a great merger when we’re debating which company is more hated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, well these are American ISPs. They’re all awful.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well. We don’t we don’t we don’t hate I think those of us who are Fios customers We may not like Verizon Wireless
⏹️ ▶️ John for various reasons But I think we’re all more or less happy with like we’re all glad that we have Fios
⏹️ ▶️ John because the pricing is Kind of around the same as what we hear from cable companies And
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re happy with the service in terms of reliability and speeds the only one I hear better things about is
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if this is just because this is one of the few places I visit every year, but what used to be Cablevision on
⏹️ ▶️ John Long Island, Optum Online, always comes out really high in the rankings of bandwidth and people seem to like it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like it that much for the house that we rent there that has it. It looks kind of crappy to me, but that gets highly rated.
⏹️ ▶️ John I hear Comcast, yes, lots of people hate because it’s wide, but I hear lots of complaints from people I know in
⏹️ ▶️ John the New York City area about Time Warner.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, well, and I’ve actually, I’ve had Cablevision slash OptumOnline, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s, they serve Westchester, so I’ve had that in two different places and it was fine, it was great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it was actually better. Time Warner I had in Brooklyn and it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very clearly oversold where I was, and Time Warner in Manhattan, I’ve had it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the Tumblr office, we had that briefly, and it was pretty bad. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Manhattan has a problem where pretty much anything that’s not like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thousands of dollars a month dedicated leased line to your office, like anything less than that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you’re just getting like file or business cable, they’re all terrible. Because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the same reason everything else in Manhattan, it’s it’s traffic. It’s like you have way too many people crammed into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way too small of an area and there’s even traffic on the internet. Like there’s too much traffic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even for that so that everyone’s backhaul and pipes and everything gets overloaded in Manhattan too. And the buildings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are all old, so a lot of times you only have like one choice of what the buildings even would permit in or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already have hookups for. It’s a bad scene there. But I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What scares me about this deal, assuming that it’s real, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would assume that this is subject to regulatory approval, although the way things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have gone in the US with the FCC and regulatory approval for things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant internet companies merging I don’t imagine they’re gonna have problems with that I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they should but they won’t and so I just think it’s sad I mean the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that we need in the US is less broadband competition
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah yeah all the people in other countries have been telling us since last week or whenever we talked about net neutrality that I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even remember which countries there but that some some places apparently have laws that if you own the wires you can’t run an ISP
⏹️ ▶️ John and that would be an easy an easy way to there’s one of the things like of the common carrier things where it’s like, well, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John own the wires, you have to rent access to your, you’re required by law to rent them out to other people. And then you’re like, grumble,
⏹️ ▶️ John grumble, all right, fine, we’ll rent them out, but we’ll do a crappy job of it. The that the law where it has to be split
⏹️ ▶️ John where one company can’t own both of them seems much better to me, because then the interests are aligned, like the company that owns the
⏹️ ▶️ John wires is in the business of renting them out. And it’s not like you have the company that owns the wires and an ISP
⏹️ ▶️ John also is forced by the government to rent them out, but always does a a crappy job and gives rents out the
⏹️ ▶️ John crappy quality of service to other people. Many systems are better than what we have now, and I think preventing
⏹️ ▶️ John the merger, I agree that they probably shouldn’t be allowed to go forward, but the bottom line is Time Warner will probably
⏹️ ▶️ John get better as a result of this, and it will give Comcast more power to raise prices and screw everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s like not allowing this merger doesn’t really make things better, it just stops
⏹️ ▶️ John things from getting worse in one respect and possibly better in another. So yeah, we need sane laws on tech, and
⏹️ ▶️ John we won’t get it because we’re in America.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, there is one thing to point out that the chat and Twitter are both very happily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pointing out right now, that competition in this instance is weird because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way US cable companies work, you almost never, I’ve never heard of a place where you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco choose between two different cable companies in like four your house or office. Like usually.
⏹️ ▶️ John Massachusetts, we had three up here. I think. Really? Comcast, Fios, and RCN.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s still the case. I had Comcast and Fios in the same place, and RCN
⏹️ ▶️ John cables were running to my house when I can. They all did internet. They all did internet, phone, television,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure. Yeah. Well, but yeah, usually you’ll have one phone company and one cable company.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can get things through both. And if the phone company is Verizon Fios,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you can get TV through that too. Or even AT&T’s U-Verse, isn’t that? Anyway, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what these things are.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yes, I’m a rarity. but I have three choices. I could have picked any three of those and fulfilled all my needs. I could
⏹️ ▶️ John have picked all three of them and picked the internet from one, phone from the other, and television from the other if I wanted to. Obviously, they make that
⏹️ ▶️ John economically unfeasible, but that is a rarity. Mostly from what I hear, it’s like, all I can get at my house is Comcast or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. Right, like usually you can choose one phone company with DSL or, if you’re lucky, Fiber,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and one cable company, and that’s it. And so, you know, Time Warner and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Comcast are not like so direct competitors where they have to really compete on price because they’re usually not competing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the same customers. Where I think this is bad is in consolidation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, you know, now we’re gonna have even fewer major national ISPs and Comcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is already, I think it was the biggest ISP in the country already, Comcast, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already has way too much power over things like net neutrality in the US,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, like if net neutrality starts going badly for us, Comcast is gonna be the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company to start screwing people over. They’re gonna jump right on that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have a terrible track record with this. So they are just horrible,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco horrible people in that company. And so it isn’t necessarily the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of you’d have less competition for pricing in your area for cable. It’s the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of now, one company is going to be in charge of even more of the US’s connected broadband.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, the number of companies that are representing the entire connected US
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is shrinking. And these are like two of the biggest ones that are now going to become one, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and it would be just terrible of me not to say that I have had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Comcast on at least a couple of occasions, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is without a shadow of a doubt, I believe my most hated company other than perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey airlines. It was terrible. It was my only reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey option, and I hated it. I hated it at least 100 times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more than the Mac Pro discussion. I hated Comcast. The customer service
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was awful. It was – I would wait for an hour to talk to someone who had no idea what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they were doing and no matter what fancy thing I said to them to indicate that I’m not an idiot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would still have to unplug my router and then I would have to do this and then I would have to do that. And it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just a freaking nightmare. The service was never terribly good. Rates went up constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without any notice and without any real reason. Whenever I went
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the local office to like return a piece of broken equipment or exchange something, whatever the case may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be, it was a 50-50 shot that that would actually show up on my bill. And then I would have to call the customer service
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see, oh, okay, well, I returned this in person to your office. I didn’t even put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it through the mail two weeks ago, and yet you’re still charging me for this thing that I haven’t had for two weeks. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cannot even begin to tell you how terrible Comcast is. Whereas by comparison, and I know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know I’ve talked about how wonderful Fios is and I know no one wants to hear it, but just a few weeks ago when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had an issue with, um, some, I forget which piece that was in the house, but it wasn’t the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey router, it was something upstream from the router, but it was something in the house. It was like the ONT or something like that. Well, anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I said to the, to the, to the person on the phone, well, you know, I’ve looked at the router, but I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got this and this and this problem, and I’m looking at the ONT, and it’s got this, this, and the other thing going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, and that completely bypassed me through all the stupid drivel. And I think the guy even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, oh, you know what you’re talking about. All right, let’s try this just to be safe. And I think I talked about this on the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like he had me unplug something, replug something, just to confirm that the outlet itself wasn’t an issue, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a perfectly reasonable course of action. And then the next day, that morning, they said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what went from an all day, you know, you have to be home all day because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re not going to tell you when we’re coming. It ended up that I actually almost got woken up by their phone call to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, we’d like to fix your problem as soon as possible. Whereas Comcast was, I believe they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey missed an installation appointment or two at one point. I’ll stop because I could go on forever, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I cannot tell you how bad Comcast is. And the fact that they’re buying another major cable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey corporation petrifies me because who’s a competitor anymore? Fios is the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV of the Verizon conglomerate. U-verse is the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV of the AT&T conglomerate. My parents have it. It’s very good, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a pet project as far as I’m concerned. My parents used to have charter communications. I don’t know if that’s even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still a thing anymore. I mean, what are the big companies other than Comcast?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you’re right, Marco, that it’s basically Comcast and then a bunch of little guys. And that’s scary.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s not good for anyone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Verizon and Comcast entered this shady agreement a few years ago that basically Verizon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco agreed to stop expanding Fios. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John That can’t be legal. The good thing about the little guys, though, like I don’t know who owns Cablevision or Optima Online
⏹️ ▶️ John or whoever. Maybe they’re already owned by Comcast. But like the little guys have some reasonable chance
⏹️ ▶️ John of like they’re not going to be swallowed by the other ones unless they buy them because they own, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John they own their regional areas and Comcast is not going to come and pay to string new wires
⏹️ ▶️ John there and if those companies don’t have to rent their wires out to them they’re not going to what Comcast will do instead I guess is buy
⏹️ ▶️ John them if it’s worthwhile to them which is what they’re doing with Time Warner and hopefully eventually even
⏹️ ▶️ John our crappy laws will step in and say you know when Comcast tries to buy Verizon or vice versa they’ll say okay you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do that but uh no it’s not it’s not a great situation and And I would I think we would all be happier
⏹️ ▶️ John if the service itself would improve, like instead of just
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, your profits are improving or you’re merging and doing stuff like this. Like, would you care how bad the customer
⏹️ ▶️ John service was? If you just got good speeds all the time, like I have, I’ve had files for I don’t know, for as long as I could possibly had it
⏹️ ▶️ John many, many years now. And I’ve never called their customer service. It could be terrible as far as I know, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it just always works. It doesn’t go down. I never have to call them. It doesn’t break all the equipment is still going. Eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John I assume it will break or I’ll need to get it upgraded or something, but so far so good. So if Comcast put as much energy
⏹️ ▶️ John into improving its service as it does into like buying up other companies and trying to figure out how to make money, maybe you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, well, the customer service is terrible, but boy, the speeds are great. And I bet Fios, you know, I bet your
⏹️ ▶️ John Verizon, if you had a bad customer service experience, it would annoy you, but you’d be like, well, I still enjoy the speeds and the connection.
⏹️ ▶️ John And for the most part, it’s been reliable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But what’s compelling them to do that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, nothing. Yeah, that’s why they’re not doing it. Nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s the problem. And the competition is what makes everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get better. It’s the same reason why, although I don’t prefer Android, I want Android to be incredible because that makes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS that much better. And I just seen a tweet or an article or something like that a day or two ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying that suddenly Comcast had just ratcheted up their speeds in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the areas around Google Fiber. Or maybe it was in Chattanooga where I know that they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have municipal or their power company or something like that. weirdo setup that I’ve talked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Bradley Chambers about wherein they get just absurd speeds from a source that you wouldn’t expect, either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the municipality or like the power company or something. Well, anyways, in those areas, Comcast will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually be okay from what I gather because they’re compelled to, because otherwise no one will subscribe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to them. And I don’t know, I guess for regular human beings, Fios isn’t compelling enough, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree, John. The only, I’ve had to call customer service twice maybe, and it was because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of random one-off things that are kind of expected to happen over the course of several years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And otherwise, I’ve never, ever, ever, ever had an issue with it, ever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever. And I use the ActionTech router, not for Wi-Fi, but I use it as a router. And I know that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco’s favorite thing in the world. And I’ve actually not even had problems with that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t stress enough how wonderful Fios is and how god-awful terrible Comcast is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco god that we are sponsored by somebody better than Comcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Our third sponsor this week, our friends at Hover. Hover is high quality,
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Promo code, who the hell is Casey? For 10% off. I am serious.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That is fantastic.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is an all Casey promo code episode. I love it For 10% off. So what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is hover? hover is In my words not theirs hover is a domain registrar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That doesn’t suck and and if you’ve used domain registrars before to register domain names
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know that not sucking is pretty rare and not only do they not suck.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re pretty good actually. They have amazing support, they have a beautiful design, they have… I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love Hover and their sister company Ting, part of the Two Cows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco family of companies. They have this awesome support thing where they have phone support.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, you can do online stuff too, but if you want you can call them anytime during a business day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a person picks up the phone. It’s a no hold, no transfer, no wait policy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You call them during a business day and a real person picks up phone, there’s no long hold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times, and the person who picks up is actually able to help you. They don’t have to transfer you 17 times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have you explain everything, all this crazy stuff. It’s fantastic phone support. So in addition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to all that, see, Hubbard’s really focused on, you know, they want people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who have ideas, who want to start a new website, buy a new domain for your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco email address, whatever the case may be. They want people who have ideas to be able to just find a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco name get it set up and then get back to making your idea work they know that domain registration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not like the place you go to hang out all day you know they they know that this is like this is something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you need to do something else so they want to make it as easy as possible for you to get in get out and just get what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need they can they can have that to pull it in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so and they have I mean you you guys have probably heard all these crazy new TLD that are being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco released you can get like dot laundry or something they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many so many really stupid ones being released honestly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I don’t know what you know it seems like is it I can that makes the final
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decisions on these or the IANA I am on reddit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I I know what you’re saying I never can keep them straight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like the creation of new TLDs whoever makes those decisions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just comically misguided about how how things are named on the internet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the TLD is not usually used for you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know important purposes usually it’s like you pick the one that either like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco completes the spelling of a domain hack for you so you can get like you know thing dot G
⏹️ ▶️ Marco s so it says things and you need stuff like that or you get one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s like kind of accidentally related like we We have ATP.fm, even though we are not in the Federated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Islands of Micronesia. It just happens that that’s kind of sound related.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And just like TV, is it Tuvalu or Tuvalu? No one who has a.tv domain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco name is actually in Tuvalu. But people use it. Hey, it’s.tv. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like.me, I think, is another country, too. That just happens to mean something in English.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that got popular. co is Columbia
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s close enough to dot-com that everyone’s like oh well that’ll work well we’ll just you start using that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that’ll work and then they the new domains are all these crazy things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dot lighting and like dot like dot photography and like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know this is not AOL keywords I know this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know this is a sponsor read but I’m going I’m making this a topic Temporarily this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I’m so annoyed by the list of these new domains because they’re so useless like they’re so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheesy like Who is gonna name their business like supplies dot photography?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well see what they what they did was sort of how Mac OS 10 Made movie computers real because
⏹️ ▶️ John it used to be before I go s10 then movie computers did these crazy animations? It didn’t exist in real computers
⏹️ ▶️ John and things would go Blooping you’re like, oh, that’s not where real computers are like, it’s so stupid and then Mac OS 10 came out It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John as a real computer does that genie thing? It’s actually a real thing Well, this makes what your parents would say
⏹️ ▶️ John for domain names or what what like late night comics would say I need to go to
⏹️ ▶️ John You know doggy dot wolf wolf and we’d be like that wolf wolf isn’t a real TLD Don’t you know
⏹️ ▶️ John it like they wouldn’t know that it was like com org net or whatever They would just say like, you know paper bags
⏹️ ▶️ John dot lunchtime Alright, because they and they say backslash after that, right? Well now those things are now
⏹️ ▶️ John those things are real and TLC’s and it’s like no you’re making you’re making all the worst bad
⏹️ ▶️ John things about people who didn’t know technology come true. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey By the way, why do all movie and TV computers make noises every time you click or
⏹️ ▶️ John anything? Text appearing on the screen. I can’t stand it. A window
⏹️ ▶️ John appears. Everything makes noise. Drives me nuts. All right, different topic. Finish the ad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so if you want to get a sensible TLD, like the ones we’ve had forever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get pretty much all of them. They keep adding new ones all the time and they they have almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone I’ve ever looked for However, if you want to get one of the new stupid ones you can now do that as well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you can get I just look they now have today or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah today a new batch became available including dot equipment dot camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dot estate dot gallery and dot lighting So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now you can you know, you can have your new like, you know ATP dot lighting in case we want to start a lighting related
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company. I’m sure there’s enough of those to justify an entire top-level domain on the internet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So so they have all sorts of these new crazy domains and there’s they keep there’s like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two year long schedule They’re gonna roll out a whole bunch of them at I can level and so All the registrars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are joining in at least all the good ones but if I was gonna register any of these I’d do it at hover because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They you know, they’re just they have their panels nice and easy to use. They have great support They have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this old but awesome service called Value Transfer where if you want to transfer some names to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hover and you don’t want to have to deal with the process, they will do the transfer for you. If you just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give them the credentials to log into your old registrar, they will transfer everything over for you. It’s really great. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have all sorts of stuff. They have email, Google apps for your domain, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support that. And their attitude is very honest. don’t try to like aggressively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upsell you or cross sell you to crazy stuff like you know if you’re in they didn’t tell me to say this but we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all know that the the implication here or rather the alternative here is if you ever did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a checkout at GoDaddy oh my god it’s like it’s worse than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app store it’s like the amount of crap they present to you is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it’s unbelievable and it’s like they use the you know there’s like all these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shady things like oh well do you You do not want us to not give your disclosed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco information to people who are possibly affiliated with us. And you can pay an extra $12
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a month to have privacy so that we won’t spam you. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so weird with other registrars. Hover has sensible defaults. They don’t badger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. Things like domain privacy, they give you for no additional cost. It’s great. So let me get back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to reality here. Thanks a lot to Hover for sponsoring the show. where you’re talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a hover.com slash ATP for high quality no hassle domain registration and use the promo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code who the hell is Casey for 10% off.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should know that the promo code is only for new customers though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yes that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also should point out that a moon dot lighting is already taken and I’m very sad about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh that’s too bad. I know not surprising but unfortunate nevertheless. These TLDs are really the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worst. I mean it’s like we’ve had Stupid TLDs in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco addition to these for a while like dot museum like when was the last time you saw it like even museums
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t use dot museum if they don’t use it who else is going to use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t get it It makes no sense to me, but whatever do we want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me do something brief about Ibeacons and Bluetooth le and then we can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe talk about Copeland 2010 for six
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, not on this show. That one is… put a line in the notes. Next show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Well, let’s let me talk briefly about iBeacons and then maybe we can wrap. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve had a little bit of time between projects at work over the last week and a half, and I’ve been fiddling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with iBeacons and Bluetooth Low Energy. And in case you live on…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Translation, I’ve been slacking off at work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no, no, no. I’ve been between projects. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sure, yeah. You know, don’t be a jerk. But anyway…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have my share of slacking off at work. Don’t worry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, they’re slacking off at work and then there’s doing things that are professional development when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. It’s your 90% time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Well, so… All right. I want to try to be serious here, darn it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I was piddling with iBeacon’s Bluetooth Low Energy. And so in case you don’t know what that is, in iOS 7,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple came up with a standard that they said they would make a standard, which just like FaceTime, they haven’t, wherein
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can have over Bluetooth Low Energy, a small data packet that’s broadcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that includes a GUID or UUID or GUID, depending on how you wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco pronounce it. Did you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say GUID like squid? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey awesome. That’s how I’ve always pronounced it, I don’t know. Anyway, so it’s strictly speaking, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a UUID in the Apple platforms, but you can broadcast a UUID,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a major integer, a minor integer, and I believe a little bit of text as well. I forget off the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey top of my head. And the idea is you can set up a iPad, for example, like let’s say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a cash register iPad, and you can set it up to beam over Bluetooth Low Energy, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hi, I’m here, and I’m waiting for someone to talk to me. And on a iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you have, let’s say this is the Apple Store, because the Apple Store is doing this, if you have the Apple Store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app on your iPhone, not the App Store, mind you, but the retail store app,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As you walk into an Apple retail store, it will actually say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we see you’re at the Apple store, is there anything we can do for you? And they took this even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey further at WWDC, and they said, hey, if you think about it, you could use the major and minor integers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do something like specify the major integer is what store number you’re in, and the minor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey integer is where you are within the store. So you could say if it’s Macy’s or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that, department store, you’re in the men’s section. Perhaps when you walk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in there with your iPhone, the app could, the Macy’s app, if you have it installed, could pop up and say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, we see you’re in the men’s section. Did you know that ties are on sale? And so on and so forth. It’s both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extremely cool and it could be extremely creepy. You could think of less creepy uses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like at a museum. We were talking about.museum earlier, where as you go between exhibits,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there could be eye beacons all over the place saying, hey, we think you’re at at such and such exhibit, let me show you a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen about that rather than you having to go and search for information about that exhibit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, anyway, so I’ve been playing with this over the last week and a half, and really the whole point in me bringing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this up was to say that Bluetooth Low Energy apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a hell of a lot more energy in it than I thought it did. And I say that because I had my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Retinopad Mini sitting on my desk at work, and then I walked across the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey office, which I know doesn’t mean anything to anyone, but suffice to say it was a solid,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, 10 to 20 meters or 10 yards if you’re an American.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So polite. So it was through a few walls. I could still,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very faintly of course, but I could still pick up from my iPhone 5S my Retinopad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mini’s beacon being transmitted via Bluetooth low energy a solid like 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or meters away, which I just thought was remarkable because the way it was pitched, it sounded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me like it was going to work in the span of a couple of meters
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at most. And that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. And I just thought it was very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting. And I will also say that it was actually fairly straightforward to get it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to work and the code really isn’t that bad. And I also ordered from, what is it, Red Bear,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is some company out of, I believe, Hong Kong. a Beacon B1, actually I ordered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three of them for the company, which are basically these standalone iBeacons.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so what you can do is you can connect to them using an app that they have and program them with your GUID
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash UUID and program them with what major and minor number you want. And you can use them as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a physical iBeacon. And the reason you can do that is because the quote unquote standard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Apple came up with for iBeacons really isn’t that complex. And so people reverse engineered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it pretty quickly. And they’ve come out with physical hardware devices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can use in order to be an eye beacon. And I just thought this was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all fascinating. I don’t really know where this is going in the future, but the thought of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having what is basically geolocation within a building where GPS isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably going to work very well and additionally isn’t accurate enough, I just think that whole thing is fascinating. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe that’s me. I don’t know. Do you guys have anything to say about that?
⏹️ ▶️ John like the fantasy of every computer, every business person
⏹️ ▶️ John told about computers for the past 50, 70 years has been hammering on the, and when
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re right near the cafe we’ll tell them we’re having a sale on coffee. Like people are obsessed with giving
⏹️ ▶️ John you just in time advertising information. Every both utopian and dystopian sci-fi
⏹️ ▶️ John movie would have some scene where the character not used to the future wanders by some sign that notices he’s there
⏹️ ▶️ John and tells them that something is available for his purchase that’s related to his interests or changes to talk
⏹️ ▶️ John to him or whatever. And that mostly for me, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of dystopian. But I like the idea of
⏹️ ▶️ John using the similar type of technology where it’s like, it’s not it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John longer range than near field is not as long range as Wi Fi, but it’s but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s almost as low power as you know, it’s not gonna be as low power as near field, obviously, but but it’s much lower
⏹️ ▶️ John power, like making it more feasible to do something like like pipe in GPS,
⏹️ ▶️ John for example, like to do the equivalent of positioning within a building without having to use GPS, but have it be
⏹️ ▶️ John similarly accurate by using all the in all the in store beacons as sort of a proxy for
⏹️ ▶️ John actual GPS beacon that somewhere else and because the beacons know where they are. And I don’t know how this would work. But
⏹️ ▶️ John position within a building is good because even if it’s just for like, you’re in the mall and you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to find out where the heck the the the you know children’s do the jimbari is you want to buy
⏹️ ▶️ John clothes and you haven’t been in this mall before it would be nice and the mall would consider
⏹️ ▶️ John it a feature if you could just look on your phone and like type in G Y M and tap on the first
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and it would tell you how to get to the jimbari like wayfinding within buildings to find you know if that was
⏹️ ▶️ John so common that it was boring you wouldn’t have that thing that we have now like it used to be when you wanted to go on a long car
⏹️ ▶️ John trip you’d like look up the maps in your little Atlas thing or get one of those triple-a booklets that tells
⏹️ ▶️ John you all the different turns and stuff like that. Now we just take for granted that if you want to go somewhere and you know the address you can
⏹️ ▶️ John just hop right in your car type in the address and drive there. But we still do the thing when you get into a building where you got to go to
⏹️ ▶️ John the front desk and find out what floor this place is on and what number it is and you look up on the little the sign
⏹️ ▶️ John and by the elevators to show where you have to go. That’s that’s the equivalent of bringing the Hagstrom into
⏹️ ▶️ John your car and looking stuff up or getting a little AAA manual. So if this stuff does come become pervasive
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s boring very benign uses of it that would eliminate yet another one of those things that
⏹️ ▶️ John we can tell our kids that we used to have to look things up and it would be like telling people you had to go through Rolodex to find someone’s phone number
⏹️ ▶️ John if they still know what phone numbers are by the time we’re telling them these stories. So I mostly give this tech a thumbs up,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think people will try the dystopian things first and I think those won’t fly as well as something more utilitarian
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I would agree with that. I should also mention that the iBeacon API within
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a core location on the iPhone, or in the iPad, actually, it does tell you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a basic idea of whether or not you’re close to any of the beacons you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can see. So it gives you a vague proximity of basically you’re on top of it, you’re near
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, you’re far away from it, or I can barely tell. And the other very interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing about iBeacon specifically is that you can actually have iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey start or provide a notification that you are within that region, even if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your app isn’t running. And so for the nerds, CLBeaconRegion is the class in question.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there’s a property, notify entry state on display. And it says, when set to yes, the location
⏹️ ▶️ Casey manager sends beacon notifications when the user turns on the display and the device is already inside the region.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey These notifications are sent even if your app is not running. In that situation, the system launches
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your app into the background so it can handle the notifications, which is actually extremely interesting to me because I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t think of a way in which, I guess you could with push notifications,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but are there any other ways, Marco, that you could just have your app started arbitrarily in the background?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Background refresh and stuff, but like for a particular, like when you stumble into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a spot, I guess, I mean, you can do geofence tricks, you could do like all the various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco location-based APIs is now, like the major updates and regular updates and geofences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff like that. But otherwise, I don’t think any of them are really reliable enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you wanted to simulate this behavior with anything else, you couldn’t really do it very well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s the thing. I just thought this was all very interesting and something a little bit different that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my knowledge, not a lot of people have really been exploring. And I don’t know how to explore that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a non-retail sense, because you need these physical devices and beaming these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bluetooth packets in order to in order to do anything with iBeacons, but I could see it being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just really cool and really and really interesting things coming from it. And I agree, John, that there’s a dystopian
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version, which is, hey, ties are on sale. Hey, unmentionables are on sale. Hey, pots and pans are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on sale. Or there’s the cool version of, hey, let me tell you where, you know, we see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you’re in such a such a location in the museum. If you’d like to look at the gallery of M cars in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey BMW Welt, well, you need to go upstairs and to the left or whatever the case may be. And I just think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that would be really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I think with a lot of this stuff, reality kind of gets in the way for me. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tend to adopt this stuff very slowly and very late compared to everyone else. I still use paper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boarding passes at the airport. I still don’t use the thing on your phone, the passbook thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because usually there’s some level of complexity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and fumbling and delay with technology that if there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a quick paper way to do something, I’ll usually do it that way. Or if there’s some simple way, I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be much more likely to look around the floor of the museum I’m at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a directory or for a map than I am to take out my phone and try that. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so often this stuff doesn’t work right Or it’s not worth the effort to take your phone out of your pocket,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unlock it, find the app, find the thing, wait for it to connect, drain your battery.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s all these little tiny costs that add up to make it kind of clunky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in so many cases. I’m usually very skeptical of stuff like this, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually I avoid it for years after everyone else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tries it. And usually it dies out and it’s not a problem, and I save myself the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of ever having tried it.
⏹️ ▶️ John The museum thing, I have a friend who works in a museum, and he had been for years taking a bunch of old
⏹️ ▶️ John school iPods, I think even the ones with wheels and stuff, and charging a bunch of them up
⏹️ ▶️ John and filling them with audio programs that people would use the little click wheel to scroll through. They were
⏹️ ▶️ John manually making their own tour. As a sort of manually guided audio tour, you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John go to a certain section of the museum, rotate the little wheel, and hear a little story about something.
⏹️ ▶️ John If people were willing to tolerate that, especially museum patrons, which are like, you know, senior citizens and
⏹️ ▶️ John rich people, and I don’t know who goes to museums, but like, this
⏹️ ▶️ John would be a vast improvement if you could use these beacons and give a bunch of people iBOD touches, because the whole problem was trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John make something that was guided so that people didn’t have to manipulate the device. And if you just walk up to something and the little
⏹️ ▶️ John thing in your hand starts playing it, that’s that’s an improvement. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s definitely small areas where this will become influential. It only becomes really
⏹️ ▶️ John something that regular people encounter if those beacons are everywhere. That’s where
⏹️ ▶️ John the big value… Beacons in a few places and beacons in a few stores has some value, but if you just assume
⏹️ ▶️ John that when you went into a mall, the thing would be filled with beacons, then now you’ve got a platform
⏹️ ▶️ John on which people can do both more interesting and more terrible things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now you can launch that platform at.domains or.holdings or.systems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that one I don’t think it is dot Academy oh I got it beacon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dot plumbing that’s your new site right there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco museum dot solutions thanks a lot for three spots this week Squarespace transporter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and hover and we will see you next week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now the show is over they didn’t even mean to begin because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John let him, cause it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was accidental. And you can
⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at ATP.FM. And if you’re into Twitter, And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidental. They didn’t mean to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental. Tech podcasts so long.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was going to say that a new life awaited you in the off-world colonies, but I realized neither one of you would get that, so never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mind. Nope. You got to listen to the Bionic a couple episodes ago where they were going through these domains. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco freaking hilarious. The soft mat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was just thinking the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just like I was listening to that episode when I was walking my dog and so I couldn’t like go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco check out the list myself immediately and I kept listening through I’m like this can’t be real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half of these have to be made up This has to be a joke and then I get home and I look and they’re all real Like every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of these stupid domains
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do we ever find out if Mike got Mike dot sexy is dot sexy available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I don’t think it’s available yet. I think it’s in like there’s all these fate It’s in the hopper. Is it just me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or is the whole TLD thing, you think, a scam by ICANN to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever little percentage of the registrations that they get from all the trademark owners who got to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go register all their trademarks, all these different TLDs?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m interested to see how it goes because
⏹️ ▶️ John the cachet and the technological advantages of.com back
⏹️ ▶️ John in the days when address bars used to… I mean, I guess maybe there’s only the Mac platform. But remember when address bars used
⏹️ ▶️ John to stick on.com for you instead of doing a search if you just typed in a word by itself? Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ John That right away was a huge advantage. If you didn’t want the.net or the.org because you knew if they
⏹️ ▶️ John typed foo and hit return in the address bar, which people used to do back in the day, use the address bar, they would
⏹️ ▶️ John go to foo.com and then it would try www.foo.com and do all those heuristics. And
⏹️ ▶️ John now that’s gone, but I still think there’s a cachet to having the.com for most people.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I wonder if there’ll be a stigma associated with having
⏹️ ▶️ John clownpenis.fart, as the joke goes, or any other
⏹️ ▶️ John TLD that looks like you’re kind of like fly by night, or couldn’t you get the dot com, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John social aspect of TLDs, not the technical aspect, and not whether there’s a TLD that’s perfectly
⏹️ ▶️ John suited for you, that kind of like, we were here first, and we got the dot com,
⏹️ ▶️ John and everyone else has dot com, and you look weird because you have this other thing. The only place I can see where
⏹️ ▶️ John this would work out well, and I don’t know if they allow XXX or whatever, but all the porn sites, I assume, will rush to
⏹️ ▶️ John get XXX.sex or whatever, because people are probably typing those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco browsers, they’re typing. But they haven’t. We’ve had XXX for, I think, a couple years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. Have we? I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t want to let, do we have.sex? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure that’s one of the proposed ones. I mean, the thing is, these are released
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under, And by the way, before we leave this topic, we’ve had.biz and.info for a long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time now, and no one uses them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and.name, we’ve had.name. I’ve got a.name.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and.name is not too abused, but biz and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco info, those are just spam. The only things on there are spam.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, that’s all, it’s 100% spam. It’s affiliate marketing spam and just
⏹️ ▶️ John crap. This colloquy.info is the only.info site I know of that I would visit legitimately. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I guess they couldn’t get the dot com. That’s my first assumption. Like, why would you get colloquially dot info?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, exactly. So, you know, but you know, all these domains, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they, it’s like the people who made the yellow pages design this domain name system. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, they, they think that anyone is going to want to have like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, for instance, there’s a dot diamonds. And if you’re like, do you think major diamond
⏹️ ▶️ Marco companies are going to move their sites or create new sites as like, you know, company name dot diamonds?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or is that going to be really cheesy looking immediately?
⏹️ ▶️ John a banana. It’s a bonanza for domain squatters. Like I think if you’re gonna think who’s this guy, who’s this gonna hurt the
⏹️ ▶️ John most? It seems like it’s gonna hurt the domain squatters the most because you know, they’re just gonna have like parking pages and,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, maybe not hurt them. But like, all those accidental results you get on Google that are just someone squatting
⏹️ ▶️ John to redirect you, you know they’re gonna be all over dot diamond because it’s God forbid someone accidentally type something that
⏹️ ▶️ John looks like that or get a Google result that goes that though so many new places that look legitimate to someone
⏹️ ▶️ John at a glance that they can drive you through to probably take you to a porn site or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, like and I just think like the the tax this is gonna place on trademark holders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like to try to like okay well to what degree do you have to buy them
⏹️ ▶️ John like yeah I don’t think so like is Coca-Cola gonna get like Coca-Cola dot plumbing, I don’t think they are.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, they’re going to let that one go, you know? Like, they just, I mean, they don’t care. I wouldn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it would be an easy way to get money out of them, but I think they’re going to, they’re going to look at that list and say, if the list was five
⏹️ ▶️ John more, every corporation would buy the extra five, but the list is too long now. They’re going to be like, okay, well now you’ve pushed
⏹️ ▶️ John me to this and I’m going to say, no, I’m not going to get Coca-Cola that all of these, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John just going to keep, like, who knows if Coca-Cola even has Coca-Cola dot info or Coca-Cola dot biz. I bet they don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John have them. So I think they’re going to stick with the dot com. And I don’t know what’s going to happen with all these top
⏹️ ▶️ John level domains, but.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dot florist. Yeah. I mean, infinite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco numbers of podcast episodes could be recorded about these domains.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know the technical reasons why. Like, why do we have the top level domains at all? Like, I understand how DNS works and everything. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you were to remove the technical limitations and just say, what
⏹️ ▶️ John if the entire name was up for grabs? And when you got a domain, you just picked the name. and you just got Coca-Cola and there was
⏹️ ▶️ John no dot com, right? Like, then you could put dots in your names
⏹️ ▶️ John if you wanted, and people can make up any sort of something, dot something, dot something if they wanted to.
⏹️ ▶️ John In some ways, it would be cleaner in that you’re just fighting over, like, ASCII characters that
⏹️ ▶️ John make, or, you know, the Unicode with that crazy escaping system they have in domain names. Just a bunch of characters.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s just this weird artifact that there’s this certain last segment of it because of the way DNS works
⏹️ ▶️ John and the top level domain holders that that’s limited. But everything in front of that you can get
⏹️ ▶️ John you know I don’t even know if there’s length restrictions anymore, there probably is somewhere out in the distance, but you can just put any crazy garbage you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to try to fish people or whatever and it just has to end in one of these other crazy things. And the list of crazy things is getting
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger so I’m kind of okay with that. Like it’s moving us more towards you just register
⏹️ ▶️ John a name and here’s some length limits and here’s the character encoding has to be and you just pick the name we map it to your IP address
⏹️ ▶️ John somehow. So maybe that’s the endgame. Top-level domains. It’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ John fixed list. You just pick what you want. The last part of your thing to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wasn’t that a proposal like a year and a half or two years ago? Didn’t ICANN propose that they’ll just allow.anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and allow people to register any TLD they wanted? But I think that didn’t go anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That might be for the best. I don’t know. It seems like all of the… I mean, the value of a domain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so much smaller now because everyone just searches. And like, you know, Google ranking is so much more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important. Now, one thing that might be relevant here is how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weight is Google going to put on these keywords, these new TLDs? Is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this going to count favorably towards your rank on Google for these searches?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I think Google has long since learned to disregard. If anything, it’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be a negative, like it probably has for.info, because their weighting is not based on philosophy,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s based on practical results. Their battle with spam or whatever is like, practically speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John if more.biz domains are crappy and have spam, they’re going to get downranked. There’s not someone saying, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John that seems more specific because it says.museum. I don’t think that’s anywhere in their algorithm.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey .choose. All I want to know is, are you going to get overcast.weather?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is.weather one of them? I
⏹️ ▶️ John even know. I don’t even know. They probably have.podcast. They might have.podcast client. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco funny thing. They don’t. proposed.app which I would love to get overcast.app and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s one that would be interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh.app would just drive people crazy. Like you imagine like trying to discuss
⏹️ ▶️ John like… Well it would drive Mac heads
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah like what what is the website for your app it’s whatever.app and I
⏹️ ▶️ John use terminal.app to use mail.app to go to that.app. I mean someone would get terminal.app
⏹️ ▶️ John and mail.app and make something out of it. file name extensions they ruin everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s what these are really they’re just they’re they’re they’re like keyword spam domain extensions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so they just so tacky like I seriously I who are these people who came
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up who come up with this and say that’s a good idea people submitted
⏹️ ▶️ John them was it wasn’t like a yeah me pseudo-democratic process and I bet the people submitting them are all the people who make
⏹️ ▶️ John those parked spammy fishing sites yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean it’s just like it seems like they’re trying to make one for it for like every major industry basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a bunch of weirdly minor ones it’s just it’s just an odd list
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like this it’s this is clearly everything about this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is designed by committee like it’s obvious that there is no guiding authority here whatsoever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just all like well I guess we’ll have invite all these different stakeholders to the table
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we’ll come up with something with this task force and that everyone can agree on. Like there’s no one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s no authority here saying yeah but this is all kind of a bad idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anything else going on?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco early so. Do you want to talk about this Patreon thing? What?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Patreon is this this site that basically it lets you, you as a creative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person, get money from your fans every time you release something. So you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can say like, you know, every podcast episode I release or every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three blog posts I make or every five songs I write, you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the audience, can pledge ten bucks or five bucks or whatever for every X that I do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, is this what Jonathan Mann is doing? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, exactly. Okay. So, you know, the idea of it’s pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s good people behind it. Anyway, they emailed us inviting us to put our podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on there. And I don’t feel good about that. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s different with Jonathan Mann. He doesn’t fill his stuff up with ads. And he doesn’t really, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you don’t have a lot of great options to make money with your stuff directly, then that’s fine. But we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make money through ads. And we make good money through ads. And we make, I think, more through ads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than we would ever make through direct payments.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think if this is your only way, if you decide the way you’re making money is people are going to buy the thing, the consumers
⏹️ ▶️ John of the thing are going to buy it, then something like Patreon is great. But if you’re ad-supported, it almost feels
⏹️ ▶️ John like all you’re trying to do is get a little bit extra by soaking your 200 best fans for money.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I would much rather see, if you’re going to soak your 200 best fans for money, I would much rather see them get something out of it,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco something. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly. Because then they’re getting something, like then they have something that expresses their super fandom.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas with Patreon, they would have got the shows anyway. And I would rather sell
⏹️ ▶️ John somebody swag than do this type of thing. But if you’re trying to do a non-ad supported podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would totally do something like this, because you’re looking for some way to efficiently get money from people who want to give
⏹️ ▶️ John it to you for the thing that you make.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree on all counts.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we should do t-shirts or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, oh, definitely. But we need a better logo before we do t-shirts. Yeah. Preferably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something without the Mac Pro on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still only have mine yet. Don’t care. Terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should take the new off of it. Well, I guess this has ATP now. You should put soon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco funny. Put 2013 in quotes. Yeah. Will anybody, I mean, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, people are getting them now. But it’s like now, I think shipping estimates have slipped to April.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Rich Siegel still doesn’t have his. And slipping to April,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would love to know if that’s like, is there a problem or is that demand? And
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you’re almost, it’s almost hard to believe that it could be demand. You’re like, seriously, that many people on Mac Pro is
⏹️ ▶️ John like, okay, I can imagine some delay because like they weren’t ready to start manufacturing, couldn’t build up an inventory. But surely by this point,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s almost like there’s some part shortage or some other thing that’s preventing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as far as I can tell, the bottleneck might be Intel. Because if you try to buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these CPUs, not all of them, but if you try to buy, like especially the 8-core, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t buy one. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John everywhere they’re out of stock. They should swap in some i7s. Keep
⏹️ ▶️ John the prices the same, don’t tell anybody, hey this has better single-threaded performance, I don’t know what’s going on. I guess they can’t do that because of the PCI Express.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, they definitely can’t do that. I know, I know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, so I think the problem might be Intel, but it also might just be like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, this is a brand new factory, and a brand new place with a brand new staff, making a a brand new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product that they probably didn’t think was going to sell in massive volumes.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s a metal tube. Is it more complicated to manufacture than an iPhone? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, but it’s inexperienced. This is like a new thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s this new plant in Austin doing this cool… Or is it in Austin? Somewhere. It’s this new plant doing this crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing and with all these…
⏹️ ▶️ John Just say it. It’s Lazy Americans.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s lazy, but it is Americans as opposed to these places in Asia who have been manufacturing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like this for a long, long time and at massive volumes. Whereas here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have a lot less of the infrastructure set up for that here.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the part shortage theory and secondarily, distant second, the demand theory.
⏹️ ▶️ John But presumably, if it’s demand, we’ll hear about it. And either Apple will tout it and say, wow, we
⏹️ ▶️ John put the new Mac Pro on sale. And the sales were way more than we thought they would be. And they’ll announce some number. But I doubt they’ll ever mention
⏹️ ▶️ John the number. And the other way to tell would be on the earnings call, like margins on Macs went up. If Horace
⏹️ ▶️ John or somebody can calculate that and say, like, well, what could possibly be driving margins up in the Mac market? Maybe the
⏹️ ▶️ John new bajillion dollar Mac Pro is selling in huge numbers. But part shortage sure sounds like the
⏹️ ▶️ John most likely culprit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, if I had to take my best guess, I’d say it’s Intel. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the more I think about this and look at what’s coming and my current setup, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more I think that I should use this Mac Pro whenever it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes in and honestly if it doesn’t come in in the next month I might just even cancel it I mean just wait for the next one at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t cancel it you have to get it. I already got the AppleCare they’ve already invoiced me
⏹️ ▶️ John you got the thing where it starts yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and now yeah now I’m gonna have to call and make them move the date up from whenever like I got the the AppleCare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delivered like a month ago and so but yeah so now I’m definitely thinking with this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one like this is whatever the next Mac Pro comes out with the Haswell EP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chips that will be like you know 10-15% faster single threaded stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll probably upgrade to that for myself and then give this one to Tiff for her upgrade.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah there you go this is the hand-me-down thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which will make my office much quieter.
⏹️ ▶️ John People in the chatroom just cannot accept that I don’t want a gaming PC. Somehow it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like a form of arrogance that I don’t want a gaming PC. I just don’t want one. I want different things than you.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can have a gaming PC. I don’t want one. It’s not, I don’t think it’s a,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s anything to get upset about. What is it? Just make a damn gaming rig and get over yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not, I’m not getting over, I don’t think I’m too good for a game. I just don’t want one. It’s a thing I don’t want. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John want it and you can get it, but I don’t want it. And it doesn’t make either one of us a better person
⏹️ ▶️ John than the other person. If I had a house where I could have a second computer setup,
⏹️ ▶️ John then I would be much more interested in a gaming PC because I would say well I got the gaming PC over there and my Mac over here and I would decide
⏹️ ▶️ John which place I wanted to put which one but I don’t have that and I don’t want a KVM. Why don’t you want to get a KVM? Get
⏹️ ▶️ John over yourself. I don’t want it. I just don’t. I don’t want an extra complexity. I want one computer that does everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that we just trolled Casey into another Mac Pro discussion. Yeah, well. He’s trying to go to bed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just wait until yours arrives. Then his day of reckoning will come.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He just hung up. He’s deployed
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco He just locked it. He just lopped it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you see that picture from Underscore where he had his Backblaze mug on top of his Mac Pro? I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming that was his Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, that was actually a Backblaze blog post.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, oh well. I was like, I didn’t know Underscore had a Mac Pro. But anyway, you could find out if that
⏹️ ▶️ John warms your coffee. And then accidentally spill it into your $7,000 computer. Mine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was not that. It would have been $7,000 if I kept the original configuration,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I felt too bad about that. I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John that. That’s the one advantage, that the Mac Pro probably doesn’t have those little water detector things inside
⏹️ ▶️ John it. That’s true, actually. You’re like, what coffee? Why does it smell like coffee in there? I don’t know. You must be
⏹️ ▶️ John crazy. For some reason, it smells like really good coffee inside this computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John it smell Kenyan? Because I only have Kenyan. I only have Kenyan, that isn’t about Kenyan at all.