64: It Never Died Because It Never Lived

08 May 2014

Apple/Amazon as a net neutrality debate, App.net’s grim future, Chrome beta’s URL bar, and Casey goes open-source.

Episode Description:

Hurry if you want an ATP T-Shirt! Just $19, and the sale may be over by the time you read this!
Follow-up:
- Who plays video games vs. self-identified "gamers"
- ComiXology
  - Is Apple's 30% cut of in-app purchases the same as net neutrality?
  - Vihart Video
  - Internet2
  - Who should blink, Apple or ComiXology?
- AppLinks
App.net sunsets its employees
- Brianna Wu's Post
- Tent
Chrome experiments with removing URLs from the omnibox
Casey open-sourced his Camel blog engine
After-show:
- Casey's flower boxes
- John's code on CPAN
  - Rose
- Marco's bastardized K&R style wedged into his Objective-C code
- Brent Simmons on Javascript integers

Transcript start

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well someone say something funny first and then that can be air opener and then we’ll start.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh I’ll get right on that. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s another case where we got a bunch of feedback that I thought talked about something we had covered

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the previous show but apparently we did not do a good enough job so if we don’t get the job done the first time we’ll go back and try

⏹️ ▶️ ^John again. This was about video games and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John topic came up when both of you had said that you had played video games when you were younger and didn’t play them as much now and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we talked about why that might be. And I talked about the average age of a gamer. And then we brought out stats from the ESA,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think on the last show and talked all about this. And a couple people wrote in to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John talk about the difference between people who play video games and people who are self identified

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gamers. Some people wrote in to say, Oh, I just play a couple iOS games now and then I certainly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wouldn’t call myself a gamer. One of the best ones I thought was Joe lion who wrote in to say, this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a section from what he wrote, having put in hundreds or thousands of hours playing games over the past couple of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John years, I by no means consider myself a gamer. So I mean, a lot of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put in the argument in terms of time, like, I just play once in a while, not a big deal. But this guy plays games all the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time, his own accounts, hundreds or thousands of hours, like in playing during the commute, just obsessively playing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John games, finishing games or whatever, but does not consider himself a gamer. And the discussion

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was not about what I would call a self identified gamer. It was just about the idea that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know that you and Marco said most people you know like they thought it was a common thing that like you played games when you’re younger and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t play them anymore as an adult. Self-identified gamer is a whole other ball of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wax. I mean as many people uh pointed out including Joe Lyon like I watch tv all the time. Do I identify

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as a television watcher? No. It’s not it’s not like it’s not the games you play, it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how long you play them. Identity is entirely up to the person. I would call myself a self-identified

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like I would call myself a a gamer, but it’s for reasons entirely outside how many games I play,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how long I play, that my guarantee I play games less for less amount of clock time than than almost anybody

⏹️ ▶️ ^John else who considers themselves a gamer. So that’s more of an identity and a cultural type thing. It has nothing to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do with that. And it certainly has nothing to do with what we were discussing, which was, is it common for people to play

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a lot of games when young and stop when they’re older and by going through the stats on gamers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we discovered that that’s not the case that in fact, there was one of the stats people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was like twice as many adult women play games as males under 18.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the average age of gamer was like our age. So it’s very clear that the majority of the people who are playing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John games today did not stop playing games when they got older. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hang on a second. I’ve got to go and say goodnight to one of my children, but I’ll be back.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You can you can you can just vamp for a second and make a nice cut point and I’ll add something in but this is something I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do I’ll be right back. All

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right, well, now you’re never going to be able to make a reasonable edit out of this but tough luck. What was I saying before I left?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I believe you would finish that follow up bit. So we’re moving on to other follow up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I guess that’s all I had to say about video games. But basically, the thing the message that we failed to get across

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was that the entire discussion was not about self identified gamers. That was not part of, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this feedback from Joe Lyons said that we needed to define the terms better. If we did a bad job of that, I’m sorry, but that’s we were not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John talking about self-identity. We’re just talking about the phenomenon on is it common for people to play games when they’re young and then stop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John playing them when they’re older, regardless of during any of those times whether they consider themselves self-identified

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gamers. And like I said, I don’t think that tag has anything to do with any criteria

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you might bring up that you could measure, like how long you play, what types of games you play, how obsessed you are with games, anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like that. It’s more, you know, you choose to identify yourself, you choose if that’s some part of your identity. Again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with television, I don’t, my part of my identity is not that I watch television, but part of my identity is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I play games. Why? Because that’s what I choose to do. And that’s up to each individual person. But that’s not what we were talking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. So we also got a lot of feedback about our discussion, what was really more your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey guys’s discussion about comiXology and in-app purchase

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and Apple and who’s at fault, on first, what’s on second, I don’t know what’s on third. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a lot of people wrote in to compare your arguments, John, to the arguments –

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I hope I got this right. I think I got this right – against net neutrality. So this whole discussion about a fast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey lane on the internet and, oh, if Netflix is pumping a crudload of data across Comcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey pipes, then you know what? Netflix should probably have a discount or maybe even pay

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey more depending on who you ask. And so can you address how this is either the same or different than net neutrality?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It doesn’t really matter whether the people who are sending the feedback were for or against net neutrality. And in fact, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what they want, wanted to say was that all those people who sent that feedback, I would guess

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the real debate they want to have is about net neutrality, because regardless of which side

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they are on the Apple thing, what they’re trying to say is this Apple situation is similar to net neutrality.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if you don’t have the same opinion about both situations, you’re being inconsistent. therefore you’re wrong about one of those two things. And it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doesn’t really matter if they think we’re wrong about Apple and comiXology if they think we’re wrong about a net neutrality or whatever, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just wanted to see some consistency. And I didn’t like a lot of this was over Twitter and have time to send back

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tweets that explain this whole big long thing. Although I tried to a couple times on Twitter before I realized it was pointless.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And for emails, I figured we would address it on the show because like one or two three responses came in, you’re like, Alright,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no big deal. And one or two Twitter, but it was super common that everybody was like, you’re going to give

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re saying that Apple should cut a deal with Amazon.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And how is that any different than the ISPs cutting a deal with Netflix or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Amazon or anything like that? And I think it’s different in a couple of ways, some very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John important and some less important. Well, you can decide which ones you find more convincing. The biggest

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and most important difference in what I tried to express on Twitter, because I thought, oh, here’s a succinct way to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John express this is Apple doesn’t sell access to the Internet. That was not convincing to anybody. It was like, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so what? What’s different about the Internet and Apple selling access to its

⏹️ ▶️ ^John customers? You give us a 30% cut. We let you use our payment system and get access to our customers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I wasn’t about to try to explain in 140 characters what the difference between

⏹️ ▶️ ^John access to Apple’s customers and the Internet is. I will try to do so now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The Internet is the Internet is it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a series of tubes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, by definition there is one Internet. Anything you connect to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Internet becomes part of the Internet. The Internet is the way we are all connected to each other. There are not multiple Internets.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There’s not one. There’s not there’s not two. There’s not five. If you made a second one and it connected to the Internet,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it would by definition become part of the Internet because every place in the Internet is reachable to every other place plus

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or minus nat and all this other stuff but that’s like conceptually that’s what the internet is it’s how we’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all connected to each other uh that is very different than getting access

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the customers of the second place uh cell phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know platform or any other type of thing like that like maybe if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if android didn’t exist and i guess if microsoft didn’t also exist you would have a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more of an argument. But I would say that even in that case, the possibility

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of something coming up that would be similar to iOS, like if Android didn’t exist, you’re like, well, Google could enter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the phone space and make their own operating system and platform and do something or Apple could or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Amazon could or Microsoft could write. No one is saying, well, what about when the competitor to the internet comes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John along? Because this whole internet thing could be replaced by just some hungry competitor comes up with the new internet,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the internet to which is the thing that exists, look it up. But anyway, like does it still? Yeah, I’m sure it does. And I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sure it will eventually be connected to the Internet. What about the IPv6 Internet will come to replace the old Internet? That

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not much of a possibility. I don’t think happening these days that the Internet access is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Internet itself is a very is like perhaps the only unique, singular,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John different than everything else in many, many different ways.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that the Internet is so different from the iOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app store that it doesn’t apply. But if If you don’t find that, they’re basically the same thing. It’s a bunch of people connected through

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tubes to each other. It should be the same. The second part of this thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and this gets into the nitty gritty details of net neutrality, is in the United States,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your choice for getting internet access are much more limited than your choice for a cell phone provider. Pretty much anyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the United States can get an iPhone or has the opportunity to. If they assume they can afford an iPhone,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they can get a phone that has T-Mobile prepaid. They can get an Android phone. you can get one of my dumb

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phones like that your choices for cell phone tablets so on and so forth

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no matter where you live in the United States you have many different choices and a lot of places the United States

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you only have one choice for internet access and some of those places where you might have two choices soon you will have one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John choice because there is constant consolidation a lot of these places have local monopolies

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the reason they have local monopolies leads to the third reason in the United States and you I don’t know about the rest of the world but in the United

⏹️ ▶️ ^John States a lot of our internet infrastructure was built essentially with taxpayer dollars,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these broadband companies got billions of dollars in tax breaks in exchange for Okay, well, we’ll give you these tax

⏹️ ▶️ ^John breaks. So we’ll help you out here, the government said, as long as you build out your networks to provide more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people with access, because we as the government had decided it’s for the good of the nation that more people have broadband access, therefore, here

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a billion dollar write off for you to continue to expand your networks. So these networks that these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the ISPs have some of whom are monopoly and they’re in their particular local markets, just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John built by those ISPs, they were built with taxpayer money, and have been operating

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for many years in a way that is neutral to that where they don’t decide, you know, who’s traffic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will be sped up and slowed down based on who will pay them. All of this, I think makes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the internet which it’s complicated by the fact that, of course, the iOS app store runs over the internet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if you want to think about that, you can think, well, okay, what if Comcast decides they want 40% of every purchase of the app store,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everyone would go nuts, right? I think they are extremely different situations

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I don’t see any inconsistency in saying the Internet this strange singular thing that in the United

⏹️ ▶️ ^John States is only accessible to people through a single broadband ISP in many locations and has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John been partially paid for by taxpayer money and has operated in this sort of common carrier

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like situation for many many years should be treated differently

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than one vendors App Store and I put a link in the we’ll put it in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John show notes to this recent by heart video trying to explain that neutrality, which is kind of a boring, weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing to understand. But she does these neat little things where she draws on a notepad and talks over it, and maybe it won’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make it any clearer, but at least you’ll be entertained. The fun thing about her example is, as Casey

⏹️ ▶️ ^John alluded to, is I think he watched the video. The example she gives the way she tries to draw an analogy is that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John customer who uses a lot like Netflix, you know, it’s like, wow, huge amount of the traffic going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John through these is pieces. Netflix, the is the example she uses the ice piece go to the Netflix and say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, 30% of our traffic is from your stupid movies. Why don’t you pay us some extra money? Otherwise, we’ll throttle

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your bandwidth, which is exactly the opposite of the situation that I was suggesting for Amazon or at the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John App Store in general, which is, hey, it looks like you’re selling $20 billion worth of comic books. Would you guys like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a volume discount will take less of a percentage if you if you sell more because we want people to drive more and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more business through our store. I don’t think the direction you’re turning the dollar

⏹️ ▶️ ^John makes so much of a difference. The bottom line is, I think Apple should have the right to set whatever terms it wants for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the people who sell through its App Store. And I don’t think there’s anything magical about it being 30% for everybody. And as many

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people pointed out, it’s not 30% for everybody. If you sell a commercial commercial physical product through the App Store,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you don’t have to pay Apple anything. Why? Because Apple makes the rules of their App Store. It’s already not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uniform. And all I was suggesting was continue to make it not uniform come up with a different rate, take larger,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John smaller percentage based on volume based on whatever the heck you want to do. Unlike the net neutrality

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if Apple gives Amazon a break and bad things start to happen,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they can change their mind. Apple can at any time change the terms and they control their own app store. It is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a private thing. Yes, it happens over the Internet, but it is definitely a private thing. And the only

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other two points of when I’m making the Apple comics, all of you think which I think a chance to put in the show is for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the most part. The only feedback we got were the net neutrality ones and people telling me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that the app store has to stay the way it is. Otherwise, bad things will happen. Oh, and the third one was that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple shouldn’t budge because Amazon’s in the wrong and why should Apple change anything? It’s Apple’s right to do whatever it wants, blah, blah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blah. Nobody wrote me in to say that was better for users this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way that not being able to buy comic books through the comics. All the app is better for user. Nobody argued that, which makes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me think that that is a pretty slam dunk. Everyone agrees that’s worse. So all the people arguing the opposite are basically saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s okay for things to be slightly worse on Apple’s platform because and then the greater good like because they have to hold the line

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because if they give in now, they’ll just be giving in forever, and they’ll lose control of the App Store and so on and so forth. I think that slippery

⏹️ ▶️ ^John slope angle would be more convincing if this was the first time this happened. And if this hadn’t been the case on the App Store

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for years and Amazon had shown that it’s not willing to budge. And I think the other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John point about the situation is that the way I think about it is, is this a bigger problem for Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or Amazon? If you know, Amazon says, Okay, we’re gonna make you buy everything through a website,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and Apple doesn’t get those sales anymore? Who is that a bigger problem for? Is it a bigger problem for Apple now that they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not getting a 30% of anything because Apple selling everything through the website? Or is it a bigger problem Amazon and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that people won’t buy as many comics because they have to go to the stupid website? I think and as I tried to argue last

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time, it is a bigger problem for Apple because it makes Apple’s platform worse.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And Amazon always has the excuse of well, yeah, Apple’s platform is a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bit worse. But hey, if you don’t like it by Kindle, like they have their own platform to promote in exchange.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Right. And so yes, Amazon is going to lose sales because people can’t buy things easily. But their answer is so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much more compelling than Apple’s. Their answer is, you shouldn’t be buying the stupid iPads anyway. By Kindle Fire, we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have an amazing looking screen. It’s a great place to read comics. You can buy them right on the device. By the way, it’s also cheaper than an iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple’s answer is, yeah, it’s worse. But trust us, we really need to hold a line on this because if we give into Amazon, the world

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will come to an end. And I did get two different kinds of feedback from people were like, Oh, this happened.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And they kept using their mom. The examples I’m just I’m just the messenger. Don’t shoot me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John again. It could be because their mothers are much more technologically advanced than their fathers and their fathers don’t touch iPads. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they were saying this happened on my mom’s iPad, and I just put a shortcut to the you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the website on her iPad, and she just goes to that. It’s no problem, but not a big deal. Another person

⏹️ ▶️ ^John said this happened. They’re talking about when the Kindle store stopped having an internal web view for the website. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^John happened on, you know, back in 2011 for the Kindle store. And from from that point on, my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mom always calls me when she wants to buy a book and I buy it for her. And then other people saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this happened. And then someone, you know, stopped even buying things because they said, Oh, this is stupid. It’s broken

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now. I’m not going to do this anymore. So anecdotal evidence on all sides, whether this is a problem or not. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I actually I think it was only one person who said that And that is not a big deal. You just go to the web link. But anyway, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think this hurts Apple more than it hurts Amazon. And I think after several years, it’s clear

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that Apple is not going to win this by holding strong. And I just don’t see the point

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anymore in holding the line and making things worse for users with the expectation that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with the argument that if you do anything else, just the App Store will come crumbling down. If they do this, and it turns out bad, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still have total control. Apple can change the rules at any time. I think it’s worth an experiment, especially it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could be a secret experiment where they have secret deals with Amazon and they call it off and they have NDAs and no one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can talk about it or whatever. Like Apple is in the driver’s seat here. I just think it’s time for customers to stop suffering.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well hold on though. There was one other point that a few people pointed out that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of the reasons why Amazon might not want to do Apple’s in-app purchase system has nothing to do with the 30% cut

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and everything to do with Amazon wanting to own that buying experience. I alluded

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to that a little bit, but we got a number of people pointing out specifics of why that’s important to them. So one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the biggest, of course, is they want your credit card information to be entered into Amazon.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They want to have the most credit cards on file of anybody, and they want your default behavior

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be, if you’re going to buy something, buy it from Amazon with one click. Done, done, done. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for you to be using Apple’s system, that’s one more customer than Amazon might not have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco using them. Also, Amazon extensively, when possible,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and this has become less possible with big name ebooks because of the agency deal, but when possible,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Amazon uses heavy price controls and price tweaking. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco why if you go visit Amazon product pages for almost anything,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s kind of unusual to see the same price twice. And the prices seem kind of random,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco especially on digital goods where they can fudge numbers. And they reserve the right

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on their app store to change the price of apps at will and stuff like that. There’s all sorts of ways

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Amazon uses price control as a sales or data tactic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And they can’t really do that at the kind of granularity and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco volume they would want to do it at in an Apple system at all. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and again, so it’s all I think with Amazon, it’s much more about owning that transaction, user behavior,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco getting everyone using Amazon and paying through Amazon. I don’t think even if Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco system was free, I don’t think Amazon would use it. Now it is Apple’s fault for disallowing them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from using their own. That certainly is something Apple could change if they wanted to, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco again I think that opens up a weird can of worms and I think that would be a bad precedent to set.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I still don’t think allowing alternate payment systems is reasonable. I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think anyone suggested that. A lot of people sent in email about this saying, you know, basically saying, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they should never allow alternate. Yeah, they probably shouldn’t allow alternate payment systems. Like you can see how that could be chaos

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and terrible and everything. And if it’s the case that all Amazon wants is credit card numbers, because Apple has way more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John credit cards than Amazon does. That’s someone threw around a stat recently, but it wasn’t even close. And you would think Amazon would have more credit cards, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John apparently not. But if that’s if that’s the line in the sand that Amazon is making, I still think this is Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John problem. And I think it’s even worse problem because it’s like, oh, what can we do? In fact, if we made it free, they still wouldn’t buy like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Amazon has things that Apple doesn’t. Amazon has a popular store where people buy tons of stuff. Apple has a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of semi popular store where people buy some things and apparently iBook sells comics too. But Merlin

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was saying that it’s a terrible experience and you know, like it’s a problem. You know, it’s a similar

⏹️ ▶️ ^John situation that Apple was with Google. Google has something that Apple needs and Apple decided we’re going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to make our own, which is a good strategic move because you don’t want to rely on your your deadly enemy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be providing you with this essential functionality, but it’s really hard. And Google is really good at what it does. And Apple tried to do some of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John same stuff itself and didn’t do that good a job. And it’s getting better. What are they going to do now? Like it as a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John platform owner, Apple has to figure this stuff out. They can’t have a platform and say, do everything our way, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re not gonna use anything from Google and we’re not gonna use anything from Amazon. And just everything’s going to be a little bit worse. Like their job as a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John platform is to encourage a rich ecosystem of people who provide awesome apps. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if everyone knows if you’re going to buy stuff, go to Amazon’s platform. And if you’re going to do anything with cloud stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go to Google’s platform. But I guess anything else you know, like this is Apple’s problem long term. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know what the solution is. I’m just arguing for at this point, uh, being stubborn

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and holding the line for another three years as they’ve done with, you know, allowing you to purchase stuff inside applications

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not is going to hurt Apple more than it hurts Amazon or more than it hurts Google. Unless you know, the other solution

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is Apple could just tell tons of iOS devices because if I always had 90% market share, then suddenly this is back to being Amazon

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and Google’s problem, but they don’t. So for now, it’s Apple’s problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, they do have that kind of level of a lot of things like, you know, web browsing with purchase

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco intent and stuff like that, like Apple, the iOS platform does represent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco itself way larger than its installed base in in things like, you know, what percentage of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doing actual online purchasing of goods are using Apple stuff or you know, what percentage

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of people buying books online, buying movies online, you know, that kind of stuff. I bet Apple’s platforms

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco actually are big enough in those that Amazon, for instance, has to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an iOS app for their business to be healthy in that in that department.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I don’t I don’t know if they ever broke those down by how many purchases were through apps versus how many were through mobile Safari,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John someone going to amazon.com and just buying, you know, sweaters and stuff like I don’t I don’t know if it’s broken down by app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Amazon’s perfectly happy to let you use your iPad as a web browser and buy stuff from Amazon.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So can we go back a second to the is this or is this not net neutrality debate?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Because I feel like you kind of fluff that off. Well, it’s not the internet, thus it’s not the same.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So no, it’s – and I don’t know if it’s quite so simple. And the way I look at it, and it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey didn’t occur to me until people wrote in about it, but if you look at the situation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at my house today, if I want to watch some content, let’s Netflix

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as an example, Verizon is standing between me and that content.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So somehow or another, I need Verizon to kind of orchestrate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the exchange between Netflix and me. In a similar vein, if I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey an iPhone and I want some content, be it a comic or be it an app or whatever the case

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey may be, Apple is standing between me and the content I want.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I think what people are bothered by is, at this point,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey couldn’t you make a reasonable argument that the same kind of common carrier

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey stuff that applies to Verizon, isn’t that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey almost aren’t we almost at the point that that applies to Apple to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple’s not Verizon is not between you and the content you want Verizon is between you and the internet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Sure. And that’s that’s an important distinction because when you’re buying something through Apple, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John buying something from Apple store, right? Someone uploaded to Apple, Apple has it. Verizon has nothing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Verizon doesn’t like… You are choosing to go through Verizon’s gate to get to the internet,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at which point you can choose wherever you want to go. I mean, you’re going through the… For crying out loud, you’re going through the internet

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to get to the App Store, if you want to think of it that way. Verizon is the gate between you and buying the thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Why shouldn’t Verizon get 40% of every purchase through the App App Store. They are your gate to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John internet. And the internet is a different thing. It’s how we are all connected to each other. Verizon

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does not own anything on the internet. Verizon does not run the internet. Verizon doesn’t run Netflix. Verizon doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accept uploaded videos from movie theaters to Netflix. Verizon doesn’t manage the subscriptions of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to Netflix. Verizon has nothing to do with Netflix. They are a gateway to the internet. They like to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put themselves in between and say, oh, well, the entire internet is our oyster. No matter what you want to do there,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we can extort money from whatever the most popular things are because otherwise we’ll cut off their access. And we can do that because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the US anyway, in many markets, we have monopolies. And what are they going to do? Go to a different competitor. Verizon has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nothing. Apple owns the App Store. They accept uploads. They have a developer program. They made the hardware. They made the software.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They allow people to upload things. They accept your money. They do it like that is Apple. We’re going through the Internet to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get to Apple. It’s not the same thing as the Internet at all. The Internet is a special, unique snowflake.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m going to say that it is different than everything else. The internet is not the app store for crying out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John loud. The app store is on the internet. Without the internet, nothing works. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey simply because Apple made the app store,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we have to play by their rules, even if they’re completely unfair.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And owns it and runs it and makes all decisions about it. Is it a private entity? It’s basically private versus

⏹️ ▶️ ^John public. And I think the internet works best and has historically been treated as a public thing that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we all share together. Because it doesn’t work if we cut ourselves off from it and try to divvy it up into little pieces

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and disconnect. If you disconnect a sub network from the Internet, that’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not that you’re not on this. You’re not on the Internet anymore. It’s pointless to anybody. The Northeast says, well, we’re not going to communicate with anybody

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who’s not in the Northeast. Like, that’s pointless. The whole point is we’re all connected to each other through it. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what makes the Internet the Internet. It is a unique thing. It should be treated differently than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everything else. That’s totally different than things that live on the Internet. I mean, it is complicated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by the fact that the app stores on the internet would be simpler if it was just like something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that wasn’t involved in the internet. But everything’s involved in the internet now. The whole thing with net neutrality is if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John allow regional ISPs to be gatekeepers and extort money for things that are already being paid for on both ends, they’re getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to choose the winners and losers. Apple chooses winners and losers in its own app store all the time. They choose who to feature. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^John choose who to be rejected. They choose every… They choose to make the rules. They change the rules once your application is in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app store. course they pick the winners and losers in the app store it’s their thing but they don’t choose whether

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can get to the app store Verizon would choose oh well if Apple doesn’t pay us we’re not gonna allow people to get to the app store over

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their iOS devices wirelessly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right it’s almost as if you’re creating your own intranet speaking of which our sponsor this week

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thanks a lot to igloo for sponsoring our show once again. They’re pretty cool people there. All right, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco last bit of follow up is on app links. Quick little thing. We talked about the Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco project app links last week. And we got a bunch of feedback from people who are much more familiar

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with it than we are saying that they’re really the point of app links is mostly not about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going from browsers to apps, which is what we were mostly talking about. It’s mostly to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more intelligently link from apps to other apps without bouncing through the browser. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for instance, if you know, like in the Twitter app, if they if they integrated app links, and you link to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an Instagram link, well, assuming Twitter and Facebook, we’re talking, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bet Twitter would actually explicitly disable the Instagram link from working. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco suppose it was some other service Twitter is friendly with like okay suppose

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s the Tumblr app and Tumblr app wants to link to Instagram because I don’t think they hate each other yet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so the Tumblr app would you know link directly to Instagram instead of you know bouncing through the web

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco web browser so it’s you still have to fetch the page but then you know they have a library that handles that for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you so it’s kind of it’s still kind of iffy it’s still you don’t have to fetch the page

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well they have to fetch the the HTML. No, you don’t because like that’s part of the API. That’s one of the things that people were pointing out to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John us is that because Casey brought that up as well and I was looking at the doc. So like the stuff is still in the page,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but that’s like the protocol. Like how do you provide this information to the thing but Facebook or somebody

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like provides a library that like they said you can crawl the pages yourself and extract the information

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but we also provide an API that basically you just give us a URL and we give you the equivalent

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like app link and oh that’s right yeah the discovery service

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right Right. So like, so they’ll crawl them and they’ll like, so then you don’t have to go out to a page and get it. If you’re lucky, it’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be in like a cache or a local thing or, you know, I don’t know. It boils down to the same thing, but basically like they want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be able to given, uh, you know, given a URL that I would go to on a webpage

⏹️ ▶️ ^John instead of going to that webpage, have something else that has already been to that web page, extract the information needed to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John build the app link. And that takes me deeply into another application. And hopefully you don’t, the thing doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to actually go to that webpage, pull it up and do that thing. Hopefully something has done it before. But that that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the equivalency. That’s the I think the piece that I was missing in this thing is basically like, given a URL that works in a web

⏹️ ▶️ ^John browser, that would work just fine, like it shows you the thing you’re going to buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever. Tell me what is the equivalent location inside an application and form that into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an app link that I can use to get to the equivalent page inside another app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, that is a fantastic way for Facebook to capture tons of click data on all the URLs people are clicking in apps.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Now you see now I know why they launched us. There we go. That’s that’s the reason right there. It’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a discovery service. It’s just an implementation detail. Don’t worry about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, you’re right because they want to bypass the web tape is the only the only way you could you get to places with like, you know, protocol

⏹️ ▶️ ^John helpers are going through a web page and redirecting you to the like whatever protocol handler that I was says is belongs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to your application. It’s like no, no, no, we’ll we’ll get that. You know, given the URL, we will tell you what the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John equivalent application page is based on all this metadata that is in the URL. And that’s why this stuff is on a web page.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it makes more sense to me now that like, you know, if you don’t support app links, you’ll just go to the page and the page will show you details

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for that book. But if that page has app link information, and you tap on an app that supports app

⏹️ ▶️ ^John links, we won’t show you that detail page for the book. Instead, we’ll take you directly to the bookselling application

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that you know, the page that shows the detail inside the app instead of going to a web browser,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right. And for every single link you tap in any application that supports It’s going to first check with the Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Discovery Service and yeah, anyone else can run a Discovery Service, but this is going to be the default one that’s already built in and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco free. So of course, everyone’s going to just use that and that way every single link you ever tap in an app that supports this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco will first tell Facebook that you’re clicking on it. That’s fantastic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But, but it’s there. I mean, it may only tell Facebook, but you know, Facebook wants to have this constellation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of applications surrounding their data. And so they, they want to use it for their purposes and like, okay, well, if they don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have the Facebook whatever app installed take them to facebook.com slash whatever but if they do have the Facebook whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app installed don’t bother sending to the Facebook icons that send them to the app because they think their big thing now is like you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know customize experiences in native applications instead of sending people to one big blue website

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we also have t-shirts for sale we have t-shirts for sale for a very short time remaining we only

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have right now there’s as we record there’s like four days remaining when we release this it’ll be more like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one or a day and a half remaining. So, please, if you want a t-shirt, which we greatly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco appreciate, because we’ll make a few dollars on each one, if you want a t-shirt, please

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get it quickly, because you’re almost out of time. But thank you very much to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everyone who’s bought them so far. The numbers have really surprised me. We’ve sold, as we record,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just under a thousand, which is amazing. I think I was estimating like a few hundred maybe at best, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so I’m very happy. So thank you, everyone, for buying our shirts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep. That’s very awesome of everyone who has and we appreciate it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So if you want one go to ATP dot FM slash shirt.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And we did announce this on last week’s show. And that was that was like your advance notice. So if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re hearing this show and it’s like Sunday you probably missed it already. Yeah. This is all this is only

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the people who are going to download the show when it comes out on Friday or I think Saturday you might have time. So you did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have an entire week to try to get these shirts. I know people are going to be sad because they missed it because people wait to the last minute

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they can’t decide if they want it or not. So if you’re listening to this now and you think you might want a shirt, just pause

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the podcast and go see if the sale is still on their price to move people. Some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people are asking if they thought the source code in the back would come out. Our answer is we have no idea, but we really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hope it does.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Otherwise, yeah, we have no way to tell. I mean, I like I made it as big as possible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I intentionally made the lines very short so that I could scale the text up and have it fit in the back I also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco used Monaco bold so everything should be a little bit thicker which should make it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a little bit more likely to come out I think so and we only used a few colors they can they can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reuse the color but that happened like dither it or anything weird like that so I thought you’re using men low you didn’t use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my low oh sorry it is men low you’re right yeah I use men low so it so it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco look stupid but yeah so it’s it should be relatively thick so it should turn

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out but we aren’t screen printers and we aren’t teespring and we because the way teespring works

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we can’t really get a sample first like we have to get put them put them for sale before any are printed including

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ours and we will get them when everyone else does so we think the code on the back will turn out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but we really can’t know for sure until it does so we can’t really guarantee that but we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John find out if it doesn’t think of it this way you’ll have the t-shirt equivalent of the upside down airplane stamp

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah i mean like i and i i have a few other shirts from Teespring. And their their quality seems really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good. Like they’re they’re a real screen printing shop. It isn’t doing like what CafePress does where it’s where it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco basically like a transfer almost. They’re actually like it’s a real screen printer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And you know, they were able to get quite a lot of detail on the on the shirts I’ve had previously from them. So I have high hopes, but we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco see.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. So we got some news about app.net yesterday. Is that right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yesterday when we record this anyways. And it sounds like they’re sunsetting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey their brand without sunsetting their brand. Oh, no, they’re winding down. Ah, my apologies.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, no, no, sorry. They’re winding down just the developer incentive program. App.net will continue operating

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on a forward basis. With

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey nobody actually dedicated to it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right. See, this is sad. I mean, I mean, I can’t really say that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no one saw this coming, because we all saw this coming, I think, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I just don’t, I think they should have just killed it. And, because I’m sure they’re going to kill it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s, you know, maybe they haven’t killed it yet because they want to wait out people who have paid, so they don’t have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco try to deal with issuing refunds for like partially fulfilled subscriptions, which we, that’s a pretty good reason.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But, although if they were going to do that, should stop taking subscriptions now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So maybe that wasn’t their plan. But now what they basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco said is, so a few weeks ago in mid-April was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when all of the initial subscriptions expired. So if you were one of the backers at the very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco beginning, which is where I think most of their user base came from, at least most of their paying user base,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you were one of original backers that they did kind of like a Kickstarter style thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then they lower the price, then you got extended. And so anyway, all those subscriptions were up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this a few weeks ago in early April. And so of that massive original

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wave of backers, they basically said they didn’t get enough renewals to be able to afford any other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or any full time employees anymore. So there are now no more employees,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they will use contract work here and there occasionally. as the budget permits

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which is a fancy way of saying if you subscribe some more and so it’s it’s basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like there’s basically no one working on it anymore and they said it’s it’s financially

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco healthy enough to keep going indefinitely but you know that statement is probably based on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the number of subscribers that it has today and now that they’ve announced that it’s kind of dying or dead

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I suspect the number of subscribers will continue to go down. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I suspect that, you know, an actual shutdown is likely within probably, I don’t know, six months.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So did you, either of you guys renew when the renewal happened?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I did and now I regret it, of course.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Same here. Same here. I didn’t actually because I just never use it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I do use it. I still use it every day. And, you know, I’ll be sad to see it go away. But,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, what can you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do? Yeah, I don’t really actively use it. I well, I use it to announce that we’re live.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And there’s somewhere to the order of 200 people that subscribe to that. And actually 204.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I use it when somebody mentions me. But that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it. I never actively go to app.net to just see what’s cracking on app.net.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The only time I ever go is if somebody’s addressing me or I’m announcing that we’re live.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I discovered when my renewal was coming up, I decided, you know what? I don’t use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this anymore. So I don’t want to pay for it again. So let me convert my paid account to a free account. And to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that, you have to stay under a certain following limit. I think it’s like 40 people that you can follow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s something like that. And so I had to reduce my following list down

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to that number. And so what I did was I went through the following list and I just opened up all those people’s timelines on app.net

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and anyone who had not posted anytime recently, I assume had abandoned

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the service, and therefore I could safely unfollow them. And it was really, really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco easy to get the number down by that method. Because so many people, it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it was I was actually kind of surprised like how many people who I initially had followed, were no longer using the service

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it like so many people hadn’t posted in months. Some of them hadn’t posted in over a year, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco service is about two years old. of them hadn’t posted in over a year. Some of them had never posted and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they were like I had followed them because of like a Twitter friend finder kind of thing and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it was it was kind of sad and it was it was kind of sobering. I really think you know there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are people who use it every day no question but I think it’s a really small group and I’ve heard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from from developers of app.net.apps that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it just there were just never enough users to really make development for it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco feasible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, you needed a critical mass of your friends to be there for it to be viable for you. And I went over

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there and it became very clear very quickly that a critical mass of the people I, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, interact with did not make it over there from Twitter. And so for a while, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there was a tiny little bubble of people over there that I would talk with in that in that arena.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But it was clear that most of my interactions were still going to have to take place on Twitter on Twitter because that’s where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everybody was and app that became kind of like a back channel for Twitter because of the small subset of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who are, you know, driven to app.net by anger at Twitter or by just, you know, desired having like that could be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John interesting back channel for commentary and stuff, but it was never going to be like enough

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people didn’t move on with with things like this with you know, with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with platforms where you are seeing things other people, right? And people are seeing things that you write,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh, audiences is king. And if, you know, if the people you want to follow aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John posting an app.net and the people you want to read what you’re writing aren’t on app.net, then you just,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re just not going to go there. And, you know, I, I didn’t read, uh, Brianna’s post yet, but she did a thing of basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, uh, I have an insta paper, of course, that, uh, it’s not a technology

⏹️ ▶️ ^John problem. It’s a social problem. And as, as unfortunate as that is, like we thought they had some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the social aspects from the the developer facing side, they had better than Twitter. They figured out how can we make it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Uh, you know, how can we make a win win situation for developers to use this platform? But the biggest win they didn’t put

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it put in there, which Marco pointed out is you gotta have a lot of users because there has to be a large potential customer base.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if you can’t get that, it doesn’t matter that you do all those other things right. Everything else flows from well, yeah, but who’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there? How many users do you have? And we make fun of that. I go eyeballs and big growth

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rates. And you know, it’s like, But you don’t have to make everything free for everybody and just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make the entire world use it. But you do have to meet some minimum and they just never met it. And then we can go,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, 20, 20 hindsight and say, what should they have done to get more users? Margo, I think, has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John talked about probably the biggest reason, which is waiting way too long to do a free tier. And that just put a stopper

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the entire service for like an entire year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I mean, that was the big thing. Like, you know, it was noble of them to try a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco paid model, you know, so they could avoid the weird advertiser creepiness phenomenon

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that all these free services have to return to to make money. You know, that was an interesting idea, but the problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is, and, you know, we all I think knew it at the time, the problem is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for a social product like that, you need as many people as possible. And by putting up the paywall

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right at the beginning and having no free tier, having everything be paid only at the beginning for the whole for almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the whole first year that that was really really fatal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and furthermore they even after they they made a free tier

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in I believe last early last May or last April but for a while

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you had to have an invitation from somebody else and there were a limited number of invitations so you had to you had to be invited by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a paid member. Now that I think was fatal also,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even more fatal, like beating a dead app.net, even more fatal because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when they did finally go free there was this big asterisk, well it’s free but you can’t just go sign up. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco free but you have to be invited and there’s very few invites and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they eventually removed the invitation requirement but everyone had already

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco been told that this was now free but you need an invitation so it’s like and no one no one got the memo

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when that requirement was lifted and so even people who were on the fence about it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco once they learned it was free and then were kind of turned away by that by the invitation requirement they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably didn’t go back after to check oh is that requirement still there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s really hard to strike that balance though because it can’t you know the whole thing we’re talking about if you make it free

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for everybody and nobody is ever motivated to do the pay thing, you’ve just killed your service. Like that’s the whole point. They were trying to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make a service that was sustained by the people uses. You have to try. You have to strike that perfect balance free that it gets

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people in the door, but that the, you know, sort of like Dropbox has found, I assume the balance for themselves, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, yeah, you can use Dropbox for free until you reach a certain quota and enough people are going to reach that quota and pay for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, that it pays for all the freeloaders, right? And that is really difficult to strike that balance. Making everybody

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pay on a service that is going to live or die by the number of people who use it is really difficult.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe they were fooled by the initial enthusiasm of an alternate service of Twitter, but everyone who joined

⏹️ ▶️ ^John quickly found out, well, most people I know don’t care about what the hell Twitter is doing to developers and they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back over there on Twitter. So I guess I’m going to go back there too. Uh, and yeah, I like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I, the invitation thing could have been, you know, throttling for load or trying to build

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hype or a combination of them. A lot of big services do that. Gmail was invite only in the beginning. Like that’s not an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John entirely crazy thing, but it’s all about timing and balance. Did you do it for too long?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Uh, is the balance incorrect? All those people who found they could go to free all like those dedicated people like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I use happened on that all the time, but I can get by with the free tier. Well, that’s bad. Like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fact that you found it easy to get to the free tier. Like that is an incorrect balance. By that point, it was probably too late anyway. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh, when I was thinking of the things they could do, things they could have done, uh, a lot of people, and I think Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is you as well blogged about this, like focus. They They seem to try a lot of different things and a lot of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have said, oh well, they were all over the place. No one knew what they were. They didn’t concentrate on any one thing. That’s why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they messed up. But the other side of that coin is, what if they had tried to do one of those things for the entire time? We would have been saying,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you should have tried different things. You should have tried file hosting. Maybe you could have been an API for applications. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, it all stems back to the same problem. They did not find a way to get people onto the service and every other problem they have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is like, you know, falls out of that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Maybe but I don’t know. at the same time, like, all these different things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that was that was all effort that would like that was expended. That was not trying to get people on the service.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It was trying to add value for people who are already there to maybe in the future, maybe get some more people to sign up. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, it’s every one of their major API pushes, every one of their major new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco products or aspects of the service is that the kind of thing was like, Oh, this will be great once more people are here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But, but that never came.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, they were trying to get new customers, like they say okay we can’t get people to come and use it like twitter maybe we can get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app developers to use it as their back end kind of like symperium or something like it was it was trying for another user

⏹️ ▶️ ^John base okay we can’t get enough regular people how about it can we get enough developers of applications so we can’t get enough of them how about people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who just want to host their files and the thing that might have undone them is instead of doing the pivot thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where you chose like this is where we’re going to go now they never got rid of the old things they just added to them so it became this big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John long list of things that it did and that becomes difficult to support. You know, it’s it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as if they said, okay, well, we were a Twitter like service, but now we’re a file hosting service. We were a file hosting service,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but now we’re an API connecting thing like they did all those things at once. And to their credit, engineering wise,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they seem to do a good job and all those things like Manton is very happy using them as an API and a back

⏹️ ▶️ ^John end. But again, you gotta you have to be able to show that you are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sustainable, or show that you get so many customers that some VC is willing to pour money down

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your throat forever until someone buys you out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right. Well, and engineering is one of the least important things when it comes to growing a social

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco product. Like, look at MySpace. MySpace, you know, it’s easy to laugh at them now, but before Facebook was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco big, MySpace basically ruled the internet for a few years. And they had the worst technology

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the universe powering that thing. They still do. And it’s like, it is comical just how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco much in shambles that company always was. MySpace has always been comically dysfunctional

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco before and and after acquisition. And, you know, their site was like held together by tape and glue.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And yet, it was the biggest social site on the web for a long time. And still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is no slouch. And you know, the technology matters very, very little. What

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco matters for anything that is social is just the social network effect. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco getting the people who you want to talk to and reach on there. And, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there was never any hope for something that was paywall only for every single user

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to ever get that big. If they were going to get big, they should

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have had a free tier at the very beginning. But that’s hard. The reason they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco did invitations was probably not to build hype, it was probably because they were afraid of things like spam and abuse from bulk registrations,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which is a major problem, it’s hard to deal with. But that’s the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco game. That’s the game you’re signing up for if you want to have any kind of socialization

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or have anything that requires you know strong network effect here or that needs to overcome strong network effects.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So you know really what they I think what they should have done instead was had no social

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco products at all and focus purely on the developer API stuff because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then they have they have a lot fewer direct competitors but even then the model

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of having the users pay instead of the developers is weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I think that I don’t think that ever really had a chance

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to have that nice credit. I’m the success they had surprised me like when they got real

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app developers to make real app dot net clients instead of just like some random person doing it as a lark,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, like the net bot thing like where I mean granted maybe they just reused a lot of the work they had done for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tweet bot and everything. But you know, they got actual attention from real developers and they got some pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^John darn high quality applications even if it was someone’s first application like those people honed their app.net clients and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shape them up into, you know, applications that I would put up against any third party Twitter client,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, and some of them, you know, some of them weren’t just like tweet bot ported net, but some of them are brand

⏹️ ▶️ ^John new applications out of whole cloth and they were pretty darn good. Granted, there was prior art in terms of people had seen what Twitter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John applications are like, but just think they managed to make something that was big enough to do that. And that was part of their goal. Like we’re going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make an awesome platform for developers. They did every part of that except for the part where there’s tons of customers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And they tried to make up for that by giving them a share of the money they were getting like it worked much better than I thought

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it would for longer than I thought it would. And so I give them credit for even achieving that level

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of success. Because if you think about that, if you know who else has tried that and been even remotely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John successful, it is especially on something like a social network, it is it’s a tough sell. So they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they have nothing to be ashamed of in terms of they had the guts to do this, they made it happen. and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they got a reasonable level of success, they just didn’t get over the hump and now they’re sliding back down the hill.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, agreed. I mean, you know, they’re, and you know, I’ve talked to Dalton, like these are good people and I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco trying to, you know, be constructive here. Like they, I don’t think they’re idiots. I know they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not idiots. And I don’t think they, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they just, they were trying something really, really hard and it did not work.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And again, I agree. I’m it lasted longer and got further than I thought it would. I didn’t even think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it would get backed like I didn’t think they would even make their goal because it seemed pretty high at the time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and and they did and they blew right past it. I mean and and they let to last two years I mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I certainly wouldn’t have guessed that either but I don’t know and I think now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the way they’re kind of you know winding it down I think they should

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just kill it because it now it has nobody working on it and then the user number is just going to go

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco down because now it’s like a sinking ship. Like it’s like it’s almost like you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know like Merlin was talking about it briefly. I’m back to work this week, so listen to that. But you know it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a little weird. It’s like it’s like it’s like you’re hanging out at a bar with your friends and there are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people like filtering out for a while and now the owner is just turn the lights on and left.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And now you’re all

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sitting there like with the lights on in this empty in this empty room. Like how long are you really going to stay there?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tweeted today that like if you if you don’t like using something that doesn’t have full time people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John working on it, then you should trash half the application iOS applications on your phone because it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a difference because like obviously a service is different than a bunch of bits on your. But you know, this is this is a problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all over. Like this is why people are wary about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John signing up for things or using applications. And that’s why big, you know, big successful companies have some kind of advantage

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because, you know, it’s It’s not like a fly by night thing. You’re like, well, uh, if, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, depending on the company, like apple, Microsoft, Google, you figure, uh, if this thing goes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John away, it won’t be because the company went out of business. It’ll be because, you know, it could be because they changed their mind or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but you’re not worried about the viability of the company because they have billions of dollars and you figure that gives them at least a couple of years before

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they go down the tubes. Right. Uh, whereas things like this, it’s all just, you know, how much do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you believe in these scrappy group of people and how, you know, And they made it two years, which is like longer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John probably, than some Google projects. So good on them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So something Marco said a few minutes ago actually really made me think for a moment. You had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey said something along the lines of, well, they kind of screwed up having people, or having the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey users pay for app.net rather than having the developers pay. And it occurred

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to me that you could make a really legitimate argument that app.net was further

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey up the stack than a lot of the things we’re working with. So if you look at the lowest level, we’ve got

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a physical machine that, say, Marco owns for Instapaper or Overcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or what have you, that is co-located at somebody’s data center. And then you get a little less

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey close to the metal, and you have a virtual machine that’s still at somebody’s data center, and so on and so forth. So it’s a shared resource.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Then you move up the stack a little more. You have something like Heroku or Azure, perhaps in the middle maybe, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey something like that, where you have sort of a platform as a service saying, well, that’s what app.net could have been.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I feel like it would be even further up the stack from like a Heroku, where you have this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey entire platform waiting for you. And it seems, in retrospect, it seems obvious to me now, after hearing Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey say that, that that would have been really powerful for developers. And if the pricing wasn’t god-awful,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that would be a really, really great way for a developer to get, say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey user accounts set up easily, or data storage, like you had mentioned. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so many things that app.net eventually up doing or ends up doing, I don’t know, I don’t know if I should use past

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey tense or not. But anyway, there’s so much that they do that as someone who has no

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey interest in running his own servers, like myself, that is something that’s very powerful. And I think man touched on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this. And I keep getting reminded of, I think it was Brent Simmons had posted about, hey, why don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we have an API kind of like this, I think his point was a little bit different. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s a similar idea. And it really could be a wonderful thing if you don’t want to go through the hassle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey an effort of completely rolling your own stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, totally. I mean, that’s and I think part of the problem with app.net, you know, app.net,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the name and domain started out as something else. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Dalton and company kind of merged it in with this idea. You know, when Twitter started being

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a dick, they started merging it in with this and kind of kind of took over and, you know, became

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something else because it was a new cool thing that there was a need for. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as they ran app.net, they kept doing more and more of those kind of things like, hey, let’s take

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this thing and add this other thing to it and this other kind of product and other kind of service and keep let’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco add this on and add this on. And I think that lack of focus really hurt them a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lot. But I think if they would have skipped that first or that second step,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if they would have skipped the step of let’s make this into a Twitter alternative, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or let’s make us into a platform that could power a Twitter alternative, please don’t email me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, if they would have skipped that, and gone directly from the old app.net developer services

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco company into what you just described, like a like a high level developer back

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco end services company where the developers would pay them to host their back ends

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on this infrastructure. And users would never have to know about it just the same way users don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know don’t know if your back end is on, you know, AWS, or parse or Microsoft Azure,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like they don’t have like, users don’t need to see that it’s an implementation detail. And you the application

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco developer would do your own, you know, user management in the sense that like, you would say, Alright,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this, you know, create a user and, you know, here’s here’s an email and password, you know, give me a user account for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this. And then you would every call you’d make it say, Alright, give me the files for user ID XYZ, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s for my application. that’s that’s a level up and I think that’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably a better business to be in given all the services they were building on top of it like it seems like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they would have been better off targeting only developers and making the developers pay and and making

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all these great services they added to it just just developer services really that’d be boring though

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean like there are services out there like I mentioned Sympirium but there’s also wasn’t there that one before Game Center

⏹️ ▶️ ^John came out that did all the game high scores and leaderboards what the hell was that called?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I know. Everyone. I always had to say no to it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, whatever. But anyway, and you know, Azure, of course, is one and like all sorts of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all sorts of services that are like this that are essentially offering alternatives to either alternatives to iCloud or trying to record it. And of course,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the alternatives to iCloud don’t have the advantages iCloud does and that your your users are probably already logged in. Open

⏹️ ▶️ ^John faint was the game. That’s it. Yeah, like, but but that’s, you know, and Sympyrium is like for, you know, a sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of alternative to core data, simpler kind of document data storage. And app that was even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more general like. But the thing is, I don’t know any of those services are like burning up the charts and those companies

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are being wildly successful. At the very least, app.net got to do something different, which was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this weird Twitter like thing. They got to run the experiment of how does 256 characters feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John compared to 140? My my answer to that is it feels pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good. I like it. I wish Twitter was like that. What about out of band metadata? The answer to that was it’s really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hard to get clients to support it, but it’s kind of a good idea in theory. You know, the conversation threading lots of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the experiments they ran. I mean, if Twitter wasn’t a bunch of butts, they would use it as like, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these guys did all the research for us by trying a whole bunch of crazy things and some work and some didn’t. But queer doesn’t care about any of that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff anymore, unfortunately. But if they did, after that, did a good service to them. And I think the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the user goodwill to people who did enjoy app dot net and did enjoy the community that was there and everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is probably going to have a more lasting impact and all the experiments there and more lasting impact than if they had just become

⏹️ ▶️ ^John another company in line with all those other companies that I mentioned that I mean, and I don’t know how those companies are doing well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe they’re doing fabulously well, and I just don’t know about it. But it seems like there’s a whole bunch of them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And every once in a while, one of the big dogs comes and squished him like, I don’t know how open faint is doing now. The game center is out. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re doing great. I don’t know. But like Azure and stuff, Microsoft has the advantage and like, you know, app

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that Matt would have to pay, you know, S three or AWS or Azure or something because they don’t, know they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are a reseller of other services with software on top of them whereas Microsoft itself or Amazon itself or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple itself doesn’t have that extra margin in the middle to give to some other party in the chain so they’re always gonna beat

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you on price and people who own platforms are always gonna beat you on platform integration and that’s a tough business to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in so maybe they would still be in business if they had chose that model but I don’t think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a recipe for runaway success.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh I don’t know about that I mean you know they they would be a value-added provider you know like they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would have this this great system built on top of raw hardware like if you look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at a service like Heroku the markup is insane I mean they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s tons of profit to be made there by adding convenience and by building in functionality

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that developers don’t have to write themselves like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that yeah but they’re never gonna do like they don’t they would have to pay Amazon if they use ec2 to deploy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on they would have to pay you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Heroku do that well I’m yeah I don’t know saying it Heroku is not burned out the chart too like I’m saying you’re always

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going to something. There’s always going to be someone who can offer the same service for cheaper or the same service with better platform integration.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it’s a tough business to be in. Like you’re always kind of, you’re trying to find the little area that someone isn’t covering.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like OpenFaint probably thought it was like, great, Apple’s never gonna do anything with games. We’re all set with this. And they were doing well for a while. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Game Center comes, which sucks and I hate, but it really took the wind out of their sails.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I mean, I suppose it is a harder business, but do you think it’s harder than a paid social network?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I mean, it’s, you know, it’s risk reward. Like they went for the riskier play initially that had the bigger potential upside.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And like I said, I think the things they did with it are more interesting experiments than if they had, you know, tried to sell services

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because they, and maybe they would have done something more interesting there, but it just seems like it would have been more of the same. Like we, we offer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something similar to these other companies, but with different services or whatever, whereas no one tried to make, well, no one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John made as as successful a sort of Twitter like application as app that. Now I think what was the other one?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Tent, it used to be called

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Tentus.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. They changed the name to something else. Anyway, like they had a federated system or maybe, You know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s the thing about leaving this thing running. I think tent is still running because it’s like not centralized

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you know, it’s called cupcake now or whatever. Like you know, it’ll never die because it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John never lived right at app.net. If it just limps long for years like sleeping,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who knows? It could be like IRC or people forget about it until you realize, oh yeah, IRC is still there and it still works and still

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does what it’s supposed to do. And especially if they open source everything app.net, the protocol

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and technology could rise again in the distant future. Stranger things have happened.

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, so let’s talk about one more thing tonight. And we this actually broke before the last episode,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey maybe even the day that we recorded the last episode, we didn’t have time to talk about it. And our friend

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Alan Pike wrote about how, in a preview

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey release of Chrome, there, they’ve removed the URL bar,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or the omni bar, whatever you call it. And so we’ll put the link in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And basically, where currently you have a full bore URL, and it you know, highlights

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the top level domain and so on. So it highlights like amazon.com, for example,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey well, now what it would be is it would show that you’re on amazon.com. And that’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then everything else is just a search Google box. And the internet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey seems to be really upset about this. And I got into a couple of conversations

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on Twitter with a couple of people about this, and people who are really fired up and really angry about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it. And not Alan, Alan seems to be kind of ambivalent about it, from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what I recollect from reading this. But anyways, I, while I don’t like it, personally,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m not so sure this is such a terrible idea. And I’m curious to hear what you two think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I saw it come up in my beta because I’m on the beta channel. and immediately did.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I should have done this first, but now I’ve learned that by the time something shows up in the beta channel, there are 8,000 web

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pages explaining how to turn it off. So you’ve just got to type Chrome restore address bar and like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John number one hit is someone telling you how to do it. But at this point, I just go immediately to Chrome colon double

⏹️ ▶️ ^John slash flags and then find the little setting that turns it off and do relaunch and I restored it. But like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reason I have to restart is because I’m a web developer. I need to see the address bar. Like it’s kind important to see that. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m assuming they will always include the feature to turn it on because some people are web developers, but most

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people are not. And that’s where we get into like, is it a good idea to hide this to this degree? And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not so sure. Like not because I think, oh, you always have to show the address and people like I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think people care about the address, but I don’t think people ever even look at it. And I don’t like the idea

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of people fishing with the things with the big long username with an ad that username looks like a host name and people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think they’re at apple.com. They’re not. And that’s why EV certificates for SSL are good because they put the little green thing like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s a lot of important progress we should make in terms of the UI of highlighting the parts that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are important to people and making it not be free form text. But by the same token,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the web works on URLs and you may not need to expose all the nitty gritty details

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but there needs to be something up there that not looks like a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John URL necessarily but that show that all the parts of the URL show through

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in all their glory. Because URL design and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John URLs is a thing you can copy and paste out of an area and send around I think is still an important part

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the web. And like I mean it could work without it. I can see a scenario

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where you have all the same features. You don’t need to swipe over some text and copy and paste it. You can just use a sharing link and say

⏹️ ▶️ ^John copy URL and paste it into an email. And then when you paste into the email it could look different and you never need to see those parts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I think the path of least resistance for this thing that we have, like URLs are not going away, and people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are going to want to share them over text mediums. So they have to exist in some form. So I’m all for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stopping all the things that are bad that people do with URLs and pinning down different parts of it. But I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still think you have to be able to deal with it as text, even users who don’t know or care what it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, because even those people might want to send an email about it at some point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, but the problem I have with what you’re saying is, I don’t see any need to look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at the full URL outside of when I’m trying to share it. And you know, people in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey chat are pointing out, this is the behavior that Chrome is having, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey will have theoretically, is exactly how Safari works in iOS 7 today. So if you look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at a website, all you see at the top is the is the hostname and top, you know, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so caselist.com, for example, and that’s it. And it’s not until you tap in the URL bar

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or if you go to share that you actually see the rest of the URL. And what I’m saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is I don’t think there even needs to necessarily be a tap in the URL bar to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey see the rest of the URL. The only time I think an average person would need to see the URL is just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like you said, John, in a share sheet or something to that effect. Web developers or developers in general

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey absolutely agree with you that, yeah, we’re going to want to see it. But your average user, I just don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey think it’s relevant. And additionally, from anecdotal experience,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I can’t think of anyone other than my dad, who’s pretty geeky, who would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ever type in a URL. Most people I know just go to Google to look for what they want.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I’m not saying it has to remain plain text. I mean, in the iOS situation, obviously you do it for space constraints.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The iPad, I think, I don’t remember what the iOS 7 iPad app looks like, but I mean, on the phone it makes perfect

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sense. Like, you don’t have room to show all that stuff. But, and I’m not saying you need to show it full-bore text, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there are portions of it. Like I would like, you know how like sometimes they have something that ends up being raw text, but they show, for example,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like a comma-separated list but they show those little capsule bubbles because the theory is that people can deal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with those capsule bubbles individually instead of, you know, behind the scenes it’s just comma-separated text.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You talk about in like email? Yeah, like in the same way that they do with the EVSSL certificates where they’re,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they show the big green box that says apple.com so you can be sure it’s from apple.com. Like by all means,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John turn the address into a series of bits of UI. But I think you’d still want people to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John able to like back up one level in the hierarchy like you can by command clicking the title

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bar in Safari. I don’t want people to be afraid. I don’t want it to become sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of like the thing that you don’t touch. I don’t want people to be afraid to go up there and like backspace

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or you know it’s not it’s not for the average person but like for regular people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like it’s no reason to shut out more people people who are currently comfortable messing with the address bar who are just in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that borderline, locking it down like this will scare them away. And I think that just reducing the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pool of people who care about URLs. And you know, that way lies the the madness

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of URLs as generated by terrible web content generators

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the early 90s like front page URLs or the original original. What

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is it? The original City Desk URLs. Remember those Marco? Oh, yeah, all the zeros. Yeah, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, URL design is part of the web. And yes, very few users ever touch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. But I don’t think it’s worth lock like locking it down more like they’re already ignoring it. locking it down more doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John help them. It’s like, well, previously, they were screwing things up. No, they weren’t. They don’t even know that thing is up there. Like, those people can hide

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that if they want, right. But if you’re going to have it visible at all,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would like you to get rid of the the bad things that are about the current URL, it shouldn’t you shouldn’t be able to fish people with it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John should be you know, it should be parsed out and made into some kind of UI, but I would like to strike a balance that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it still allows it to be sort of piecemeal, editable and and selectable manipulable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by the people who do care about the others, right? People who don’t care at the outer spar, just hide it completely. Like don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even include a token for it or anything. Just make it you know, like it like it is on iOS. Make it make that the default

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you want to. It’s just that I think that there’s no reason to isn’t there’s no reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to scare away the people who are on the borderline now who just tweak you a little bit, you know, because I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think that is that is a reasonable interface like so we don’t want people to use a command line or text or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I think our history with the GUI has shown that while the GUI is vastly superior for almost all things, a couple of things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are actually useful for text, just think of all the email clients to let you start typing in a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John two address, and then we like auto complete and turn it into a little token. That is a text interface

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with augmentation, rather than saying, oh, every time you want to send to somebody, you have to open up this widget

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and scroll through and find the person or something like that. These hybrid interfaces that allow you to type

⏹️ ▶️ ^John freeform text and also give you affordances to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John quickly turn that into an immutable capsule so you’re not afraid you’re going to screw it up or whatever, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John type of design for the address bar seems appropriate. And in the same way that the text fields

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for to CC subject in an email client don’t go away, we just make really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good versions of those. And I think that’s what the address bar should be, really good version of a place where people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John see and manipulate text who care about it and if you don’t care about it yeah just hide it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah I mean it’s it’s a hard problem because we you know we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as geeks recognize the significance of URLs and the power of URLs but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know in reality in real-world use they are a significant usability problem and they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very confusing to people and people you know what what chrome

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco did in this in this beta and and I’ve heard from various you know various people on Twitter have said like this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is probably not gonna stick around but it was like it was an experiment but we’ll see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I better to get there eventually because it does benefit Google tremendously but I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s it’s it’s hard for us to accept but this is how people use the internet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and not just like super novices like almost everyone And there’s lots of problems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with URLs like security and you know, the phishing attempts and stuff like that. But the fact is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco showing the little lock icon for SSL pages showing the big green bar for EV SSL certificates

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with the company name in it, telling people to look for you know, make sure you’re on paypal.com before you type in your PayPal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco password. The fact is, that doesn’t work. Most people don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco check for those things there. You know, in practice, these efforts really are not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco worth a whole lot. We think they’re effective. To us, they make sense

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as nerds, but the vast majority of people don’t even look at this stuff. They don’t pay attention

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to URL security. They can’t tell whether they’re on PayPal or not. If it looks like PayPal, it is PayPal to them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Stuff like that. It’s really hard to meaningfully improve URL

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco security. And it’s all down to just actual

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco human nature and human behavior. And there’s not a lot we can do about that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You want to be able to tell them like people won’t do the right thing. But in the case where someone is asking,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I want to do the right thing, tell me what the right thing is. If you can’t easily describe it to them, that’s a problem. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think at the very least that the bar should be if someone is on the phone with you and saying I can’t telephone on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John PayPal dot com. If you know what browser they’re using, you should be able to tell them something quickly instead of telling them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John scroll really far right in the address bar and make sure there’s no at sign Because that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just a gigantic username that begins with www.paypal.com or something You know what? I mean like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you could tell them look at the big green thing to say paypal.com and in the Chrome UI

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like That’s not nothing right? I mean getting back to how this is good for Google though

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think that’s one of the dangers of this is that yeah people use the internet that way But for example

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you see a billboard with a URL or something in and imagine with Google you know, being evil in the future of saying,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even if you type in HTTP colon slash slash triple W dot apple dot com, we will do something different with that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We’ll never take you to apple dot com. Even if you saw that in a magazine ad, even if you saw it on a billboard, everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a Google search and we control like suddenly we control a huge portion of the internet because like chrome becomes way more popular

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever. Like you don’t want to give the browser vendor so much control. And there are situations

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where any where human beings will have to deal with URLs in a non electronic form. And I don’t want to scan a QR

⏹️ ▶️ ^John code, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the paper paper is not going to go away. And like I would be, I wouldn’t like a situation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where no matter what anyone types in that thing, it does a Google search because that that gives too much control to Google

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or any, any browser vendor. Uh, I think you need to, to strike a balance. Maybe the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John current thing is the right balance. Like I haven’t, I didn’t use it enough. I immediately turned it off. Like maybe, maybe that is the balance I’m talking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about. Some people in the chat room is saying it, it more or less acts the way I’m described. I just that it’s something to watch for.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Uh, don’t want to make everything into a search because then whoever you choose as your search vendor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is like your gateway to the entire internet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Unfortunately that is how most people use the internet anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Right and that’s exactly the point I’m driving at is that why stand on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey tradition? Why not embrace the fact that from what I can tell anyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey who wants to find out a website’s address, they’re not going to think to type in Facebook.com,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they’re going to just type in Facebook to Google, or have a bookmark, perhaps, and that’s how they’re going to get there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So let’s just embrace the fact that the URL doesn’t really mean much to anyone but nerds.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But on subsequent visits, if you type app, it completes apple.com, when you hit return, it doesn’t do a Google search

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for apple.com takes you right to apple.com. I see my parents do this all the time. Like I mean, maybe it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John again, if they change auto complete not to behave that way. But if you visit a site frequently, and you start to type something,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people will figure out that like, Oh, if I just hit return that like it won’t go through a Google

⏹️ ▶️ ^John search, it will because you go to apple.com constantly or google.com or you know, whatever your local newspapers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John website is or whatever, it will be the first autocomplete completion, not the Google search for it, right? If you’re going to some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John random place, you just type some a bunch of stuff, then yeah, you’ll do a search. But if it if it matches the.com, that’s usually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the top thing in the result. And I think people find like that better than going to Google and clicking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the top result. I think they like it saying, you know, they to go Denver post it type D and and it already

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has highlighted Denver post.com and hit return they would be annoyed if it went to Google even if the top hit was Denver post.com

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they just want to go to Denver post right and I think bookmarks nobody uses them anymore book bookmark bar

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things if people ever figured out how to configure them or someone can figure some for them they use that a lot I think there is still

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a desire to go immediately where they wanted to go without going through a search when people know where they want to go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah that’s true but why couldn’t you in this omnibar why couldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you match a against page titles rather than URLs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Nobody knows what the titles of pages are.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Half the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John titles are probably the same title full of sighted

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco names. Well, the titles are all spammed up with keyword crap anyway. Breaking news, world

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey news. That’s true as well, but I mean, if you’re looking for Apple and you’ve been to apple.com in the past,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m assuming that the title on Apple’s landing page is something that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey says Apple Inc. or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, the top level domain things that we talked about and laughed about in the last show have not come through and wiped

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out all sanity and domain names. So it currently is still a cache and association

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with like something dot com. People know what dot com is and the reason they know about it is because they’ve been seeing it in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John address bars and it is a way as something to hang your head on. Uh you know if someone says oh you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know you should check out blah blah dot com you know it’s something you should go home and type in your web browser and you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what it distinguishes it as like this is the website. Luckily we’ve gotten rid of the triple W more or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John less even Casey. But like there’s there’s still something to you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, not just like reading off billboards, but communicating with friends or whatever. You don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want to tell someone, I’ll just type this into your thing and I’m sure it’ll be the number one result. If you know it’s like go to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John netflix.com, you could sign up for Netflix. What what the hell is netflix.com? It’s something you type in an address,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John borrow the results to a host and they don’t know the details, but they know like that’s different than saying if you just search for Netflix, you’ll find

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, which is also true. But communicating in comms with each other, advertising

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them and telling other people about them. I still think there’s value in that.

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Waller So I open sourced my blogging engine during the time between the last

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey episode and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco today. Jared Polin Does the name of your blogging engine end in lis?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Waller No.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Jared Polin Wow. John Waller It’s just called Camel. Jared Polin Camelis? John Waller No, just Camel, which I still don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know how to pronounce the word right, but it’s a combination of my first and middle names, Portman something or other.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John John, it’s French, I think. Well, portmanteau? Is that what you’re talking about? I don’t know how to pronounce it either. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’s it. Well, thank you. Thank you for taking the fall for me this week. Anyways, so there’s not really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that much to be said here, and I’m actually going to not say much, unlike usually.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But I did open source it. It’s on GitHub. And I already got a pull request, which I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey accepted, which was a one-liner. But it was a one-liner that I didn’t think to include myself, which was to set

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the content type for the RSS feed. But no, it’s been an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey interesting experience. It was very stressful, the thought of open sourcing it, because I kind of wanted

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to. But I was so scared that by doing so, everyone will realize

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that I don’t really know anything about Node or Express, and I just kind of hacked this together.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And it’s held together in the same way that MySpace was, as we were talking about earlier.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But nobody’s really come out of the woodwork to say that I’m completely off the reservation, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey good. And granted, everyone’s code does suck in some way, shape, or form. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey no, it’s been pretty cool. I’ve liked having it up there. Now the biggest problem I have is that I feel like it’s feature complete.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t feel like I really want to add anything. Since the last episode, I added my loose

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey pagination, which you can’t see yet because I’m posted enough on my site yet. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey now I’m really into it, really excited about it. But I don’t have anything else to do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So now I’m like, well, I guess I need a new project.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You tweeted about the line counts, and there was like 400 lines of code. But what were the stats?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Let me run it real quick. It’s going to take me a second. But what I tweeted was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that I had roughly 405 lines. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey trying to get there right now. Hold on. I had roughly 400 lines of code that I had written. Let’s see.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Clock, camel. So let’s see. OK, so 448 lines of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey code for me right now that I wrote myself. So now I’m gonna look at the node modules,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so all the third-party libraries that I imported, and it is 956 unique files, 94,580 lines of code.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey See, now I feel less bad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about my ridiculous static content blogging thing, because I was gonna say, you wrote 400 lines of code, and I was like, I don’t have 400 lines of code

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in any single file, but then in the Perl world, like, well, not in the Perl world,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but in my world, I end up, I like writing frameworks. I’m like Marco, I have this problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I like writing tools, I like writing frameworks. So I’m not gonna use someone else’s framework. I’m gonna write, first

⏹️ ▶️ ^John step in writing and making a blog is first write a framework for making web applications. Second, write a blog using

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that framework. Third, you know, like, and so I have a tremendous number of lines, but I have way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John less than 95,000. But you know, I’ve essentially made my own, in Perl, you gotta make your own object

⏹️ ▶️ ^John systems. I made my own object system, use that object system. Wait, are you really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey serious? What a great language. Yeah, it’s great. Oh, that’s fantastic. Yeah, that’s definitely the best

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey language of all the moronic languages we use.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, you can’t talk

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mr. JavaScript. Yeah, JavaScript you’re making your own object system too. So let’s not throw stones

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here. We can make a class-based system out of this prototype-based system. We’ll just, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The amazing thing is that PHP actually has a really good object system. It’s probably the best between

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco these three languages.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, the thing, not to go on a sidebar here, but the thing about Perl is like, the ability to build your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John own object system means that people keep making new object systems in Perl And it has allowed us to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have 5,000 different object systems and evolutionary kind of, let’s converge on something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s good. So the bad ones go off and die, and we get new ones. Whereas if you have an object system built into a language,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and that’s the only way you can do it, if that object system is bad or becomes bad in the future, you have no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John choice but to move to another language. But Pearl, it’s like, well, let’s throw away that one. It was crappy. We’ll make a new one and go again and again. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so it is a little test tube for different object-oriented experiments.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And a lot of the experiments that been done in Perl 5 or would have led to Perl 6. But anyway, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feel better about my giant code base because it is still way less lines than all those node modules,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even though I happen to write all of them because, you know, I just like making frameworks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, and so on the one side, I tweeted it expressly because I thought

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was remarkable. It was both remarkable that it took only 450 lines to write

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what I consider to be a full-featured blog engine, at least for the needs that I have. But it’s also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey remarkable that I’m leveraging basically 100,000 lines of other people’s code in order to get there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And on the one side, I would tell you that that is a completely terrible idea

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to use that much code that you have no control over. And granted, it’s all open source, but I don’t have, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey intend to open up any of that source. But on the other side of the coin, most of this code, especially

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the Node community seems to be very into testing. Let’s show

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what the test coverage is, how many of the tests are passing as of right now. And so because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of that, I would argue that using all of this code is like how Marco talks about using

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey MySQL because he’s not the biggest user of MySQL. And MySQL’s been proven, it’s been tested, a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey million zillion people have used it, and we know it’s solid. And maybe that’s not true of every package

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that I’ve chosen, But nevertheless, I got to assume that most of them are pretty well tested, pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey robust, and I really shouldn’t have to worry about them. So, like I said, half of me is freaking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey out about using 100,000 lines of other people’s code, but the other half of me is like, well, actually, it’s probably for the best

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that I didn’t roll my own on all that stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now, you’re supposed to be doing that. Everyone is using, that’s not even the beginning of the count of number of lines of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other people’s code you’re using to run your blog. That’s how everything works. Like, I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. It’s just like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in fact, I would say that’s a good measure the health of the JavaScript ecosystem is like you only

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had to write the code that was relevant to the thing you were trying to make.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} And yes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everything else you could use a library that was reasonably well known that you didn’t have to like, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, do hunting, hunt around for something. There was something suitable for your needs. It seemed like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was reasonably well supported. So like this, these are all good things. I was just, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you had said it was 400 lines of code, I was like, wow, maybe he’s getting a lot more done with a lot less lines of code. but then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at the top of your thing, you have 8000 require statements and like, oh, OK, that makes sense.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Some of these libraries I recognize. Hmm.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s not 8000. How many is it? It’s like 10

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ish. Yeah. Like a little comment for statics. Wrong language, Casey.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I put it in air quotes. Yeah. The scare quotes. Yeah. What would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you relax? Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week. Igloo, New Relic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and Nature Box. And we will see you next week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And you can find the show notes at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ATP.FM And if you’re into Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco Arment,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-E It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they didn’t mean to We

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John talk about the format of your flower box comments here, too. Have you not decided

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about how you’re going to handle things in JavaScript? It’s clear that you’ve adopted the JavaScript naming conventions and capitalization, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your little box thing is misshapen. What’s wrong with them? Is that a format

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you use in C, C++? Or is that a special little thing that you made just for JavaScript?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I mean, I’ve done it occasionally in the past. I did it for just so in C sharp, I would use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey regions, which basically is cold code folding

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey same way that you would use pragmas in Objective C. And that’s what I would do there as well. Well, it’s a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey less cold, photo, cold. God, I can’t pronounce that code folding in Objective C and more about,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you know, the drop down at the top of the editor. But anyways,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s right. That’s for ID integration, right? It’s not a feature of the language. You’re just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yes, yes, yes, exactly what you just said. But for this, you know, it’s 450 lines. And I just wanted

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey something that would catch my eye as I’m scrolling down the file. And so I thought a big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey three line comment would do the trick. Hideous. Well, what would you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John done? Like, can we count the ways this is bad? Maybe it’s just that the this flower

⏹️ ▶️ ^John box or my code in general? No, the flower box. All right. So it’s not symmetrical, because you’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John got the beginning end of the comments like at angles to each other, upper left, right. So right away

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s all oddly shaped. The sides of the box because of the way the font spacing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is like giant gaps in the side but really tight things on the top right and then inside that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have some text that’s all caps like it’s shouting at me it’s and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John width is is it 80 columns no is it like 60 I don’t even know it’s just randomly it’s wide enough it’s sufficiently

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wide it’s randomly sized I I give a thumbs down to this this format for writing comments.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco John, I really think we have to see your code. I do too. Because I don’t, has the world ever seen your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco code?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There’s tons of stuff on the CPan. It’s hideous. Feel free to go look at it and laugh. Anything recent though?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, I mean like I update the things on CPan frequently. So like if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John look at the date will be like 2013, 2014, but the vast majority of the code was written a long time. But that’s not why it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hideous. Like it’s just, I mean if you look at what it does, it’s crazy. You know, I mean This is code

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I originally wrote in the 90s. So I will put it up against anyone else’s code they wrote in the 90s. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I look at it now, and it’s very bad. But aesthetically and formatting-wise, I’m very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John particular about that. I like my equal signs to line up and when there’s a bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John assignments with each other. I’m very sensitive with the formatting of comments. So they look nice and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t add visual noise. And I get upset when there’s no sane weight in dense stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is probably why I would go insane with Objective-C, because sometimes it’s like, look, this is not gonna work

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out for anybody. It’s like, these are really short and these are really long and no matter how you line it up, it looks weird.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it is tough. If you’re like a white space formatting purist, Objective-C

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco basically has no standard that’s good, that’s actually useful.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I try to wedge KNRC style into it, which does not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco work gracefully, but it works well enough for me, but it’s weird.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, JavaScript has some similar problems there are some constructs that are just always ugly and like there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no there’s no system for formatting them that will you know you can’t see and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John simpler languages just have nicer rules especially like with the when the pieces you’re moving around

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are of similar size whereas if you’re in a language where the size of these things can vary wildly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like really long class names and really short pronouns and really short class names and lines just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and and square brackets versus curly’s versus parens and just no decision works

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I get upset about that I like my code to be aesthetically nice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well why don’t you use Python isn’t it part of the language?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So yes then everything can have underscores in front of it it’ll just be stabbing me in the eyes all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Good grief. Awesome double underscores before and after that will show that this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a special method with meaning to the language. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the funny thing about this code, the Mike code in camel is that I tried

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my darndest. I think I succeeded in doing the thing that I hate so much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in Objective-C and C sharp, which is when you have a say like an if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey statement, having the opening brace bracket brace brace on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey same line as the if statement, I would prefer them so that the braces are all on the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the same column. And JavaScript is not that way. And so you know, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in a function declaration is another example. So function all post paginated, you know, some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey parameters, open curly, new line, and all it drives me crazy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, that’s that’s KNRC style. Like I’ve been doing that for a while. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the worst. I hate it. But it’s the JavaScript way and I’m trying to trying to learn.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I if you look at all the Perl code that they just posted in the chat room. Like that was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my chosen style, you know, always match up vertically opening, closing curlies in any language that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John did in any C like language. But in my job for the past five years, I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John been doing it the other way. And I have to admit that my fingers have been rewired. It’s unfortunate. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so now, so now when I have to go edit my own code and like, you know, to fix bugs in the C band modules or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I find myself doing it the other way. And it’s like, yeah, it’s, you know, it’s a lot of his

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way. I still maintain that that other way is better. But I mean, it’s not better enough

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey way where they vertically align.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, but it was not something I was going to argue like, it’s not better enough to make a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John difference. So you know, you guys are nuts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, this code that I’m looking at of yours from Rose is absolutely terrible. Also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey aesthetically, because it well, in the languages I’m used to, if it’s not a function call,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it should be if space open for yes, I know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that that is that is an example of a style that I have changed. I don’t do that anymore. I put spaces after the if I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know why I didn’t put and spaces after the my like there’s many things that I look in this code that I did not do anymore at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} What

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about the not operator?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} If space not no, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t I don’t I don’t I don’t put a space after the not the not is stuck to the thing that is negating.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I agree. That’s weird. Yeah, so it’d be if space open paren not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John look look, we may differ over these small things here and there. But at least we can agree that we’re not animals

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the people who don’t put space around binary operators like Like those people should just all be pushed off a cliff. I don’t even know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what like and there are people out there who will defend that. It’s like what it you know everyone can be oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^John braces here braces there you know space after the the you know exclamation point but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John come on space around binary operators like that’s just disgusting like just jam everything up again

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and there are people out you think they don’t exist. I don’t know if you have met I’ve met them these people who are like no no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there should not be spaces around the equal sign. Are you crazy plus equals minus they just jam it all together

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you know it doesn’t matter what the context is. And those people are just I don’t know what happened in their life that made them do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You ever see PHP code where so PHP had this stupid idea of let’s make the string cat nation operator at the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dot which is also used for other things. But we’ll make that the string can get operator. Where do you think they got that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from? What is that? Is that the pro way? Yes, stupid.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s not a compliment.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pro probably got it from awkward. It’s great. It’s much better than plus as you’ll learn when you try to do stuff in JavaScript with it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} yeah, this is a number

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or a string. You’ll find

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey up whatever we’ll wing it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah but yeah so that was oh I also recently discovered the whole thing about like how JavaScript

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doesn’t really have a good integer type like like Brent Simmons tweeted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or blogged about everything’s floats yeah welcome to JavaScript

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah so you have like you have basically the equivalent of I think 53 bit integers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at best so yes if you were using it 64s in your app yep good luck getting that into JavaScript

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah no this is one of the many reasons that JavaScript sucks and one of the many things that people who tried to write serious

⏹️ ▶️ ^John applications in JavaScript very soon discovered. And by the time they discovered it, they were like, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a formal part of the language, we’re screwed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I just think it’s so funny that like, you know, like just like when Gruber and Brent Simmons

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco did that video for Microsoft, I said, like, wouldn’t it be funny if you went back to like, you know, 2006

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Gruber and showed him this? You know, wouldn’t it be funny if you went back to 2006

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco programmers and said, in 2014, the cool new hip language, everyone’s writing

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is JavaScript.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey If you told me in 2013, that I would take this on for fun,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I would have laughed in your face. I absolutely would have laughed in your face.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, like so many other things, like Objective C, for that matter, people are excited by what they can do with it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Web applications are cool. If you can write a web application, Modern browsers run JavaScript really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well. Everybody has them. Suddenly, JavaScript, this crappy language, you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do cool things with it. People may hate Objective-C, but what can you do with Objective-C? You can write an iOS app. iOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John apps are cool. That’s appealing. So that’s what it all comes down to. If JavaScript

⏹️ ▶️ ^John did not exist in browsers, it would be about as popular as Pearl.

catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

64: It Never Died Because It Never Lived

Transcript start

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