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🗞 News
Facebook held its annual developer event, F8. Lots of normal product evolution, especially around commerce inside Instagram, and people said 'privacy' a huge number of times. It's particularly interesting to look at Facebook trying to move away from models where abusive behavior is harder to stop: they said that they expect more things to be shared in Stories than in the original newsfeed this year, and the core newsfeed itself is going to be redesigned around groups, which implies a shift away for the algorithm as the only way to manage information overload, and perhaps again less scope for the Russians to go viral into your feed. That is, a lot of this fits into the broader Zuck-led plan to address abuse by changing the mechanics that it takes advantage of, as I argued recently. Link
Another part of the shift: Instagram and Facebook banned a bunch of far-right polemicists (some of whom, of course, became prominent precisely by gaming those mechanics). Fascinating how the narrative around all of these companies has shifted from 'they're too closed!' to 'they're too open!'. Link
Apple will hold its WWDC developer event in a few weeks, and Bloomberg has a leak on some of the new macOS/iOS features that may be planned. Again, lots of product evolution but no big strategic moves, at least in this story. Link
The Guardian is finally profitable, and is so longer running down its trust-fund (mostly based on Autotrader). A long journey, and part of a broader conversation about combining scale, reach and quality (plus asking readers for money). Best stat: only 8% of revenue now comes from print advertising. Link
Stripe (payments rocket ship) announced that its next engineering hub will be remote (cf the old joke "we're hiring to build a communications platform that makes distance irrelevant. Must be willing to relocate to San Francisco"). Link
🔮 Reading
Fascinating FT story on Jumia and online shopping in Africa. Cash on delivery, demand, logistics, etc, etc Link
Oral history of the creation of Amazon Prime. Link
Interesting discussion of the role of social media, Stories and influencers for Chinese 'daigous' (people who buy luxury goods in the west and ship to China at a discount to Chinese prices). Link
A good summary of the arguments in the US around the regulation and breakup of 'big tech'. Part of the conversation is that US anti-trust orthodoxy doesn't align well with the dynamics of these companies - it aims at low prices almost to the exclusion of anything else, so what happens when Facebook is free or Amazon is cheaper? And what do you actually do to a platform even if you think 'something' does need to be done? 'Break up' is a familiar and easy to understand remedy but, again, makes little to no sense here. New thinking needed. Link
a16z made a video of a startup pitch (Sandbox VR) and the following conversation. Link
Another installment from the NY Times on the growth of the Chinese surveillance state. Link
Buzzfeed on the growth of paid email newsletters (I am writing something about this). Link
😮 Cool things of the week
The latest cool email service: Normalhuman Link
Drowning doesn't look like drowning. You should know this. Link
Orange launched 25 years ago. Still one of the best launch campaigns ever. Link
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