Leigh Alexander wrote a very interesting essay on how Facebook is getting a little… “intimate” with its users lately. She extrapolates that to a growing trend in The New Intimacy Economy:

Pretending at closeness is really the only way forward for anyone who wants to make money on the internet. As such, watch as organizations pretend, with increasing intensity, that they are individuals. Start counting how many times platforms, services and websites entreat you in human voices, with awkward humor, for money. Watch as the things we expect to be invisible, utilitarian, start oozing emojis and winky-smileys. Even Silicon Valley, global epicenter of whitewashed empathy voids and 1-percenter sci-fi wank fantasies, is going to pretend it cares about you.

Neil Cybart has a very interesting analysis of AAPL, the stock, and Apple, the company. From The Two Apples:

While AAPL investors look at changing revenue sources and Apple entering new industries as risk factors, for Apple such characteristics are normal business and according to plan. It is this divide that will likely continue indefinitely, suggesting it is unwise to expect AAPL to one day begin to follow Apple. Just as a declining AAPL stock price is no indication of a struggling Apple, there will likely come a time when AAPL outperforms peers even though Apple, the company, may be struggling.

The whole article is worth reading if you’re interested in the disconnect between a company that seems to be doing really well, and a stock price that doesn’t reflect that.

In Why Every Gadget You Own Suddenly Wants To Talk To You Mark Wilson imagines a scenario where every single thing in your home is always connected, always listening:

As consumers, we’re caught in the middle of the convenience. Do we choose to side with Siri, Alexa, or Cortana, and talk only to her, despite looming bias and the risk of growing dependent on a single voice—a voice that could take advantage of us? Or do we side with a free market that gives a voice to every stupid overzealous object in our lives, however confusing that may be, in a world where ordering milk becomes a bidding war on a commodities training floor?

Which future do you root for? They both sound horrible.

This is the current situation we are in—The Internet of Way Too Many Things. We’ll eventually figure it out and make useful connected products, but right now it’s just a race to be first, although no one really seems to know first at what.

I really enjoyed Clive Thompson’s history of How the Phonograph Changed Music Forever. I found a couple of observations particularly interesting. First, on the “new” phenomenon of listening to music alone:

A curious new behavior emerged: listening to music alone. Previously, music was most often highly social, with a family gathering together around a piano, or a group of people hearing a band in a bar. But now you could immerse yourself in isolation. In 1923, the writer Orlo Williams described how strange it would be to enter a room and find someone alone with a phonograph. “You would think it odd, would you not?” he noted. “You would endeavor to dissemble your surprise: you would look twice to see whether some other person were not hidden in some corner of the room.”

This is particularly interesting when you consider it in the context of the latest trend: headphones as the new walls for people in open-plan offices. We went from listening to music together, to listening to music alone, to using music to indicate we don’t want to be bothered. Also see How Headphones Changed the World as a great companion article to the phonograph one.

Second, this is something I hadn’t considered before1:

“In the age of the iPod, and the age of Pandora, and the age of Spotify, we’ve seen the average college student go from being a hard-core ‘rock fan’ or a hard-core ‘hip-hop fan’ to being a connoisseur of a lot of different genres, and a casual fan of dozens more,” he says. “It’s very rare to come across someone of college age or younger who’s only invested in one or two styles of music,” and they’re less likely to judge people on their musical taste.

I’ve written before on the tyranny of endless musical choice, and how much we lose in the age of streaming, but this is most certainly a positive thing. We used to be narrowly defined by the genres we liked, and now we’re able to dip in and out of interesting musical experiences we wouldn’t have been exposed to in the age of the phonograph and CDs.

1. These “man, I’m old” moments are happening with increasing and concerning frequency now. ↩

It’s interesting to see the web vs apps pendulum swing back to the web in recent months. From Larry Seltzer’s Can Web standards make mobile apps obsolete?:

What’s the alternative? Well, perhaps the best answer is to go back to the future and do what we do on desktop computers: use the Web and the Web browser. Updates to HTML apps happen entirely on the server, so users get them immediately. There’s no window of vulnerability between the release of a security fix and the user applying the update. So with a capable, HTML-based platform and a well-designed program that makes good use of CSS, one site could support phones, tablets, PCs, and just about anything else with one site.

The primary issue with moving back to the web is mainly what the web has become in recent years. As Maciej Cegłowski points out, we have a website obesity crisis. The talk (which you shoud definitely read) starts like this:

What do I mean by a website obesity crisis?

Here’s an article on GigaOm from 2012 titled “The Growing Epidemic of Page Bloat”. It warns that the average web page is over a megabyte in size.

The article itself is 1.8 megabytes long.

We can’t have it both ways, unfortunately. The only way that the web can become a better mobile platform than apps is if we take the obesity/performance crisis seriously. Otherwise the “it’s too slow!” argument will always win.

For an example of how this idea could work sensibly, see Addy Osmani’s excellent Getting started with Progressive Web Apps.

My latest column for A List Apart was published today. From The Analog Revolution:

So I wonder. I wonder what would happen if we felt the weight of responsibility a little more when we’re designing software. What if we go into a project as if the product we make might not only be done at some point, but might be something that lasts for a while? Would we make it fit into the web environment better, give it a timeless aesthetic, add fewer unnecessary features, and spend more time considering the consequences of our design decisions?

It’s not the best thing I’ve ever written, but I have to say, it’s one of my favorites. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a very long time, and to condense those thoughts into just over 1,000 words that include subtle references to The Hobbit and Zoolander feels pretty good.