11–20 of 53 posts
It annoys me that everyone wants you to play inside their walled garden. It's especially annoying with all of these smart speakers that function perfectly fine as Bluetooth speakerphones. I would much rather they augment my existing phone service.
Matrix support and total federation integration.
why in the world is everyone so keen on entering the messaging app space? what the hell is the value for all of these companies? is conversation data that useful for training deep nets or something?
why in the world is everyone so keen on entering the messaging app space? what the hell is the value for all of these companies? is conversation data that useful for training deep nets or something?
if amazon can start selling ads to you, based on what you're talking about, that would be much more desirable than ads based only on viewing/purchasing history.
messaging in particular is also a really viral phenomenon - you choose your app based on where your friends are and you don't switch. having a loyal captive audience is really useful to start selling to, a la wechat payments or other value add services where you can take some transaction fee. this fits very well with amazon's overarching business model of 'middlemanning every transaction'
why in the world is everyone so keen on entering the messaging app space? what the hell is the value for all of these companies? is conversation data that useful for training deep nets or something?
An Amazon messaging service principally gives you, well, chat with others. Then they build gaming applications that use that infrastructure. Open it up to 3rd parties to use this (like Apple's Game Center, but not constrained to iOS). Now you're getting rent from game developers. It's probably easily integrated with other services (video and music, for shared consumption experiences like when my GF and I, 5k miles apart, want to watch a movie together, not that we'd make use of that, we never have the same movies available on the same service at the same time anyways).
And if they actually do this, note the last feature: chat with businesses. WhatsApp screwed the pooch on that one. My GF is in Argentina, many people use WhatsApp as their primary chat (and often voice) mechanism. Businesses want to use it, but they practically can't. WhatsApp is tied to a single device (maybe get the web client going and you've got two). It's tied to a single mobile device at that. And businesses that tried to use it (often using 3rd party software to make it practical for their use-cases) ended up with accounts closed (that they'd have to reopen, a pain in the ass).
Apple can't offer that feature because they keep their messaging clients tied to their hardware. iOS devices are not practical in many countries still (due to either the local economy being too poor, or the government adding high taxes to iDevices in particular).
Google could have taken this market, but, well they don't have a fucking clue how to pick a goal and stick with it. They keep adding new messaging clients every other month that aren't always compatible with the old ones.
Amazon barely makes hardware (Fire Stick, Kindle, Kindle Fire, the Echo devices). They don't care about winning on hardware, they want to win on services. They're more than happy to offer their stuffs on any device it can run on as long as it increases their presence (which leads to an increase in spending on their platform).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What they are good at is trying a shit ton of ideas and then optimizing and doubling down on the winners. If they just "stuck to what they are good at" they would still be a small online bookstore.
The issue is that they are slipping on things they used to be good at. They are a lousy bookstore now and even the general retail experience has seriously regressed.
It annoys me that everyone wants you to play inside their walled garden. It's especially annoying with all of these smart speakers that function perfectly fine as Bluetooth speakerphones. I would much rather they augment my existing phone service.
There was a time aol, yahoo and msn were made to play nice and interop, will that soon be the case with these new messaging platforms?
Google used XMPP initially with Google Talk, but then turned off federation (was it ever on? I recall it was, but that was a long time ago).
We've had greater than a decade now of poor interop between messaging platforms. This is unlikely to change as long as these platforms are owned by people with a vested interest in controlling the experience (tying it to their hardware or other services or ad networks, primarily).
why in the world is everyone so keen on entering the messaging app space? what the hell is the value for all of these companies? is conversation data that useful for training deep nets or something?
In my view, messaging is the best example of how bloat over time kills apps. Nobody actively wants to switch messaging apps, but with numerous apps that have come and gone throughout the years - from icq to msn messenger to yahoo messenger to Skype to WhatsApp to kik to Line, often enough it's that the app itself gets bloated to the point where the fundamental messaging capability becomes secondary and folks move awa…
It's one thing when bloat is from attempts at software feature differentiation; that's what kills these apps. It's another thing entirely when you're interfacing with product and payment ecosystems, when your features make you the core way in which people live their lives. It'll be damn hard to stick the landing, but Amazon absolutely has to try.
why in the world is everyone so keen on entering the messaging app space? what the hell is the value for all of these companies? is conversation data that useful for training deep nets or something?
In my view, messaging is the best example of how bloat over time kills apps. Nobody actively wants to switch messaging apps, but with numerous apps that have come and gone throughout the years - from icq to msn messenger to yahoo messenger to Skype to WhatsApp to kik to Line, often enough it's that the app itself gets bloated to the point where the fundamental messaging capability becomes secondary and folks move awa…
It annoys me that everyone wants you to play inside their walled garden. It's especially annoying with all of these smart speakers that function perfectly fine as Bluetooth speakerphones. I would much rather they augment my existing phone service.
Amazon echo is their attempt at a smart phone without a screen.
The Echo worked because it was user oblivious but the new communication features break that model and are decidedly user specific and functionally retarded.