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I Hope This Bubble Kills The App

adamconrad.posterous.com

51–60 of 64 posts

Re: I Hope This Bubble Kills The App

#51
post #20

Ahem: http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/... :) Just sayin'. But, to your point, yes I would welcome a world where all the ultra low-fi junk would disappear and where there was less noise in the app marketplace... like 2003, except with today's consumer awareness. But the exact opposite will happen. Right now, our peers are building tools to allow ever lower-fidelity apps to enter the marketp…

Personally, I think democratizing technology is a really, really good thing. Sure, we have to suffer through things like Comic Sans abuse and crappy apps, but that is a minuscule price to pay for increasing the creative freedom of humanity. That's fundamentally why we build new tools -- to increase the freedom of people to impact the world. [Edit: Just read the article you linked. Losing 27 pounds by eating twinkies?…

I agree, and I'll go a step further, risking HN pariah status in doing so:

Comic Sans is a Good Thing.

That capitalization isn't accidental. It, and every other easy to [mis]use cute, fun, and simple thing we've seen in the last couple decades have been incredibly beneficial to the tech industry and humanity as a whole.

When the Mac and Windows came around, a lot of "computer people" hated them. They were slow and inefficient, and hurt productivity. RMS still rarely uses a mouse. That's fine for people like us, but it isn't fine for people who use a computer to keep in touch with friends or make lost cat posters. And the simple fact is that there aren't that many people like us. Casual users are by far the largest demographic, and that expanded market has been a huge boon for us.

The proliferation of "toy" apps is no different. By sending the message that "you too can make an app", we expand the market hugely. That helps everyone. So what if most apps are garbage? Most websites were garbage in the 90s, but without them we would never have had the Internet that we have today. We needed that huge variety of sites for people to think the marketplace was worthwhile. Now, the Internet is mature, and we almost accept as an inevitability that it should be that way. It wasn't. Without geocities, porn, and even AOL it would just be a graphical Usenet with 2% of its current users.

We're in a Geocities phase right now. There's a proliferation of garbage filling up the mobile sphere. Without that garbage, however, the sphere would be much smaller. Eventually, professional companies will step in and improve overall quality, but we need size at the moment. It grows the market, and it's good for everyone.

Re: I Hope This Bubble Kills The App

#53
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I think democratizing technology is a really, really good thing. Sure, we have to suffer through things like Comic Sans abuse and crappy apps, but that is a minuscule price to pay for increasing the creative freedom of humanity. That's fundamentally why we build new tools -- to increase the freedom of people to impact the world. [Edit: Just read the article you linked. Losing 27 pounds by eating twinkies?…

I agree, and I'll go a step further, risking HN pariah status in doing so: Comic Sans is a Good Thing. That capitalization isn't accidental. It, and every other easy to [mis]use cute, fun, and simple thing we've seen in the last couple decades have been incredibly beneficial to the tech industry and humanity as a whole. When the Mac and Windows came around, a lot of "computer people" hated them. They were slow and in…

Comic Sans, "The Geocities of Typefaces"... Yeah has a nice ring to it.

Re: I Hope This Bubble Kills The App

#54
post #10

" ...Ninja Warrior Agile ScrumMaster and Incompetent MBA Popped Collar... " Epic.

The full quote is better

"So this cluster fuck of apps has become so diluted in human value and so inflated in capital value that Ninja Warrior Agile ScrumMaster and Incompetent MBA Popped Collar actually have a decent chance of landing on the front page of TechCrunch with a title something to the effect of “Man Takes a Dump on an Android Phone: Sand Hill Road Calls First Dibs for $22M”"

Re: I Hope This Bubble Kills The App

#55
post #35
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nobody said there was a stock market bubble That's what the word "bubble" refers to, though. If the OP didn't mean a stock market bubble, he should explain what he does mean. A "bubble" of investing? Why would it warrant the analogy of a bubble? What horrible things happen if and when VC investments don't pan out? What people are trying to call a bubble is actually just an increase in investment by VCs, sometimes goo…

That's what the word "bubble" refers to, though why? not at all. last spectacular bubble was in real estate - it was accompanied by stock market rise but not by any means stock market bubble.

In reference to the technology industry, "bubble" means stock market bubble -- because that's the kind of bubble that can have a direct, significant impact on the industry. And it did, in the late '90s.

What kind of bubble are we in? A VC investment bubble? The investments that are being disparaged too anecdotal to have a significant financial impact.

Why call it a bubble?

Re: I Hope This Bubble Kills The App

#56
post #40

Meh. Apple first tried to push developers to the web. It was because of the hacking community that apps got popular and they opened up the iPhone OS (now iOS). Mobile apps are great for small and quick functional tasks. It's not a great interface to do incredibly complicated actions unless they can be done at the press of a button, minimal typing or by a swipe. I agree there's a lot of crud out there but I'd like to…

    Apple first tried to push developers to the web
That's kind of bullshit when Mobile Safari doesn't support such basic functionality as uploading photos you've made from your phone to websites.

A far more likely scenario -- Apple wasn't sure they want third-party apps (web or not) on their platform. After all, the iPod did quite well without apps, or a browser.

Re: I Hope This Bubble Kills The App

#59
post #4

My thoughts exactly. Doesn't anyone want to innovate, or "change the world" anymore? If someone's going to go through all of the labor to make a copy of groupon or an iFart app or a twitter API mashup just for the cash, they should just write a Forex trading algorithm. They'll make more money that way, and their models will be infinitely more computationally unique than any consumer copycat.

So writing Forex trading algorithms, according to you, will innovate to "change the world"? How? A common critic to the financial sector is that their "innovation" helps only to get themselves rich.

A lot of real innovation still happens in semiconductors, medical, energy. I think that's a better contrast to the 'bullshit app' hype.

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