6. Hashtag inventor (and much more) Chris Messina

Geek Out with Matt Navarra is sponsored by Pinterest. Inspire your audience and grow your company on Pinterest with a free business account. Learn more at business.pinterest.com. It's time to geek out. Hello and welcome to Geek Out with Matt Navarra, sponsored by Pinterest. I am Matt Navarra.

And I'm Martin SFP Bryant. Not many people can claim to have invented one of the central features of almost all social media, but our guest today certainly can. Chris Messina invented the hashtag way back in 2007, but there's way more to him than just that.

Yes, that's right. Chris is one of the most interesting people around to talk to about social media products, how they're built, how they're used. And I had the privilege to hang out with him in, in Australia recently in Perth. It was an amazing trip for an event there and we talked about all sorts of stuff to do with social media. So he is a true geek's geek and you'll be looking forward to having him here shortly.

And we should point out as well that this is the final episode of the season.

It is a finale, a season finale. So, uh, we, when we came up with the idea for this podcast, we, we decided to do a 6-week run just to see how it went. Uh, and to be honest, we've been blown away by the response. It's been better than we ever, um, hoped or expected. So we fully intend to be back for you very soon. Uh, your feedback is always, um, appreciated. So do get in touch with us on Twitter using the hashtag #GeekOutQuestions, and you can find me there as @MattNavarra.

And I'm @MartinSFP. So Matt, what have you been up to this week?

Oh, a couple of things in terms of the geeky side of stuff. I have been playing with something called Kindred, which is a new kind of influencer marketing platform, um, which has got some of the people that are behind ContentCal are involved in it as well. And it's kind of a spin on what we already know for both influencers and brands are trying to join in the middle to do different deals. Uh, and the kind of USP of Kindred seems to be, um, that there's a minimum requirement of, uh, up from 1% upwards that say the influencer or the brands have to kind of give to charity, a nominated charity, as part of the process. But it basically gives them a platform to do to join up with so they can see all the things that these brands want to sell or to push, push out on social channels. And the influencers can kind of pick and choose which ones they want to get involved in. So it's an interesting spin on the whole influencer marketing space. I'm looking forward to having to play with that one. Also been looking into doing a Social Media Geek Out meetup. So I'm going to be speaking at Social Media Week in the Netherlands, in The Hague actually, in November on the 14th, which is my birthday. So they offered me the chance to build up a meetup for people in the Facebook group or people who are in the area of the Netherlands who listen to the podcast to meet up and just hang out and do what we do on the podcast, discuss all these geeky things in person. So that's coming soon. And of course, been talking to you about season 2. So we're looking at guests that we might want to bring on. We've got a couple of big names that we really wanted to get on season 1, but there was just too much other stuff that we wanted to cram in. So we're going to hold that back into season 2 and also see what we can do to improve bits that maybe people want more of or people want less of. So yeah, I've been thinking about that a lot this week.

Yeah, my week was spent partly in Vienna. In fact, last week's episode was edited in a Vienna hotel room. I traveled to one of the world's most beautiful cities and spent my night sitting in a small room and just editing this podcast in Adobe Audition. But no, I was there to meet a lot of startups, tech startups, and talk about pitching to the press and how that's changed over the years. It's totally changed, as I was saying last week. And so that went well. Some good stuff come out of it. And also apps-wise, I've been playing with Instagram threads. And we'll talk about that a bit more later on.

So now we're joined by Chris Messina. Welcome, Chris.

Thank you. I'm glad to be here.

So tell, tell us and tell everyone else who's listening a bit about you, because I know you from the fact that we've hung out a little bit recently, which is amazing. Some people will know you as the inventor of the hashtag, which I'm sure you're sickened to death of talking about. So don't worry, we're not going to spend 30 minutes going about how you invented the hashtag. But tell us a little bit about your potted history and your career today.

Yeah, so I'm— I consider myself a product designer and I spent a lot of my career working on developer platforms and social technology. And so what that's meant is trying to figure out how to create products that people use to connect and to communicate, you know, with their friends and other people. And I feel like, you know, my timing just happened to be really good when I arrived in Silicon Valley around 2004 to help to launch the Firefox browser. So my background is also in open source and open platforms. And it's kind of like, you know, been my, I guess, career so far. And I've spent some time at Google, I spent some time at Uber, and I've also worked with startups. I had a conversational AI startup not too long ago. And, you know, you and I happened to meet this, this year during what I'm thinking of now as my kind of walkabout year, as I've kind of traveled the world and given some talks about my experiences and where I see things going when it comes to social media, AI, conversational software and technology. Voice computing and stuff like that.

Awesome. Well, it was a totally awesome experience in Australia because it was like a geek, an ultimate geek meeting another ultimate geek. It was perfect.

So we went deep pretty quickly.

It was great. Well, we're going to chat to Chris in a moment, a bit more in detail. But first of all, let's get dig into the news and see what's been going on in social this week. So Martin, what do we got this week?

Well, yes, just after we hit publish on last week's episode, Instagram launched a new app called Threads, a new messaging app aimed at keeping you in touch with your close friends and sharing statuses with them. Uh, now the first news of this broke a couple of months ago when The Verge had a scoop about this app's existence. And, uh, it sounded to me really, really interesting. Like it was going to be kind of like the revival of Path. Path, for those of you who don't remember, was a really beautifully designed app. It was designed to let you share your status and what you're up to with just your closest friends and share photos, what you're watching, what you're listening to. It was just a really nice, it had a really nice feel to it and a different vibe to other social media. So this sounded like this could be exactly that. And I have to say, in its initial incarnation, I'm a little disappointed with Threads. It feels to me like it could have been a tab within Instagram. It's essentially a filter for Instagram that just gives you the messaging and the stories from your closest friends. And other than a quite interesting status sharing thing, which is quite interesting, other than that, there's not a lot to it. Matt, what do you make of it?

Yeah, well, I always think with Facebook, there's this thing where they like to just throw out a lot of kind of ideas and kind of like small apps that they want to try to see if anything sticks and what works and if anything gets traction. And if it doesn't, they just disband it and get rid of it. So I always wonder whether this is just yet another one of those. But if you read a little bit of the coverage about it, it does make sense. They do want to keep on top of this kind of interest in messaging and private messaging, particularly with close friends and family. And to be able to do that, having it built into the main app, Instagram app, would limit the ability for him to kind of build out and develop it further. So having it as a separate app— but what we've seen on other apps where they've done this, we've had a separate app for something, um, it kind of struggles because people don't want to flick between two different versions of the app for two different parts of the utility of the app, whether it's like messaging is in one part and you flick back into another one to have the, you know, the rest of the experience. So that, that concerns me as to whether that will become a problem for them. But also The privacy side of things was quite interesting because they actually— Facebook blogged separately about not only the app as one blog post, but they had a separate blog post about the privacy settings. So they were very conscious of their track record in privacy and the importance of underlining the issues and concerns people might have with that. But I think it's a cute little app. It doesn't have huge amounts of functionality in there. It's got some interesting features like you mentioned with the status, the auto status, which you can kind of let it try track what you're, um, kind of where you are and a couple of other details to then be able to set your status if you want to. Um, but in terms of whether it'll stick, if I was to put money on it today, I don't think it'll be here in 5 years' time. But, um, Chris, what do you think?

Uh, you know, it's, it's interesting. Um, like if you were to evaluate this product, I suppose, as you might evaluate, you know, a new car coming out or something, then I think that, you know, we, your analysis probably is is completely reasonable. But I've been looking at what Facebook's doing, I think, from a very different lens, um, which is both, you know, competing with a bunch of other companies that are out there that are doing things that of course they think are, um, if not existential, certainly are eroding or could erode their market share when it comes to advertiser dollars, influencer dollars, video spend, like things like that that are very important to like their, their core business. And at the same time, I think if I were to imagine being inside the company like, you know, these products don't come out of, you know, kind of nowhere, right? Like, they all require a number of product reviews and executives to sign off, and there's a strategy, and there's like all the stuff that actually is going on behind the scenes. And so what we're actually seeing in terms of products coming out are trailing indicators of their overall strategy. So if I were to imagine a couple things, first of all, we know that there is a move within the company to unify all of the messaging products., right? Not just to make them interoperable, but that interoperability has to, I think, in some way be about driving towards the future of unifying a bunch of products and perhaps decommissioning others. You guys have talked about in one of your previous episodes about retiring the group story. Well, that's very interesting and very significant because they've literally put stories in almost all of the Facebook suite of products. To take it away from one means that they're looking at the behavior in that context and saying, okay, what is the behavior in that area that we want to really focus on? Um, and it's not going to be stories, it's going to be conventional old school, you know, posting to feeds, getting updates. And there's a certain cohort of users that, you know, might not be, um, you know, a younger audience, might not be an urban audience who are used to us, let's say, a slower Facebook. Then there's the people who are using Facebook on a much faster clip who, uh, I think are probably going to use a product like Threads for visual communication. And that's taking on, you know, Snapchat pretty directly. Um, and it's not— I mean, remember that Messenger itself was sort of, you know, the Adam's rib of the Facebook app. Messenger itself used to be embedded in the Facebook, uh, the blue app, and it became its own app. Of course, lots of people were upset about it, but they did that. And over time, I think it makes sense that if you were to imagine having to go into the Facebook app to get to your messages, that actually doesn't make sense. So what I think is happening is that more and more private communication is happening within Instagram. Instagram itself is becoming a little bit more like YouTube, where it's a bit performative, where there's a lot more professional content, where there's a lot of monetization going on, where you're seeing fashion brands and other people selling and using it as kind of a marketplace. And those messages don't quite make as much sense in terms of the private communications. So they also had to launch a messaging app that both felt slick and felt modern and did something a little bit new that a younger audience that was never exposed to Path might find interesting, and that's the auto statuses. And that's why they had to put out this additional blog post around privacy to basically say, look, this is going to be sort of a passive way of sharing in order to find out what your friends are up to, very much like Snapchat, um, with a new audience that doesn't have the same set of concerns or apprehensions or anxieties that some of us might have about automatically sharing those things, right? I mean, even if you look at the types of things that, um, are auto shares, you the status include things like studying and stuff like that, things that are completely— like, there's nothing in there for working, um, which would be the adult equivalent of studying. And so I think that's really, really important in understanding, like, their strategy and where this is going.

So can you tell us what, from your point of view, what do you think makes the difference between an app that's successful in having a core app like a Facebook and then a separate app they farm out, which is for messaging, and it being successful, uh, versus one that does that and doesn't succeed? What, what is— what do you think is the kind of thing that makes it a success not a success? Because there's so many apps, or certainly with Facebook, I've seen many experiences of them creating separate apps to kind of get one core functionality separated from it, and it's kind of bombed. And other times, like Messenger is a good example, as you said, that it made it work. What is the thing that makes it work or not work?

I think, like, you have to understand success, I think, from a different perspective. I mean, if you look at it from like, it has to be a home run or something,— sorry to use a baseball metaphor, but how you win baseball. There's a lot of singles and doubles and just playing all of the different moves that you can make within the sport. And in this case, you'll learn that I'm a very visual person. So the thing that comes to mind is that you have this bird feeder and it's incredibly busy and there's these large pigeons coming in, but the hummingbirds are sort of floating around and they have no place to go. And then there's little chickadees and they can't eat or something like that. And so what I think this strategy is about is kind of pulling out, uh, and creating sort of like a separate bird feeder for a separate type of activity and a separate type of user cohort that's very important to Facebook, uh, and that was being crowded out by the professional influencer content on Instagram itself. So therefore Threads becomes a place where you can go for those private messages, for direct messages, for interacting with your closest friends. It's literally like it was taking out the functionality of that close friends feature, putting it into a separate app, and giving people a focused way of getting into it, and then allowing those people who are using it for direct messaging to then tell their friends about Threads, and then it becomes viral in that sense, where the early users will kind of get their friends into it. And for those who are starting to wane on using Instagram because it was no longer about their friends, that sort of is a strategy for grabbing that audience. And so essentially, now you have two bird feeders that are feeding different populations but are as important. Now, that new bird feeder, one, may take a while to actually attract the same number of or the same amount of activity as the original one, but it's still holding a significant amount of the audience that it needs to hold on to in order for the future to be, you know, vibrant, essentially. So when you think about the success of these things, remember, like, Threads is the successor to Direct. Direct was a product that Facebook was working on before that was very much in the same vein but didn't go far enough to create, I would say, kind of like a pure product conception. Like, I've been using Threads a bit, and it feels like if I were 13 again, like, and I got the app, I would actually find it, like, pretty delightful. Like, all the public sharing and all the, you know, um, Peacocking stuff just isn't really— those behaviors are not really part of the app. It really is about the close sharing, which is an incredibly important core activity that people use social media for.

So, and do you think it's gonna make it harder for them to do anything in the monetization space for them in terms of it being close friends? Because I always get the feeling that when it's with a close private communication with a small group of people, close contacts, that being that being invaded by advertisers or adverts.

Yes.

Is that true? Here's what, sorry, here's what I think. I think's happening here. Um, on the data side of it, the data they can grab about your real-time location.

That's right.

That can be used everywhere. When iOS 13 came out and Apple started nudging me, this app's taking your location constantly. Do you want me to do that? I went to open Facebook. It did that. I was like, no, just when the app's open. So, you know, when it, when I, when I need it to know my location. And as soon as Threads launched, yeah, go on then, Facebook. You can have my real-time location.

Yeah, you're 100% right. And also, So it's not, yeah, Facebook, you have my location. It's, I want to keep my friends up to date because my friends are keeping everyone else up to date. And so now there's a social pressure for you to continue to share that implicit activity data that no longer you feel compelled to do in the Instagram app. So these are new ways of collecting the same amount of data because iOS 13 and its privacy protections are an existential threat, again, to Facebook's business model. So they want to start building up that profile of you or of your friends or of, you know, a younger generation. Somehow, and they need to capture that activity now. So again, when you think about the success of it, it's not about it becoming like a replacement for Instagram. It's about capturing a cohort of users that were starting to fade and that are necessary for the future success of the overall ecosystem.

And in closing up on this one, because I could spend an hour talking about this, this is great stuff. This is why I invite Chris on, because he's so awesome with this stuff. I could spend hours. Um, but do you, Chris, do you, do you see this as an app in your gut feeling that's going to stick around, or is this something that you feel it hasn't got quite what it needs?

Well, what's your sort immediate thoughts about it? So it, it, I think it actually depends on the leadership. Um, and I say that in both a broad and specific way. The specific leaders of, uh, Threads itself and their relationship to Ian and Adam Mosseri and those guys at Instagram and what the relationship is there, because there are these amazing, like, quiet integration points. So specifically, when you are using auto status in Threads, it will show up in Instagram.

Them.

So you now— it's almost like the, the blue, uh, message in iMessage, you know, versus like the green bubbles. Um, I can now see who is using Threads based on the auto status. And so that type of coordination between the two products I think is incredibly important for its like long-term success. The other thing that I think is very important is that, as you know, a lot of these apps are constantly testing new features and new functionality, you know, all over the world to see what works. I think the most important thing for a lot of these apps, especially coming out of Facebook, is to provide the barest of the bare essentials and only to build up from there. It was significant that Instagram removed the friends' activity feed this week because that feature has been in there for 8 or 9 years. The fact that something was removed almost never happens because of the blowback. So Threads has done a pretty good job, I think, of threading the needle of being close enough to Snapchat that it's familiar, and also providing a clear product story that if you don't use Instagram that much and you get Threads, it actually provides like a really useful experience that's camera first and better than iMessage and a little bit faster than Snap, although that's TBD. Um, doesn't have a lot of bloat, but can add stuff from here based on user requests. And so now that it's out in the wild, now we'll see how it can grow. So I do think it actually has quite a bit of potential, especially with a younger audience.

Awesome. Well, we're going to talk a little bit about the Instagram removal of following, the following activity tab stuff in a bit. But I'm intrigued by all this because the attack that Facebook seems to be making on iMessage to dominate the messaging space is growing and is quite exciting for a geek like me. But story 2 this week is a bit about Google and its plans for attacking TikTok. Martin, what's going on there? Yeah, yeah.

So the Wall Street Journal had a story, which sounds to me, this sounds to me, the kind of story that comes out when a startup wants to sell itself. And so either the lawyers or the founder or the bankers or someone starts feeding a journalist, hey, look, this company's got interest to try and boost the price. But I don't know if that's true or not, but that's what generally happens a lot. But yeah, so Firework is an app which is a bit like TikTok. It lets users share 30-second clips and it's aimed at a slightly older audience than TikTok, though. And Google is apparently considering buying it, according to the Wall Street Journal. And also the Chinese company Weibo has also expressed interest. Matt, what were your thoughts?

Well, yeah, there's scant detail about the genuine level of interest that Google has. I think I even saw some tweets about it when this story came out about actually if there was any genuine interest from Google. But this is a really hot space right now. We've seen now Byte coming back into this area. This is the creators of Vine coming back with their version of a short kind of app. We've seen massive interest from people in TikTok, which I think is partly led by the huge amounts of money the company spent on promoting and advertising it to get those downloads. I think I saw a stat this week that TikTok now surpassed Instagram in terms of the number of active users in India. And so they're making inroads there heavily. But I'm just not sure because these apps, they have a very narrow set of things that you can do. Very much short videos which don't lend themselves to kind of mid-roll ads and all sorts of other advertising options that people can have. But at the same time, you can't get away from the fact that there is a phenomenal amount of hype and interest around this kind of content. And I was a big fan of Vine when it was there, and I was disappointed that it disappeared. I've increasingly become addicted to TikTok in a short space of time, even though I'm probably not the demographic that it's aimed at. And then we've seen the likes of Facebook clearly desperate to kind of get its claws into this space as well with its Lasso app as well, which doesn't seem to have done much in terms of total downloads. So for me, I'm intrigued to see who comes out winning out of the TikTok, Facebook's equivalent, and this Firework app and others. Chris, what's going on with this area of social right now, do you think?

Well, you know, it's funny actually, this is a story that I missed, and so this is the first time I'm hearing about it. I think there's a number of ways to look at it. Obviously, the TikTok phenomenon is important, and the way in which I think I've started to understand some of these things is that you can't understand this just from user behavior alone. It's that brands are spending a lot of money on content that's optimized for these platforms. And in many cases, they want to take those learnings and then spread them out across a number of different contexts, right? So you don't want to just like put all your ads on Snap for Stories, or Stories on Snap rather. You want to be able to then also bring that content to your Instagram audience and to your YouTube audience and so on, right? The move to vertical video actually harmed YouTube in a lot of ways because it was so optimized for horizontal content. I don't know if this Firework thing is about getting some product people that have proven execution, know how to work with creators, and basically are being groomed for a new expansion in the YouTube universe, or if this would be its own app within the Googlesphere. It's been interesting to watch. Watch adjacent to this space, and this is what I'm thinking about from a media and advertising perspective, the way in which Google itself has created its own stories format or AMP Stories. In fact, if you go and you search for actors or actresses in the Google iOS app, occasionally, there'll be a little promo to view the story or something. It'll actually be a full-page, interactive click-through. Experience that's very much like an Instagram or a Snap Story. Google is trying to find ways of bringing in these formats which appeal to and then allow their ad teams to then sell these as products. This could be a way of actually taking the learnings from Firework and spending $100 million or whatever it is to essentially get those learnings inside of Google is chump change relative to the advertising that they might make from it. That seems to be where this might be going. Now, I guess what I'm trying to understand is if TikTok itself is going to be a lasting phenomenon, if it is truly about a new media format, a new media expression, or if it's just chasing a trend and the half-life of that trend may be for another 2 years or something, and then TikTok itself will fade off because people will be bored and they'll be looking for more immersive experiences.

Well, just to give you people a bit more background. Fireworks brand partners apparently are Refinery29, Amazon Music, NBCUniversal. The people behind the app are former execs from LinkedIn and Snapchat themselves. And one of the things that they're saying that sets themselves apart from the rest is that it's got some technology that they call Reveal that lets users both shoot and view video content horizontally as well, a break from the vertical video formats that, that others have had. Yeah, this is a question I get asked all the time in terms of TikTok. Is this just a phase? Is this just kind of a viral trend and interest in this kind of content that will fade out, or will it have the stamina to last out? And I think the jury's still out on it, but it certainly is very interesting to see that there's now not just TikTok that's out there, that there is another app that's fighting for this space, and soon to be Byte as well, which, given what Vine was like and my enjoyment of that, I'm looking forward to that as well. We will see. Another thing we wanted to talk about in talking about TikTok is the plans for itself to not be involved in political advertising. And as we've talked about in previous episodes of this podcast, you know, the whole regulation space and the area of kind of who's the arbiter of truth and who makes these decisions on what we hear and see, should it be a tech company, should it be government making these decisions or not, has come into the space of TikTok, which is going to face more of this. Martin, what's this story about?

This ties in quite interestingly with with a lot of the discussion that's been happening this week around censorship and self-censorship around the Hong Kong protests. So we've seen the NBA, we've seen Blizzard Entertainment involved in controversies around protests against, kind of in support of the Hong Kong protesters, and then how those companies have dealt with the people who made those protests. Now obviously TikTok, on the other hand, is a Chinese-owned app, and there have been reports recently about Hong Kong-related content being suppressed on there, basically like any app coming from China would. You know, they like to keep the, quite literally, the party line on it. But what's interesting is how this kind of works. Well, basically what they've done is they've said they're not going to have any political content at all, any political content. So it can be, you know, the most innocent kind of pro, you know, It could be pro-Donald Trump, it could be pro whoever his rival is in the presidential elections or whatever country, whatever your political message. No, you can't do it on TikTok, which gets around any problems they might have with people criticizing them about censoring any political protests related to China, because basically all content relating to politics is gone. I think it fits. It certainly fits the vibe of TikTok. You go into TikTok for entertainment. You don't necessarily want to be getting into a big argument.

Argument.

And, uh, Twitter would certainly be a different kind of place if all political discussion was banned. Um, so, uh, so yeah, um, Matt, your thoughts?

Yeah, I agree. I think that, um, it doesn't feel right or fitting for, for a platform like TikTok to be a space where, uh, and there's political, um, kind of propaganda or advertising, whatever you want to call it, in that space. So in some ways, yeah, it doesn't fit to have that in there. And I think it's a, it's a nice, um, big sidestep for them, as you say, for to avoid the challenges and issues that Facebook is facing.

I should— I'm sorry, I should be clear that it is about political advertising rather than political content that's generated by users, which may create a bit of a gray area there, uh, but at the same time, it sets a tone, I think.

But yeah, no, I think so. And I, I, I just think, um, that this is one of the hardest places to be in as an executive of a social network right now in terms of what role does your platform have in terms of choosing or moderating or censoring content that has a political tone to it or is paid for advertising from a political party. This has been a big discussion on this podcast for the last few weeks. Chris, what do you think about all of this stuff?

Yeah, I think it's really fascinating because what's unclear is whether or not this is purely a business decision or if it's something that is more philosophical or cultural. To understand Twitter, you have to understand that Jack Dorsey himself was a free speech advocate, and a lot of the early engineers at Twitter were the same. They were looking at building a platform and a product that was decentralized, at least in the early days, and was intended to be something that would be all for free speech and protest. So it's quite different than you can imagine TikTok, which seems to be very much about creating a commercial product that's about fun and entertainment, and therefore has a very different slant when it comes to advertising. The other thing to consider is the amount of whether this is a consideration or not, I don't know, but the amount of money that is spent on filtering a lot of this content from these platforms is enormous. Facebook has said, of course, that they spend more than Twitter makes on spam and abuse. And so if TikTok can actually just kick that content or its advertising off the platform, then that means that they have to do a lot less mediation and worrying about it. And it may also be the case that they have a far more draconian approach to anything that gets flagged, you know, because there is no expectation that your content will be seen by anybody on TikTok because it's all algorithmic. That just means that, like, if someone blocks something, well, they'll just, like, kick it out of the algorithm and it won't be shown. So there's an interesting element here around freedom, freedom of expression, around the ability for you to raise your voice and to have your voice be heard in a context where your ability to, to be heard is not as guaranteed as it is on other platforms or contexts. So I think this is, like, a pretty big deal, and I think it's a pretty shift. And this is particularly important given what we've learned or seen, you know, since 2016, you know, when we sort of had this like wake-up moment where it's like, oh yeah, these things, these platforms can be weaponized against, um, the, the people in a sense, in, in changing their minds, their perspective, what they see, what they think. And we know now that all or most governments around the world are actually engaging in a type of— I mean, it makes sense. This is historically what governments do, but propaganda to convince people of certain ideas and things like that. And so if you can just sidestep that, then you can keep your business, I think, much leaner and much more profitable and not worry about getting into the world where users are getting stressed out and they're finding your platform to be just annoying because of all the political discourse that's taking over from the kind of entertainment that you're looking for.

On that point quickly, because we could talk about this as well for is around the, um, the decision by Facebook recently, which we've talked about in a previous podcast as well, um, their decision that they will allow, um, political advertisers to basically say what they say, what they want. They can lie, they can say whatever they want as long as it meets the rest of the criteria. You can say what you want.

And I think there's, uh, you have to like look at these things as very different types of initiatives. Like, the way that I understand Facebook and Zuckerberg is that Zuckerberg is building He wants to build something that rivals the Ottoman Empire. So when we look back 100 or 1,000 years on the Facebook era, that is how we will understand the rise of this global phenomenon. Whereas TikTok maybe wants to be like a city-state and basically wants to keep the people happy. It's like Bhutan or something where they measure the gross national happiness as opposed to trying to create some legal system or framework that works in all parts of the world. So I think you have to take a geopolitical and historical perspective of these things to really understand and the pressures that are both on them and what they're willing to deal with in order to create more value and to capture more of the population's consciousness, awareness, or attention.

And finally this week, Instagram's following tab, this part of the activity tab, is finally being culled and killed away. Martin, what's the background on this?

Yes, I'll be honest. I did not know about this. I obviously have been using Instagram since just after it launched. As soon as I could get my hands on it, I was using it. I'll be honest, I never knew this following tab was there. Basically, this was a feed that you could obviously see your own notifications, but if you switched to following, you'd see what other people were liking and commenting. And some people found a kind of voyeuristic pleasure out of looking at the kinds of photos people were maybe liking without realizing that it was being fed out publicly. But yeah, somehow I just never— I saw the follow, the word following, and thought it was just notifications about people I was following and what they were doing. I don't know. I just never even bothered tapping it to see what it did. And I feel like I missed out now. I saw it for about 30 seconds after I read that news article, and then later in the day I checked it and it had gone. So, so yeah, sad times for some people. Certainly the way some people use Facebook might change, and it certainly helps to not feel so watched. And maybe also the other thing is maybe a lot of people don't realize that you can get exactly the same thing for Twitter in Twitter TweetDeck.

Well, I, on this point, it's— for me it's two things. One is, is expelling a feature that clearly people weren't aware of, and you're a good example of that from what you've just said, um, and getting rid of the bloat in inside of the app. And secondly, I just think it's a, it's a sign of the times. It's the climate we're in, you know. This is just something that's raw and ready for, for a BuzzFeed article or a Daily Mail to kind of go to town on in terms of how did you know you're doing this, and it reveals all of this information about you type scenario. So I was aware that it was there, but I wasn't a heavy user of it. And so therefore, when I heard that this was happening, it didn't come as much of a surprise. And Chris, did you use this tab? Were you aware of it? Were you using it? What do you think about it?

Yeah, I mean, I was aware of it. I would not say I was an active user of it, but I sort of liked— I did like the voyeuristic aspect of being able to go in and sort of creep on people. There are, again, a couple of different ways to look look at this and it's hard to know what was the real driver. Um, you know, I can imagine that as Instagram has scaled, of course, over a billion users, that those queries were actually quite expensive to run. And especially if that's a part of the app that is not getting that much attention or visits, then, you know, Facebook basically like looks at the math and says, you know, we're spending $10 million a day to run these queries, and if we just remove that feature, then that'll like save us a little money. And that's not always the motivation, but I remember there were times at Google where we would like remove a feature or a query and, you know, we could save the company millions and millions of dollars. Um, and so that could be part of it, um, because there is a benefit of a feature like that for, uh, the lurkers, you know, for people who are not actively posting, who don't share their stories, who, you know, don't really want to be in the spotlight, so to speak, um, and are the casual users who are, let's say, contributing a lot of likes. Um, however, I think you're right, the —especially as Instagram continues to mature. And I think this is like, to me, the biggest question of what is Instagram 2020, given Threads, given the importance of stories, given the new camera, given all of these things, you know, and given that the static profile itself is becoming less and less important, what does Instagram want to become? What does it turn into? What is its future with regards to, you know, media publishing?, sales, marketplaces, and so on. Um, so that one feature, again, especially if it saves Instagram some money, allows them to remove a feature that wasn't being used that much, allows them to remove code, which a lot of these platforms really like to do, um, because it reduces complexity and so on. Um, what does it say about where the product is going and what does it say about, let's say, private sharing or things like that and what people are actually engaging, you know, for? And actually, actually, that's an interesting Interesting point. Now that I think about it, one of the things that I've been noticing, especially as I look at the source code of Instagram, that there's a lot of stuff in there about sales and about, yeah, again, like marketplace transactions. If the activity tab actually becomes less complete and starts to leave things out, then that feature actually is not modernizing as the product changes. So if you have friends that are buying products. Well, you know, really what Instagram wants to do, especially in the Explore tab, which apparently is where a lot of the discovery is now taking place, then you want to see the products that your friends are buying through Instagram. And so that feature itself may not have made sense as Instagram becomes a place for more and more complex types of activities as opposed to just sharing photos. So that's the thing that I would be watching for, is like, what does the removal of that feature make room for that was not currently being supported in the app?

Got you. Well, I, I, that stuff, and for me, is, is the things that's be a lot of discussion points for next year because Instagram particularly, we've seen over 2019, the shopping area is where they're clearly focusing a lot of their efforts. So, uh, if we come back for season 2, which I think we probably will, um, I think we'll be discussing that, uh, into, into the next year ahead as well. We'll chat more with Chris in just a moment, but first, Geek Out with Matt Navarra is sponsored by Pinterest, and each week we share tips to help you make the most of the platform.

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So you can upload your catalog of products to enable the business profile shop at business.pinterest.com. So, Chris, people are saying, or at least I'm reading into the fact that people are saying, that social media and social networks are broken, that the system is broken, that the platforms are broken. Do you agree?

I mean, it's like deep breath, because there's a lot in that statement. And this is a very subjective feeling. One of the things, again, during my walkabout has been trying to get a sense for whether or not this feeling is shared universally. And what is hard for me to, I think, separate is that which people are reading about social media in the press and then feeling that anxiety rise versus like what is their actual experience of it. And so I think that there's two parts of it. On the one hand, there is a bit of determinism based on what you read and being like, oh yeah, you're right, I am spending a lot of time on my phone. But on the other hand, it's also a choice that people are making, um, on how to spend their time. And we've benefited in so many ways through these social technologies and being able to connect with and find people around the world that previously would have been incredibly expensive, incredibly time-consuming, and very difficult to do. But maybe now we're moving to an era where we take that for granted and we're looking at the secondary effects and the anxiety that is produced through FOMO, fear of missing out, or through being tethered to our devices and our phones. So is it social media itself that's broken? I don't know that it's like broken. I think everything is a little bit broken and we're constantly in the process of fixing it and patching over things that weren't working before and learning about what's good and learning about what's not and realizing that perhaps we've gone through a period of naivete when it comes to these platforms. And certainly a lot of these platforms weren't actually built with the protections in place to prevent against or to fight against bad actors. Bad actors. But now that those bad actors have shown up, because we've created this information and attention economy where you have to be polarizing, you know, and aggressive to kind of get that attention, people are realizing that actually that makes them feel not great. So there's a set of behaviors that people don't like because of the economics of the game that's been created around social media. But to me, that doesn't say that the social media or technology itself is what's broken. I think the way in which people are using it in a way that is ignorant of the overall ecosystem, or which places them outside of that ecosystem, is actually the root of the problem.

Social media certainly isn't what it used to be, with all the calls for regulation, fears about its impact on mental health, challenges of fake news and misinformation, distrust of platforms themselves and their founders, all of that. Do you think social media is at an inflection point right now?

It is. It is because perhaps it's reached some sort of asymptote in terms of overall saturation of the marketplace, where now you can actually have a conversation about social media and people know what you're talking about. It wasn't too long ago that that wasn't the the case, where everyone wasn't on Twitter, where the President of the United States wasn't making news every day using social media. There was a period, maybe even 5 to 6 years ago, where it was still— I wouldn't say niche, but it was something that people could ignore. But now, social media has become a lot like sports, where it's just out there. It's in the news every day. We know who the teams and who the players are. And so it's useful to have, at least for businesses, this armchair quarterbacking and second-guessing of these major platforms because now there is this common touchstone that lots of people actually understand. So in that sense, there is almost like this flywheel of news and information that's been created, and it touches so many people that now we are having a shared and collective conversation about it. At the same time, there's still a great deal of ignorance. In fact, there was a Pew study that just came out today talking a lot about digital knowledge and digital literacy. Privacy. And for many, many people, they're still quite in the dark about some of the nuances and subtleties and ways of keeping themselves safe, for example, using two-factor authentication, um, that those of us who perhaps have been in the space for a lot longer know and take for granted. So bridging that divide of awareness kind of seems to be where we're at. And so there's a lot of people who are joining the conversation now who are feeling like they should be outraged because they see a lot of outrage around them, but not fully understanding the nuances and subtleties of some of the problems in space, especially around privacy, security, marketplaces, influencers. There's a lot of stuff that's all of a sudden— and Matt, I know you've talked about this a lot— a lot of things in culture have changed really rapidly, and we don't fully know what they mean to us. And there's also a lot of shifts that are happening in power structures, again, especially in politics, where there's a realization that, oh, actually, the cat's out of the bag, and the ways in which we use we used to control the narrative or control populations aren't working as well. And so how do we adapt in that context? So is it at an inflection point? Um, perhaps. But I also think that we're going to continue to grow in terms of adoption and use and integration of these products in our everyday lives, and they will become more subtle, more seductive, more ubiquitous, and so therefore a little less hard to control because we are going to just assume that they are sort of always around us, always on, always listening. And the degree to which that creates a new type of anxiety is something I don't quite know how to think about yet.

Do you think that Facebook have been hard done by? Do you think that people have been overly critical or unfairly critical of their attempts and their efforts? Not necessarily.

I think when you have a platform that grows that quickly and that does become so powerful, it is, of course, useful to, first of all, be skeptical, to ask questions, to try to understand. On the flip side, what I've really tried to understand is what are the ways could they have been as successful if they didn't take the approach that they did? I think the same thing could be said of Uber, where you had existing, in many cases, like the mafia and other entrenched entrants.

I love that we're comparing Uber to the mafia right now.

Sorry. This is what they were against. So Uber came in and said, look, we want to make it possible for people to take a resting asset, which is their car, and if they happen to need some work, to be able to sell access access to that car where they will drive them around. Previously, the government said, "Well, we are going to have a monopoly on transportation and we will sell the ability for you to use your own car for this type of work," which is the taxi medallion system. Uber said, "That doesn't make sense anymore in the era of the mobile phone and GPS. People can coordinate amongst themselves. You no longer need to have this centralized government system to control access to that." Furthermore, the ability to track where cars go and to give people the ability to request emergency services means that the risk and the threat model is also different, but it hasn't been updated in a long time. So in that sense, Uber came along and said, we can actually do this better with new technology. And the mafia and the taxi medallion owners and things like that basically said, like, hell no, like, we have a way that we make money by keeping supply suppressed and compressed, and therefore we don't want you to come in and basically blow up market. In a similar way, Facebook has come along and changed access to information, as well as the ability to publish information very, very cheaply and inexpensively. It used to be very expensive to publish information. So that has also changed the power imbalance or the power balance in a way that a lot of people are starting to, I think, be very confused. They're trying to adapt to it. There's been a lot of new types of power brokers that have come out, like influencers, that are able to thrive in this environment. So has Facebook been given a hard time or too hard a time? Again, I just don't know if you can— There were so many competitors for so long, and Facebook kept doing a good job of both executing and also being ruthless, like Microsoft was, in the way that they approached the marketplace, that I just don't know if anybody else could have done it better and been more genteel about it and had the same kind of success.

Interesting. Well, we're going to have a weird change of tangent and come back to this space rather than being on the downer on social networks. I want to ask you a bit about what's exciting you about social media, what's making you happy, what things are you seeing and think this app's really cool, this movement towards this is really excellent. We talked a bit earlier about Bytes and TikTok, and we've talked about people's awareness of the damage that sometimes spending too much time on these apps do. And there's also just some innovative things— that are going on. And I think one of the things you've talked about before we came to talk today on the podcast was about conversational technologies that excite you. Tell us a bit about what's exciting you in tech.

I mean, I prefer to choose to be an optimist, even though it's so easy and tempting to be a pessimist. I think I provide a great deal of snark on my Twitter feed. But a lot of it is looking at these things and, sort of, on the one hand, being amused by them, or being amused by humans and the ways in which we get really provoked and triggered by things.— and trying to imagine and think about ways in which a lot of these technologies and a lot of the efforts that people are putting into them will bring us to a place where we actually can connect more intentionally and more authentically with other people, that we can also express more about ourselves in a more open way. I mean, one of the things that I think is happening that is a really positive aspect of social media is— and I think you also see like there's another— these feel like cultural tectonic plates that are pushing up against each other, which on the one hand, is kind of, you know, white nationalism or that type of extremism put against sort of woke nationalism in a sense, like where there's this new cultural movement to be more inclusive, to bring people in who previously were not part of the conversation and who were largely unseen, and to give them access to the platform, to make space for them. And that to me is one of the more promising aspects of social media and social technology that over time, um, we do move in a more liberal direction, um, from an inclusivity and diversity perspective, because that's actually going to be necessary in order to build technologies that are more relevant for more people. And if anything, one of the good aspects of capitalism— as much as a skeptic as I am of industrial capitalism, you know, capitalism needs to continue— grow. And the way that you continue to grow is by building products that are more and more useful by more and more people. And the only way to build products that are useful by more and more people is to understand their needs, which are actually quite diverse and quite, uh, different based on their cultural context or based on their lived experience and so on. And so that requires these big tech companies to actually learn more and become more mindful of the various lived experiences that people have. So, uh, one of the things that I think is very interesting about voice computing is that that's going to open up a whole new generation of people to have access to all the computing power that those of us in the West and in the developed world have had access to for quite a while. And they, I think, will be able to interact with technology in a way that feels very natural and very human and doesn't require them to go through the same evolutionary process of, let's say, learning to type or learning to modify the way that you communicate to fit the needs of the computer. So that, I think, is what I'm most interested in. And then there's a whole other aspect, which is about, again, self-expression and the ways in which I'm seeing young people express themselves through stories or through short-form videos or to just explore and express new ways of self-identity through even 3D technology or even like deepfakes but applied in a positive way to tell new types of stories are all areas that I find really interesting and really promising.

And we talked to— when we were in Australia recently, and we were together about the business models of some of these social networks. And to me, anyway, it led to quite a fascinating discussion about the opposing objectives and desires between what Facebook's there to do for its shareholders, for therefore what advertisers want, what now regulators need, and what users are there to gain from being on the networks. And so I think it would be quite interesting to air that conversation in a quick sense with the audience here about, can a company like Facebook balance the needs of all these groups? And can a paid version ever exist of a social network? What are the core issues here around these kind of discussions and these decisions?

Well, yeah, I think it's a really fascinating question because one of the things that you see is being discussed is whether or not users should be paid for their data, for example. In, I think, 2008, I was writing about this idea when I was working on digital identity that I called data capital. And my assumption and assessment was that the data that we are accruing about ourselves, our behavioral data, whether it's, you know, tweets or whether it's our GPS location or things like that, allows companies to actually build a pretty good model of what we're into, which then should create a media environment that is actually personalized and customized to us. So both we're seeing a lot of those things that are irrelevant to our interests, and so therefore are like ads that we would never click click on to a media environment in which we are seeing things that are well-targeted. Therefore, the person who's paying for that ad is actually paying for something that is effective and is being shown to the people that actually might have an interest. Then it's up to the user to think, "Do I have a need for that right now? Do I have a desire for that? Do I want to say yes to that?" That moves us into a world that's a lot more consensual from a manipulation perspective. The flip side of that is that really bad advertising ends up becoming coercive and actually erodes your sense of freedom and sovereignty by manipulating you in a way that doesn't feel good, that sort of, again, plays on your psychological weaknesses. Anyways, I'm sort of going off on a little tangent there. But this question of whether people should be paid for their data is interesting because I would say that influencers are people who are being paid for their data. It just so happens that their data is a list of followers that are watching what they do and are learning from them. So there is a set of users on social media that are already being paid for what they do in their natural lives. And the problem is that not everyone that is using social media are producing data that is equally sort of valuable to, to everybody else. And that creates, I think, a real tension because there becomes this sort of expectation or norm that, well, you know, I should be paid for my data because they're advertising to me and I'm not getting any benefit from that. And yet the baseline amount of value that each of us gets for using these platforms and services for free, you know, could be in the tens of thousands of dollars, um, you know, if you were to think about it in real terms. But as we know, we're in an information economy and an attention economy, and so therefore we are essentially given a universal basic income of access to these internet services in exchange for our eyeballs, our time, um, you know, and our Do you think it makes sense for Facebook to ever charge for anything?

Or do you think they'll never charge for anything? Can you see that happening?

No, I don't see it happening. I think the reason is because of what I said before, which is that capitalism requires growth. Most of the developed world, I would say, is pretty saturated with Facebook. So they're not going to get growth there. The market, the stockholders, the investors, the pension funds, and so on, need Facebook to continue to grow., for Facebook to grow at the scale it needs to grow, it's going to go to the developing world. And in the developing world, people have even less money to spend on things like subscriptions and so on. And so Facebook needs to be free to continue to attract more users. Um, and, you know, could it charge, uh, you know, access— like, I just— like, what it could do, and, and I think actually this is what's happening is that Facebook becomes a conduit for commercial transactions. That's happening in two ways. Number one, it's happening in Marketplace. I was looking at Facebook source code last night, actually, and I saw a lot of changes related to selling cars through the platform. Now, I don't think of going to Facebook to sell a car, but in some parts of the world where— I don't even know how to buy a car anymore. I've never bought a car. But if I were to buy a car and Facebook was the internet to me, I might actually go to Facebook and, you know, go to the marketplace and then sell stuff. Like, I don't know how successful Facebook Marketplace is, but I imagine that it's bigger than Craigslist in most of the rest of the world. And that's actually very, very important because for so long companies have wanted to take on Craigslist, but they've been focused on the wrong market. They're trying to take on Craigslist where it's an incumbent in the Western market, whereas in the rest of the world, you know, eBay and the rest possibly don't have as much market share. And so Facebook has an opportunity. So if Facebook is actually contributing to transactions in those contexts, then it gets to do something that banks do, which is to skim a little bit off the top or take a transaction fee. So that's a more direct way for Facebook to charge for its platform access. And then you look even further afield and you think, okay, over the next 10 years, how does Facebook make money? Well, they introduce their own currency, and that's what they're doing with Libra. So Libra gives them both, uh, attentional and, uh, you know, access to data that the credit card companies currently have and are not really— maybe they're regulated so they can't do anything with it, But Libra then becomes a way of paying Facebook, again, with your data to give you a premium experience. And they don't want to do things that are going to erode your experience or take you out of the platform. And so that becomes a more, I would say, aligned way for Facebook to continue to monitor you, make money from you without actually eroding your experience.

It's worth noting that last year, Facebook did say they would consider a paid-for version in the midst of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. So you're saying that was probably just more a PR move, the right thing to say at that time rather than any serious gesture. Yeah.

And I also think that they would be willing to test it. And I think the question is where and to whom. And over and over again, I think what you see is that only the very, very wealthy— and that doesn't have to mean that you're a super rich person— are willing to pay for software. I think it was significant when, for example, Tim Ferriss Matt Navarra did an experiment of having a pro or ad-free version of his podcast and realized that in terms of those who are willing to pay, it just didn't make sense economically because there were some people who actually appreciated the ads. They liked the ads. They're getting benefit from that. And the amount of overhead that I was taking to sort of produce two podcasts or whatever just wasn't worth it, whatever it was. Now, I'm not saying that that generalizes to everywhere, but over and over and over again, what I've seen is that it's incredibly hard to get people to pay for things. And it's incredibly hard if your business model requires you to continue to grow and to have new users if you're not free. So that, to me, is the fundamental tension. Are there aspects of Facebook that they might charge for? Well, they already charge for ads. Just whether or not they'll ever charge the consumers who are looking at those ads for the product remains to be seen.

So a lot has been made of the shift towards private groups and encrypted messaging. Do you think this is a worrying shift from a technologist's point of view, from a social point of view? Or is it something that's natural and a workable evolution of social media? What do you see as the problems and the benefits of a move towards encryption?

I think it depends culturally on what your goals are. I think, you know, in a way, obviously, given the reaction that we've seen recently from big government saying don't encrypt, they are obviously looking at those messages. And so you have to sort of suddenly be be like wary to say, well, would I rather have Facebook look at my messages or the government? And since Facebook doesn't have the ability to enforce laws, you know, the government having a backdoor access to your messages because they're not encrypted, you know, suddenly should give you pause. So that's, I think, a big concern. The other thing, again, as I talked about with the removal of the activity feed, the friends activity feed from Instagram, as being a way of saving some money, um, the amount of money again in resources that spent on monitoring these channels is only going to continue and to increase. And given that these products have billions of users, the amount of resources that have to be spent on monitoring those channels, especially in languages that, you know, are not English, goes up, I think, um, well, astronomically as the service continues to grow and gain users. So that's got to be a concern and a consideration with where this goes in the future. So on the one hand, you can make the privacy argument and think that they're doing this for, you know, your interests. But on the other hand, you have to look at like, well, actually, from a logistical perspective, how much does it cost to keep these messages unencrypted, given that every government in the world is going to want to have access to this stuff? And if you can say, I'm sorry, we don't have access, we threw away the key, you know, only the users have the keys, now the governments have to look elsewhere. And that puts puts like companies like Apple in an interesting, uh, place because now from an end-to-end encryption perspective, the place in which you gain access to a user's messages is through the device itself. For example, through reading the screen with a screen reader. And so now Facebook is not in that position anymore, and they can basically say, you know, this isn't our problem. I also think that this, this move to smaller groups is incredibly important for a number of reasons. First of all, it's where most of— I think a lot of the engagement is moving on Facebook because the large public square context has become so messy and so difficult to follow and just full of provocations that that's where people are feeling the most stress. But people go into smaller groups, and now you're having more civil conversations, the conversations that people actually want to have, and that's incredibly important for Facebook's future. So their group strategy, I think, is built upon that. And, and you hear them talking about it. Where I don't know— and what I don't know, how this, you know, sort of builds out and fleshes out, like, you know, is, is where you had Boz on the show, um, where this goes with regards to augmented reality and virtual reality. If those spaces become like where you're spending most of your time, and the blue app and the feed and the kind of two-dimensional social media context sort of fades to the distance in the next 10 to 15 years, I think that's what they're building towards.

So tell me a little bit about some stuff to do with you in design, because I know that you've got quite an interest in the design and the UI and the UX, these lovely terminologies that we hear as well. You know, is there anything in the last sort of year that's caught your eye in terms of what you would call a trend in design of social media apps or apps in general, or things that you thought, that was pretty damn clever, they've— what they've done there? You know, what things are interesting you in that space?

I think the thing that I'm paying the most attention to I think really is the, the transformation of Facebook. Um, and I say that because at least two, if not more, of Facebook's original product leaders— um, well, we know for example that the co-founders of Instagram left. We know that Chris Cox left. We know that a bunch of people who are really, really instrumental to the Facebook that we've known for the last decade or more are no longer there. And that, that actually is a really, really big deal in a way in which, you know, we can't— I don't think you can underline enough. And I say that because people keep talking about the things that Zuckerberg has done in the past around News Feed and, you know, the decision to build a product around that. And I, I don't think it's sufficient to give him all the credit. I think he had a lot of really, really smart deputies that were looking at user behavior, were talking to users, were understanding those things. And so then the question is, well, you know, what does Facebook, or what does Zuckerberg specifically, think about where this is going? And what We know that Facebook One surfs user behavior and moves to where they see things happening in an anticipatory way, as opposed to inventing brand new media experiences that copy what's already out there, which is actually quite savvy, even if we, as intellectual purists, think that it's a type of stealing. So I think that's interesting. And the way in which they're going to merge all these different messaging experiences together is interesting. Perhaps the place where I am seeing, uh, design and UX unfold in a way that's a little bit intimidating and like, uh, mystical, um, is in the very subtle and quiet way in which, um, Instagram story filters are being created and Snapchat 3D filters are being created. There's a whole underground economy that's happening there that I have not seen the media really grab onto because I think this is my biggest concern and critique of the media, is that the media likes to talk about themselves and about how they use the media and how they use social media. None of them are using face filters. None of them are actually, you know, in these like private groups. I know, Matt, obviously you run the Social Media Geek Out, but I don't know to what degree people are immersing themselves in rich media experiences. And what I'm seeing is that there's a lot of machine learning and artificial intelligence and augmented reality that younger people in particular are experimenting with. And you can see it with Memojis and things like that. And you can also— actually, this is maybe, uh, this is a little less design, but I think it is related to design— that the design of social software is happening in more and more subtle and subdued ways. One very specific example of that is iOS 13's messaging app, where for the very first time in the entire history of that app, which has been been there for who knows how long and used to integrate with AOL and whatever. Um, you can now set a profile photo that gets shared with other people on iMessage, and for the defaults, it's actually your Memoji. And that's very important because that has a lot to do with the Apple Arcade. And as Apple moves towards a services model where you're always connected and you're connecting to other people and sharing with other people within the Apple universe, the way in which you represent yourself in that space is important. So I'm looking at that, and I'm looking at Bitmoji, and I'm looking at— actually, well, Facebook has their own kind of avatars that are like legless or something. I don't know, I saw that really recently. Um, the ways in which people present themselves online digitally is this incredibly interesting digital challenge. And culturally, you know, as that expands into the entire world, how you represent yourself online is going to determine so much about you, and you're going to align yourself with Apple, or Google, or Facebook, or Snapchat, like for the rest of your digital life. And that, I think, is where there's a lot of interesting stuff happening this year that's going to be incredibly important in 2020.

Yeah, I had an experience with this last week. I got a message, an iMessage, from someone at the BBC saying, would you come on to talk about Facebook encryption, funnily enough? And I was saying, oh, sorry, I can't do it. I'm traveling today, blah, blah, blah. And I said, I sent the message and then for the first time since I upgraded to iOS 13, it said, do you want to send them your picture? So I would be sending them my emoji. I'm like, I don't really want to, because I don't feel like I've done enough work on this to share it beyond my own phone. I feel like, especially I'm going to be sending it in a professional capacity. So now you will.

Yeah. It's also a naked selfie, which is probably that's why he doesn't want to do it.

Go on. Yeah, it's just an interesting, interesting behavioral nudge there to get me to spend more time on that and think about just what is in a way a silly little digital avatar in a way. Think of it actually as something that represents me. Yeah. And how I use that.

Yeah. Chris, I was just going to ask you, do you see Facebook's direct or closest rival or biggest competitor to be Apple with iMessages, or do you see it to be Google, or do you see it to be another social network? What do you see the main rival to, to the biggest social network on this planet?

Well, it's hard to say, like, rival, because they're all playing slightly different sports. You know, there's a bit of baseball, there's a bit of, you know, jiu-jitsu, there's a bit of, you know, football and soccer and all these things kind of mushed together. So it's hard to say what's a direct rival or competitor because there are different features or different products that are competitive. Um, I think Google, you know, is probably the most, like, focused on, you know, cloud and data and search. And Facebook really isn't a search company, you know, like even with their, hey, portal feature or something, that, that to me is, is less relevant when it comes to being a general-purpose like search utility. Facebook is really about friends, it's really about connecting. And so I do think that the rivalry between Facebook and Apple is, uh, is intense. And everything that Apple seems to say about privacy sort of is a shot across the bow of specifically Facebook, um, and And I think iMessage is the thing that Facebook and Zuckerberg look at the most. I mean, Zuckerberg has said it on earnings calls and things like that. Like, that is the largest social network on the planet. And Apple is starting to move and, you know, in a very slow, slug-like way towards, you know, making that moat deeper and thicker and full of alligators because Apple recognizes that the device is becoming a commodity. And the services, the digital services, is where their future lies. And the degree to which I, as a user, identify myself as an Apple user versus, let's say, a Facebook user will determine where I spend my money, where I do my digital subscriptions, and so on. So I think that's a really, really important aspect of understanding kind of like the current situation. Whereas there's like Microsoft and LinkedIn, but they're kind of like off to the side, and they're not really in the space. Snap is still, I think, pretty relevant, especially for young people. And as Snap moves into its hardware business, hardware game. You know, they're trying to figure out how to build a lasting relationship with their customers. Like, to me, this is all about like relationships and relationship design. And, um, the degree to which Apple is going to continue to try to sell hardware as the core of its relationship is important, but it's insufficient. And so, you know, for example, I think Sonos is one of the most interesting companies to look at in the space because of what they just launched, which is Sonos Flex, which is in the Netherlands and allows you to subscribe for £15 month to get, um, two Sonos Ones devices, like, sort of, you know, in your house, which of course have voice assistants on them. And maybe Sonos gets a, um, a royalty or a cut every time you invoke, you know, the Google Assistant or the Amazon Assistant and you buy something through them. Like, I don't know, but hardware itself is no longer becoming the core way of having a relationship with these companies. You know, it really is about having a digital relationship that expands and grows in connection to other people. And so I think the rivalry between Apple and Facebook is the one that is the most important.

And speaking about the relationship between different social networks and their users, one way that relationship is maintained is through notifications. And certainly in the last couple of years, a lot of people have talked about being bombarded with notifications and feeling kind of fatigue around that. And we've Seen Google and Apple with their operating systems take steps to help reduce the stress around notifications, uh, cut them down, help people control them a bit more. Uh, has that, do you think, had an impact on the way that, uh, social networks stay in touch with their users? Uh, is it, uh, having an impact on, uh, engagement, uh, or is it something that can be designed around?

You know, this is kind of a really just like fascinating interesting, maybe question of the moment or sort of transitional question because we find ourselves in this place, as you suggest, that everyone wants to send you messages as notifications, as emails. We're trying to send messages to people in all the possible ways that exist and hope that some of them, maybe 1% or 2% of them, actually are seen or opened. That's sort of a fascinating situation. On the other hand, if that weren't the case, if these systems that we use weren't so aggressive in their communications, then you may never hear from them. Um, it's actually, you know, uh, talking about like an interesting, maybe adjacent, um, example of this. Currently in California, um, we are going through kind of an, uh, a late summer heat wave, um, as we do here. And, um, last year and some years before, there's been these crazy wild wildfires that have happened. And largely this has been blamed on our public utility PG&E and their equipment. And their equipment will overheat, and then it causes these brush fires, which then turn into these huge conflagrations. And parts of Napa have been burned, and so on and so forth. And there's been criticism in the past that PG&E has not communicated sufficiently about steps that they've taken to actually, like, protect people. And so this is the first time that they're doing these rolling blackouts, these really significant blackouts where up to 800,000 people are going to lose their power for up to 3 to 5 days. Um, and they've been communicating about this over the last week through text messaging, through Twitter, through social media, all these different channels. Now, you could argue that if PG&E were a type of app or service that you had installed on your phone and was sending all these messages in all these different channels, you'd be angry about it. However, obviously the criticism in the past has been that it hasn't communicated enough or sufficiently. So we are in a moment where any service or product that you use is going to attempt to talk to you all the time. Then the question becomes, well, how do you mediate or reduce the volume or intensity of those messages? And so the operating systems have responded by giving you more controls to actually change how you want those messages to be received and if you want those messages to be received at all. So, for example, iOS, I think as of iOS 12, provided the opportunity to have notifications be delivered quietly. So they'll still show up, but they just won't actually buzz your phone. So this is a new type of inbox. I mean, there's been a desire to kill email for a very long time, and I think in some respects that's happened. Um, the, the question then is, what are the, the tools and ways in which you can help users manage these, these inbound messages without overwhelming them or without actually causing them to harm themselves by, let's say, just turning off all notifications altogether or always denying notifications. And that seems to be where we're finding ourselves. And that seems to be probably the step before we move to a more algorithmic approach to assistants that actually receive all of these messages on our behalf and then figure out how to deliver them to us in a way that would be somewhat, let's say, conversational. You know, like, hey Siri, like, what are the notifications that I missed or that are relevant to me that I should know about? Or, hey Siri, like, I'm bored. Like, what are the movies that are coming out this weekend? And because those messages were sent to you through the Fandango app or or something, now Siri can have an intelligent conversation with you based on a third party collecting a lot of data about your interests and about what you might like. And then Siri can actually have a more informed conversation with you. So I think that we had to go through this stage of message overload where every app learned to talk in order to get to a place where we actually turn off some of those messages and get the ones that we are interested in.

How do you manage your digital day-to-day life in terms of stopping yourself going crazy with red dots and messages and buzzing and stuff. Do you have any strategies or how do you decide to manage that? What have you done?

I think, you know, honestly, it's a work in progress. And I would say that I am struggling, probably like a lot of people. There are a lot of ways that you can get in touch with me, and I kind of thrive on conversation and, you know, interaction, possibly to the, you know, to degrading my productivity. But I just, you know, I enjoy interacting with humans, with other people through digital technology. Technology. At the same time, I think I have become more aggressive about making sure that the notifications that I need to see are probably coming from real people. And those that are not, I find either ways of, again, having them delivered quietly or of being bunched or collected by group. There's a little clever trick, which I know you can do sort of like manually in macOS, where where you can have your notification window slide out and then there's a Do Not Disturb feature. But if you hold down Option and you click the Notifications tab in the menu bar, that'll actually turn off notifications directly. So there are little mini hacks like that that are about being very mindful. My phone is always in Do Not Disturb mode. So if you even call me, it's not going to get through. So there are just ways in which I've kind of silenced the aggression of those messages such that I can then go and review them on my terms and on my time. I've also read books like Make Time, and Nir Eyal has a new book that just came out called Indistractable. There are a lot of really great tactics and techniques in those books that I've been slowly trying to experiment with and try.

Because you can also turn your iPhone or whatever device you're using to grayscale, so you kind of don't see the red coloring for all the red dots and things like that. So those are sorts of things that That's true.

And in some ways, the fact that all of my apps have red dots on them means that I actually don't really notice them anymore. So it's sort of like a kind of blindness. Yeah. No.

Well, the thing is, I just still have that FOMO. I just kind of like, I'm gonna not see something that I need to see. And so I'm kind of struggling with the battle with it, but I'm hoping 2020 is my— maybe my New Year's resolution will be to beat the red dots.

Yeah, honestly, I think, like, the strategy is to practice meditation if you don't. Because the more mindful I become about the ways in which I'm being manipulated and to the point of coercion by a lot of these little digital signifiers means that I have to do the work to show up for myself and be like, actually, I don't want to be manipulated in this way to feel that FOMO. And so, the only way to get there is by increasing the strength and power of my mind. And the way in which I found to do that is through meditation. Meditation, people.

This is what we need to do. We'll go into our final final question, um, which I think for the final episode of the season finale is a good question to ask, especially of somebody who is the geek of all geeks, that is Chris. So predictions 2020, what do we think will change or grow massively in the world of social media? You know, what are the areas that are looking likely to be the things where development's going to be pushed forwards towards, or things that we're going to see the likes of New York times banging on about because Facebook isn't doing this, or this needs to change, or isn't this awful that someone's doing this on social media. What do you think 2020 has in store for social media?

You know, I think because we are in this moment where there is this impeachment process happening in the United States, 2020, I think, is going to be a year where we are really going to see something of a coalescing of the digital realm, which has been somewhat separate in its own space, with the real world. I think 2016 was sort of a prelude and gave us a reality check that, oh my God, actually these things are quite intertwined. And there used to be a lot of clumsiness and ignorance with governments and with big companies and corporations kind of using these platforms. But there's been a lot of learning that's been going on, and a lot of it awareness about the power to control narratives and stories and consciousness through these systems in the last couple of years. Companies are spending a lot of money to do that. So 2020 is going to be about bringing all those things together in a way that we don't exactly know how it's going to go. Facebook is one of the largest undemocratically elected governments in the world, and that's going to be challenged in a very real away through a lot of legal actions in the United States and in Europe and other places like that. How they come out of that on the other end— Zuckerberg has said that he's concerned about someone like Elizabeth Warren possibly wanting to break up Facebook. You have to look at the ways in which they are mobilizing as though a military mobilizes itself against that type of fate to make it nearly impossible for it to be broken up because, as Zuckerberg rightly says, there is an existential threat against its platform and its ability to, let's say, fight Google as an advertising platform if it gets decentralized and broken up because of the way in which Google is a hardware— sort of a hybrid company. They're both hardware and they're software, and the ways in which they are able to pull data from all sorts of contexts to then build this advertising profile of you is so profound that Facebook is sort of a check against Google in a sense that I think a lot of people don't fully, you know, think about or understand. And at the same time, we haven't thought clearly about how we want to perhaps regulate these companies to be able to give us more of a sense for what they know about us, what they're doing to track us, what they're doing to give us a sense of sovereignty and an understanding of the ways in which they're using this information to try to manipulate our commercial activities. I think there's a lot of, in a way, sort of, again, whether it's anxiety or provocation around these conversations that we need to get to a place where we can step back and take a more objective look at them and say, Well, it's completely normal for a digital company to want to manipulate people into engaging in commercial activity like buying things. However, it's creepy sometimes when we are tracked in ways that we don't expect. For example, if you're tracked in the bathroom when you're watching your Instagram stories or whatever, and then you're advertised toilet paper or something, that's a space that we typically think of as being private from prying eyes. We literally close the door, and it's one of the few places where you can go any anywhere where you have some moment of privacy all to yourself. And if we start to invade those spaces with these digital technologies or with Alexa and things like that, um, we should be thinking differently about what we're demanding of these companies that they behave differently. I think there is a desire or willingness to some degree within these companies to actually adapt and change based on, um, you know, critique and on, you know, concerns that people raise, because these companies don't want their products to not be used. At the same time, they have to make their business work. And so if we can have a more nuanced conversation gets into the details, then I think that would be productive. For example, Howie— what's his name? Senator Howie from the South. I don't know where he's from exactly. Has this proposal which seems half-written by the folks from the Humane Tech Society or whatever that group is called, with Azer Askin and Tristan Harris. And one of the things that he suggests that should be banned is infinite scroll and autoplay videos on YouTube. Now, you can look at that and be like, "Oh, that's a clever solution to this problem." However, it's a solution that only makes sense in 2019. In 2020 and beyond, we're going to be living in augmented reality. Infinite scroll becomes somewhat obsolete for a whole swath of the population. So instead, we have to have more principled ways of thinking about these things and the way that they influence us. Influence us and integrate in our lives that is more forward-looking and anticipates how this interaction should be, what type of relationship do we want with our tech. So when I think about 2020, I think we're finally going to have some really tough conversations, probably based on how maybe the election goes and the way in which Trump— I was thinking about this today. People are outraged about Trump utilizing a foreign government attempt to win the 2020 election. And that feels somewhat naive because, like, if you think about The Apprentice, which of course was like Trump's TV show, the whole point of The Apprentice was to set up conflict and then to have a winner rise out of this group of people who are all sort of fawning to become part of the royal court. Well, it's totally natural and normal for someone like Trump, who actually doesn't care that much about the presidency, to only want to stay in power and to use all of the power at his disposal to do that. So it's like, you know, normal. It's sort of like, you know, you can't take the fox out of a fox. So given that we find ourselves like in that situation and there's likely going to be manipulation in the 2020 election, what is it that we're doing to, you know, learn and to prepare and to think differently about how these structural institutions that have been with us for a long time adapt to this modern environment? Environment, and how should people in those roles of power be cast as benevolent dictators, as opposed to dictators for life? And so that requires a very different way of looking at these structures and how they operate in the era of the internet and the digital economy.

And on that last kind of nice ending to the show, one quick question around all of that area is, would you go out on a limb and say any interesting thing you think is a bit of a long shot, but you would put a little bit of money on as something that might happen that people will be shocked by? Or is— yeah, I would say there's a good chance that X would happen or Y would happen. Or is there any big winner or big loser next year that you can think, you know, they're the ones to watch for 2020?

Uh, I think the dark horse is Amazon. Um, you know, and they're going to continue to execute, and they're going to continue to bring Alexa into more and more places. And we're going to wake up one day and, you know, the Google Assistant is going to be hard to find. You know, the Facebook Assistant basically doesn't exist. You know, Siri is, is kind of dumb and requires you to do a lot of work because of Apple's stance with regards to privacy. Like, they are not collecting the data, they're not training on enough information, whereas these other companies are. And so on the one hand, it's sort of like saying, well, we are choosing— and I, you know, maybe this is a principled approach, and I hope it is. I hope it's genuine. We are running this race in a potato sack because privacy is too important for us to make an assistant that actually is effective. But Amazon and Google are racing to win. And so we are going to have a different relationship with Amazon going forward. And that actually, I think, is the one that is the most kind of like, ugh, I don't know where this is going to go. And I don't know if I fully trust Bezos and what he wants for the world. And that is the sort of locus of power to rival the Zuckerbergian Facebook empire that I'm most concerned about. So I think when we wake up in November of 2020, we're going to look around and be like, wow, how did Amazon suddenly become so ingrained in my everyday life? It's in my car, it's in my hotel, it's in my airplane, it's in my airport. Everywhere I go, I'm talking to Alexa. How did that happen? And that might be the surprise. That none of us necessarily were prepared for.

Well, I think that's a pretty good way to wrap up the show. I don't know about anyone else's thoughts on that one, but Chris, it's been fascinating chatting to you. I'm sure that we'll have you back in season 2 and hopefully season 3, 4, 5, and 6 as well. Please. But Chris, tell us a little bit about where we can— people can find you online, things that you're up to that you want to steer people to. This is your PR promo moment. Go for it.

Sure. Yeah. So, um, you can find my website at chrismassina.me. Um, it's also my name on Twitter, Chris Massina, and then I'm Chris on Instagram if you want to check out some of my stories and some of my travels and things like that. Um, those are the best places to get in touch with me. Oh, of course, I'm also on Product Hunt. Um, I'm a pretty avid user there, um, because it's a way of like surfing the future and, you know, seeing what people are thinking about what's happening and interesting. Um, and Matt, I also want to congratulate you on your first season of this. You know, you and I had this conversation about this podcast that you were gonna get started when we were in Australia. And here it is, your sort of final episode. So, I'm really proud of you for, like, making this happen. And I'm excited about, like, the next season and beyond.

Oh, that's really nice to hear, Joe. We're surprised and excited by the fact that people have even listened to it. If we got 100 listeners, I would have been cheering anyway. So, it's done better than we ever thought. But thank you so much for coming on. Okay.

Time now for quick hits. Here's Matt with a bunch of tests and updates from social media companies that are quick, quite quiet, but hopefully not quixotic. Jesus Christ.

Okay, let's go for this. Right. So dark mode for Instagram. We mentioned this, I think, in previous episodes of the podcast, but dark mode now seems to be rolling out for both Android and iOS. So you can have a little look in your settings and you'll find that if you have dark mode on natively on iOS, at least it will adopt the dark mode within Instagram as well. So it works in conjunction with the native dark mode on your device, which is good. Instagram Group Stories. So Group Stories was tried out, um, obviously on Facebook and Facebook Stories, but it didn't really work out. But now it seems that they are also testing a Group Stories feature on Instagram, and that one was courtesy of Jane Wong. And there's a couple here actually from Jane, so there's some good finds this week. Instagram QR codes is another one. So Instagram already has the name tag feature, which acts in a way like a QR code which you can scan, and it helps helps you find an account or follow an account that you want to follow. And you can create your own name tag, but they're also playing around with QR codes as well. So it could be something around the shopping kind of area that they're playing with it for, or a nice variation on name tags, who knows. So that's something that's been played around with. Twitter streaming tweets settings. So I was playing with the latest version of Twitter and had a little poke around in its code. And there's an option when you choose to view tweets latest tweets in chronological order that enables you to switch on a toggle for streaming tweets. So it's a bit like the days gone by when Twitter first came out and also is familiar to those who use TweetDeck, where rather than having to pull to refresh like, like we used to, it just continually updates at the top. So it's like a running stream of tweets. So more cosmetic than I can think of a real utility for it on the app. But some people will be pleased that that's coming, I'm sure. Scheduling of tweets on desktop. So, you know, we can already schedule tweets via various publishing tools and you can use some of the, um, ad and studio product features from Twitter to do this as well as TweetDeck. But now on desktop Twitter, twitter.com, they are playing around with an option to schedule tweets there as well. So probably more excitement for social media managers, but I would imagine most won't find it that useful because, uh, probably they'll be using a publishing tool that does all the scheduling for them. But there we go. It's something they're playing around with at the moment. Also, Twitter advanced search by engagement metrics. So if you are one of those people that loves digging into the native metrics on Twitter and also have been quite experienced with using all the search operators, this might not be as exciting 'cause you can always search for tweets on the number of likes or retweets it's got by using the correct search parameters and that you have to sort of manually type in. But now there seems to be actual options within Twitter's advanced search being tested to search for tweets with a threshold of more than 200 likes or less than 100 retweets or whatever else along those lines. So that might be a useful one for those digging into the success of their posts. Twitter DM reactions. So it's something that we've seen before in Instagram direct messages as well, where if you have a message from someone, you can tap the message within that conversation, then it likes that particular message comment. Twitter DMs are also now seemingly testing such an option as well. So that might appear in your DMs inbox soon. And finally, only recently, Instagram Create Mode, which was spotted a little while back, but now it's actually rolling out to most users. So there is an option within the stories creation composing area where you can slide across and pick Create Mode. And Create Mode gives you a much quicker and direct access to some of the common things that we like doing with stories. So adding a GIF to your story, you could make a GIF actually as a background to your story, which is a bit more funky than it's been before. I'm just sticking it on as a sticker. And there's also a new a new templates option, which gives you a variety of different, as it says, templates to kind of add into your story and that give a nice frame around something or some sort of whiteboard, blackboard kind of example template they've got there, which you could kind of draw on top of or get your followers who follow your stories to draw onto as well. And there's a few other bits and pieces in there, which is on the create mode. So the, I think some of the logos actually changed as well there for for the creation tools within Stories at the same time. So a bunch of updates there. Thank you to Jane Wong for some of those. And that is quick hits for the season finale.

Yeah, Instagram Create Mode is really useful for me. I do a thing often, not every day, but I do a thing called Earworm of the Day where I'll share a song that I've got stuck in my head and I always have a background for it. I always have to use something, take a random picture of a bit of wallpaper or the carpet or something really close up. So it's just something random to fill the background. And sometimes it works really well. I had my bathroom carpet carpeting one the other day, but having a few more options around that is good.

Martin, let's wrap up this last episode. What have we got to say?

Well, yes, that is indeed it for this season, but fear not. As we said earlier, we are working on returning to your ears very, very soon. Very, very soon indeed. All being well, we may be back in the next few weeks. We don't want to leave it too long.

Absolutely not. Yes. And make sure you hit subscribe in your podcast app of choice so you're notified as soon as the next episode is available. We've already got a long list of guests that we want to have on the show, and that includes some very big names. Uh, that's people at Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and, and all sorts of other companies, Amazon and everyone in between. So we're really looking forward to, uh, trying to get ourselves back as quickly as possible.

Yeah, let's see who we can get. Geek Out with Matt Navarra is a Big Revolution production. Find out more at bigrevolution.net. You can find me Twitter as @martinsfp.

And I'm @mattnavarra on Twitter. So don't forget to tell all your friends about the podcast and make sure they listen to this final episode. And as we said earlier, make sure you leave us a nice voice message. We chose not to play one of the messages we had, which was a lovely sing-song, but we will eventually play a collection of them on the show. So visit anchor.fm/geekoutmattnavarra and you'll find an option to record a message. And it'd be great to hear your feedback. And don't forget to join the Facebook group, that's Social Media Geek Out on Facebook. That's facebook.com/groups/socialgeekout. And I think that is about it, isn't it, Martin?

Absolutely. We'll see you soon.

So goodbye for now, geeks.