I just don’t understand the glee over Clubhouse’s demise. They tried something different and it failed. People complain on and on about Facebook and Twitter but when a new social app comes around it seemed like people already had knives out for it.
It’s just kinda sad to see the only new social media app to breakthrough was TikTok and that required an already massive company like Bytedance being able to burn billions of dollars on marketing for it to succeed.
Hmm, say he doubles down on his last tweet and sues Apple for defamation. Would Apple’s plans for its ad network expansion be made publicly available through discovery?
Facebook has every incentive now to highlight anti-competitive behavior. Maybe it would it be worth helping an old pal out with the his lawyer fees?
You can tell from the code that the "exploit" here is abusing keychain sharing.
iOS has a feature where you can pack a surprising amount of generic data into keychain storage, intended for passwords or auth credentials.
iOS also lets app developers opt-in to shared credential storage, so that if you have multiple apps, the user only needs to login once. Here's a blog post on how to do it: https://evgenii.com/blog/sharing-keychain-in-ios/
A little-known quirk of the iOS keychain is that it persists across app installs. This is useful because if multiple apps share credentials in the keychain, you don't want uninstalling one app to log you out of other apps.
If an American company tried this (looking at you Branch.io), would it be banned by Apple? Maybe? That seems to be the controversy here.
Perhaps Apple needs to rethink its keychain sharing API and make the user opt-in to credential sharing.
Also a keychain management tool would be nice, so users can see what data apps are permanently storing on their devices (even if the app is uninstalled).
Credential sharing only works between apps registered to the same developer. So no, this does not allow an tracking ID usable by all apps.
And remember, any trick abused to create tracking IDs stands the risk of being detected and blocked by Apple in the next iOS update. It has been announced, it has happened, it will keep happening.
> Credential sharing only works between apps registered to the same developer.
That's right, but it does allow persisting an id through reinstalls of the same app, and sharing that id between apps of the same developer.
> So no, this does not allow an tracking ID usable by all apps.
It effectively does though. For example, imagine a mobile game company with 10 games. With this technique, you can track that user across app re-installs in each of those games.
Now imagine another game company doing the same trick. If both companies send up their independent tracking IDs to a central server along with any other info they can get about the user (email, screen name, IP, whatever), then you can strongly correlate users across multiple tracking IDs. The user has no way to reset these IDs even if they delete and reinstall the apps using them.
Apple tried removing the keychain persisting in an iOS beta a while back and there was a big outcry from developers as it broke their ability to detect and ban users across app reinstalls. Apple reverted that and responded by adding a new feature where developers could permanently track 2 boolean values for a device (per app) but I don’t know who has bothered to switch to that mechanism.
Looks like the amount of games considered to be the best in a given year started to contract after the huge explosion in 2008. What happened after 2011?
While I think there are a lot of interesting technical and economic shifts in the AAA space that has led to a period of stagnation, I don't really have the time or energy right now to argue my case so I'll hopefully comeback later and edit this.
That said, this list is all over the place and might reflect the biases and demographics of wikipedia editors.
Off the top of my head, I loved Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 and Jet Set Radio, but putting them next to Deus Ex, Thief, and The Sims in the same year, each of which respectively defined groundbreaking new genres, hints at a strange or inconsistent criteria.
Another incoherent juxtaposition is putting Burnout Paradise and Gears 2 in the same year as Braid, which was a pioneer in the indie renaissance, and Grand Theft Auto 4, which was a massive technical leap forwards, particularly in reactively blending animations and physics.
It seems as if the editors of the list can't come to an agreement over what the list represents: the most groundbreaking and influential games of their time, or just games that were generally considered a good time at release.
Very much agree it's subjective and probably a fool's errand to attempt such a list. However, THPS2 and Jet Set Radio had similar positive reviews to Deus Ex, Thief, and other games of that year. They also broke new ground in their own way. Jet Set being one of the first cel shaded games and Tony Hawk 2 being visually stunning for the time with amazing controls. Sometimes being a top game of the year isn't about technical innovation or defining a genre though. Sometimes it's just about being a really fun game a lot of people loved.
I doubt this is the only reason, but one contributing factor is probably that the cited articles declaring a game as "best of all time" are often retrospectives from a number of years after the game released. E.G: Portal was released in 2007, yet all-but-one of its references are from the 2010s/2020s. Given another 10 years, there'll probably be at least a few more games in the 2012-2021 sections.
Clubhouse will soon have major competition with Twitter Spaces too. It already has closed captioning, tweet based Q&A highlighting, and is integrated with Fleets. Looks to be the most meaningful update in a very long time for them.
I think all of these products will quickly find that there is no mass-market demand for an audio only social network. This is a tool for self indulgence among "thought leaders" not something people actually want.
Even podcasts, which I'd argue are more accessible than live rambling, are not a mass market product after more than a decade of trying.
Radio was one of the most mass market products, wasn't it? Not trying to be mean with that but to say that audio-only can be big as well. Maybe talk radio declined precipitously with video on TV yet I think there's still quite a huge market for listening to people talk and/or joining the conversation.
I think that's the theory behind why people keep chasing this market, but radio's success was likely due to lack of competition. People have been banging on this door since Odeo.
What I've seen is that the barrier to join CH as a speaker is lower than being on video or maybe even writing in text. Audio only is much easier to produce, especially when one doesn't have to edit it, than video I'd say by orders of magnitude. Also, for people who don't like to read and write so much, speaking can be much easier.
Will audio-only eat up video and text platforms? No. Video can provide much more rich info and text can be much quicker to read and in loud places. But I do think there is a spot for live audio-only content, just don't know how big it is and how that changes when the pandemic subsides.
I totally agree that it's super easy to produce, that's one part of the problem with it. No barrier to entry, means a lot of trash content.
I think the real challenge is on the listening end. I cannot for the life of me imagine why anyone would sit around listening to people talk. If there's important information I need, I'll read it or watch a Youtube video. Audio is the least useful medium to absorb info. I'm sure some people feel otherwise, but we haven't seen a success in this space yet, and not for lack of investment/trying.
Fair point on being too easy to produce content, yes, can lead to lots of noise.
I think many people listen to people talk, especially at conferences. Imagine a panel discussion: if one is not in the first few rows, the visual info is quite little (can't see facial expressions much) and so it's mostly audio.
I guess for me, I like listening to live conversation, where it has the unpredictability of where it will go. I like to watch live interviews on TV and yet believe that many of them are stale, scripted, and too short, vs CH which yes can be stale but rarely feel scripted or too short. What I like about interviews or live conversations is that things may arise that one wouldn't think to produce without the external stimulation.
I wonder if it hasn't succeeded before because it didn't have the initial crowd. CH is basically just group conversations and if I go to a party where I think the people are not interesting (or more so, famous), I may not be so excited to talk/listen. But if I go to a private party, almost like going to a TED conference, I'm quite interested to hear those people talk to each other and myself try to contribute if I can. That's what it is, based on the audience it initially curated, it kinda felt like being at a TED or other similar conference. I wonder how that changes over time. But still, it lets ad-hoc conversations arise, sometimes with combinations that have not really happened on other platforms, e.g., Shane Battier, former NBA player, asking a question to Chris Voss, former FBI hostage negotiator. Again, sometimes the interactions bore me, but sometimes they thrill me, and that feeds to the variable ratio reward addiction mechanism of the app.
> Even podcasts, which I'd argue are more accessible than live rambling, are not a mass market product after more than a decade of trying.
In the U.S., 37% of Americans surveyed by Edison Research listened to at least one podcast during the last month. (It was 32% the previous year.) That means podcasts are about 50% more popular than Twitter or LinkedIn. Is that not a mass medium?
That research firm seems heavily invested in podcasts succeeding by the looks of it. If podcasts were actually that popular, wouldn't there be a Twitter/Instagram/LinkedIn equivalent site for podcasts? To the best of my knowledge it's just a feature inside of iTunes for the most part.
I also think we'd see a big advertising industry around podcasts. I have to admit to not being an expert in that particular market, but it sure doesn't seem like podcasts have the scale of other consumer social media.
Reddit seems to be following all the other social media platforms in increasing the time spent within their app.
Reddit Public Access Network (live streaming) could be further monetized by incentivizing tipping and venturing into gaming.
They also purchased the short video app Dubsmash to compete with TikTok. Ads can be shown in between videos.
"...encourage under-represented creators to find a home on Reddit," seems to be hinting at making the platform appealing to influencers? If so, e-commerce and affiliate linking integration could be profitable. Not sure if the current reddit community would like that one, though.
I'm sure they could also squeeze in a Clubhouse copy too. Could be popular with communities like the /r/wallstreetbets crowd.
It’s just kinda sad to see the only new social media app to breakthrough was TikTok and that required an already massive company like Bytedance being able to burn billions of dollars on marketing for it to succeed.