Linked List: January 27, 2016

Wednesday, 27 January 2016

Mossberg: ‘Twitter Has Become Secret-Handshake Software’ 

Walt Mossberg:

But, underneath all that, Twitter’s fundamental problem is this: it’s too hard to use.

To potential new users, it’s a real challenge to learn all of Twitter’s often arcane little features. And even for people who have been using the service multiple times daily for years, like me, it can be tricky to decide when to use which feature and in which situation. For instance, new users might be confused about what a retweet is, or the difference between that and a “quote tweet” (where you say more about something you’re reposting). And they surely might not understand the need to place a period before the handle of a user, when that handle is at the very start of a tweet you compose, yet not elsewhere in the tweet.

I do think Twitter has become far too complicated. The original appeal of Twitter was largely based on its simplicity. But I have argued for years that the fundamental problem is that Twitter is compared to Facebook, and it shouldn’t be. Facebook appeals to billions of people. “Most people”, it’s fair to say. Twitter appeals to hundreds of millions of people. That’s amazing, and there’s tremendous value in that — but it’s no Facebook. Cramming extra features into Twitter will never make it as popular as Facebook — it will only dilute what it is that makes Twitter as popular and useful as it is.

AlphaGo: Google Research Project Plays Top-Level Go 

Google researchers David Silver and Demis Hassabis:

So how strong is AlphaGo? To answer this question, we played a tournament between AlphaGo and the best of the rest - the top Go programs at the forefront of A.I. research. Using a single machine, AlphaGo won all but one of its 500 games against these programs. In fact, AlphaGo even beat those programs after giving them 4 free moves headstart at the beginning of each game. A high-performance version of AlphaGo, distributed across many machines, was even stronger.

It seemed that AlphaGo was ready for a greater challenge. So we invited the reigning 3-time European Go champion Fan Hui — an elite professional player who has devoted his life to Go since the age of 12 — to our London office for a challenge match. The match was played behind closed doors between October 5-9 last year. AlphaGo won by 5 games to 0 — the first time a computer program has ever beaten a professional Go player.

Swisher: ‘Twitter Is Close to Hiring Natalie Kerris, the Longtime and High-Profile Apple Communications Exec, to Run Its Communications Unit’ 

Kara Swisher, reporting for Recode:

Twitter is close to hiring Natalie Kerris, the longtime and high-profile Apple communications exec, to run its communications unit, a critically important job given the intense media and investor interest on the social communications company.

Kerris is well known in Silicon Valley for her job as one of the top public relations and communications staffers at Apple. She was in the running for the top job at the tech giant, which went to Steve Dowling, after the departure of Katie Cotton.

She also actually uses Twitter.

The 2015 Omni Group Report 

Ken Case:

At this time last year, we had four shipping apps on iPad — OmniFocus, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, and OmniPlan — but just one of those apps was available on iPhone. Apple had just shipped the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, and with their larger screens we decided to bring all our apps to iPhone. And we did just that, shipping free universal updates to the iPad apps that made them also run on iPhone: first OmniGraffle on March 5, then OmniPlan on March 12, OmniOutliner on March 19, and finally OmniFocus on April 2. (OmniFocus was actually ready on April 1, but if we shipped it that day I worried that people might think the whole thing was an April Fools’ joke!)

Among long-time Mac developers, I think the Omni Group is doing as good a job as anyone at making iOS development a thriving part of their business.

Up next, some cool news for OmniOutliner:

For OmniOutliner, I’m very pleased to share that we have some major writing improvements on the way! On both Mac and iOS, we plan to support distraction-free full-screen editing, the ability to see your current word count, and support for directly editing Markdown documents.

The 2015 Panic Report 

Cabel Sasser:

iOS Revenue. I brought this up last year and we still haven’t licked it. We had a change of heart — well, an experimental change of heart — and reduced the price of our iOS apps in 2015 to normalize them at $9.99 or less, thinking that was the upper limit and/or sweet spot for iOS app pricing. But it didn’t have a meaningful impact on sales.

More and more I’m beginning to think we simply made the wrong type of apps for iOS — we made professional tools that aren’t really “in demand” on that platform — and that price isn’t our problem, but interest is.

So, once again, we will investigate raising our iOS app prices in 2016, with two hopes: that the awesome customers that love and need these apps understand the incredible amount of work that goes into them and that these people are also willing to pay more for a quality professional app (whereas, say, the casual gamer would not).

Next up: Firewatch, in just two weeks.