This is not new. It’s actually old; really old. Almost as old as humanity. We need people. We need people to hear to us; to see us — to give us attention (yeah, exactly, the whole attention economy stuff again).
If you’re arguing against that, I’d like to direct you to your room, facing your pillow and talking to that. See how it feels…
And I’m not being mean at all. Right now, I’m not talking about an active or fake or worthy audience; I’m just talking about the attention you want to receive when creating [hopefully valuable] content — you want the attention, otherwise, what’s the point?
It’s the same on the internet, and specifically, on social media. If you don’t want to have an audience, I think, on some level, you don’t believe in what you’re selling/saying/creating. And I’m conscious about using the word ‘audience’ and not follower ‘coz they’re not the same.
Here’s a short piece I wrote a while back, and it still makes me laugh. The platforms change, but people don’t. When I wrote it, it was all about Twitter and Instagram; now, the same thing’s happening on Clubhouse.
People are doing everything they can to amass more followers, without thinking about the deeper question: would they turn up for my event? With 20k followers, if I create a room, would 10,000 people be there?
I understand why though, and it’s not complicated. It’s simply because we’re humans, and we make snap judgments; we’re lazy as a species and we make snap judgements. We see someone has a bigger followers count and we automatically think they’re more valuable… It’s less often that we dig deeper and see if that number really means something, and that’s why we have to deal with low-quality content and misinformation… something I’m very much against.
btw, sorry about last week; sometimes things outside your control happen, especially, when you’re a team of one!
News
Database containing 1.3M Clubhouse profiles was posted to a hacker forum; Clubhouse says it hasn't been breached, and the data is public info from its app [link]
Here’s what’s included in the leaked database:
User ID, Name, Photo URL, Username, Twitter handle, Instagram handle, Number of followers, Number of followings, Account creation date, Invited by user profile name
and these are all available publicly from users profile… not really a hack, but scrapped data… and it doesn’t even include the user’s bio… so here’s mine; i’ll leak it myself
enjoy! the hacking bar is low these days!
Amazon’s workers’ union, App Store’s defence, and $2.75B fine for monopolistic behaviours [link]
Watch Elon Musk’s Neuralink device on a monkey playing pong, and iMessage on Android [link]
Facebook’s big not-hack, Twitter’s unsuccessful acquisition, and Adidas’ latest collab [link]
Clubhouse’s latest valuation, Coinbase’s record quarter, and Signal's entrance to cryptoverse [link]
Google wins, Clubhouse adds payment, and Apple’s tvOS update [link]
Overall consumer spending in apps grew 31% year-over-year from $24.3 billion, outpacing the growth experienced in the first half of 2020 when compared to the same period in 2019. Consumer spending on in-app purchases, premium apps, and subscriptions climbed 28% to $20.4 billion globally on Apple’s App Store from nearly $16 billion in the first quarter of 2020. This was outpaced by the growth experienced by Google Play, which saw consumer spending grow 36% YoY to $11.4 billion from $8.4 billion.
A majority of Americans say they use YouTube and Facebook, while the use of Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok is especially common among adults under 30 [link]
Freewheel’s US video marketplace report (H2 2020) [PDF]
7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they? [link]
Consumers spent $32B on apps in Q1 2021, the biggest quarter on record [link]
Average smartphone storage capacity crossed 100GB in 2020 [link]
US iPhone users spent an average of $138 on apps in 2020, will grow to $180 in 2021 [link]
Zero-click Google searches rose to nearly 65% in 2020 [link]
