YouTube

What’s Worth Reading Now

  1. The best shows are on HBO, Seriously! Vulture ranks the catalog of the network, and after you are done reading the article, you realize how much quality is packed into the HBO archives. The Wire is probably the number one show on HBO ever, though these writers don’t agree with me on that.
  2. Technology is as biased as its makers. Machine learning and algorithms have received recent attention for being biased, but technology has always been this way.
  3. What’s with Khaki? Where did it come from?
  4. The unlikely origins of USB, the port that changed everything. This is by one of my favorite writers, Joel Johnson. So, you know it is very good and deeply researched.
  5. How YouTube’s related algorithm is helping create a new genre of music: Vice calls it “the first genre of Algorithm Age.”

This first appeared on my June 2, 2019, weekly newsletter. If you like

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Musings
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What do YouTube, Instagram & GitHub have in common?

I have had a few days to think about Microsoft’s decision to buy GitHub for $7.5 billion and I am increasingly convinced that this is a good deal for Microsoft, as long as they don’t pull the same shenanigans they did with Skype. The acquisition makes a lot of sense, especially when you see it from the lens of two of the most successful “buys” of recent years.

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Technology
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We are all trapped in the “Feed”

Every afternoon, during lunch, I open up YouTube, and I find myself marveling at the sheer dumbness of its recommendations. Despite having all this viewing data of mine, world’s second most popular search engine is dumb as a brick. It shows me propaganda channels from two ends of the political spectrum. It surfaces some inane celebrity videos. It dredges up the worst material for me — considering I usually like watch science videos, long conversations and interviews, and photography-focused educational videos.

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My Essays
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Netflix, Apple Music & need for bandwidth

For a long time, I have argued that bandwidth (usage) can be a good predictor of economic trends and shifts. I was reminded of that earlier this morning, when reading a press release about Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena Report: Asia-Pacific & Europe, when this bit caught my eye.

  • Netflix is making gains in the new European markets they entered late last year, with the service now accounting for almost 10% of peak downstream traffic in Austria and France.
  • Apple Music, bolstered by a three month free trial, has surpassed Spotify as the leading music streaming service on mobile networks in Australia and New Zealand.
  • YouTube is the top mobile application in both Europe and Asia-Pacific, making it the global leader in mobile traffic.
  • Online gaming continues to drive traffic on fixed networks with Twitch and Steam now top-10 applications for the first time in Europe and Asia-Pacific respectively.

Sandvine is a Waterloo, Ontario-based network

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Musings
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How & why Facebook video can overtake YouTube

It started with a timelapse video of an Apple Watch unboxing. The 18 second video was too long for Instagram, so I shared it with my friends on Facebook. Boom—in an instant 7,000 people (apparently) “viewed” the video. Facebook puts the stats prominently below the video clip, and they had the intended effect. I was suddenly thinking, Wow, that is a lot of views. Now, to be honest, Facebook “views” are like “hits” were in the days of the old-folk’s web. Facebook counts anything which plays for three seconds as a view, which makes for nifty numbers. A more accurate measure, however, is how many people actually click on the video to watch it.

Facebook brass might consider giving its video team a bonus, for this is the ultimate mind hack—data without context! Yes, I’m as much a sucker for viewership as the next person. Thus I decided to make

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My Essays
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What I am reading today

Musings
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Serendipity & Mr. Chen

San Francisco has one thing going for it – serendipity of interactions. Last night while having dinner with my friend Jared Kim I ran into Steve Chen, who in past life was co-founder of YouTube. These days he and Chad Hurley (another YouTube) run a holding company which now owns Delicious, the social bookmarking service that traces its roots back to the early days of Web 2.0.
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I have not seen Steve for a while – not since NewTeeVee Live when he was a speaker at the event in 2008. First words out of his mouth after a hug were — how is your health?

Chen, who stepped away from the limelight after spending a few years at Google is now a thirty something father of two. He is physically more fit than he was and still as goofy and fun as ever. We ended up sitting and chatting

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Musings
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