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Funnily enough, the word "barbarian" for uncivilized people comes all the way from Ancient Greek slang, proverbially meaning "people who speak in these 'bar bar bar' noises".[0] It's all bar bar bar to me. :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarian

This post reads like a Buzzfeed article of pointing out not quite impressive iterations of known technologies or fixes to "it ain't broke" situations.

Electric buses have been around for a while, they're called trolleys. Putting the batteries inside the buses is an improvement, but hardly a breakthrough, and I'm not entirely sure it would make me "Love the Bus"

Likewise, autonomous buses have been around for at least a couple decades in the form of driverless trains. For high-density routes with lots of passengers doing the same itinerary, I feel it's probably cheaper in the long run, more maintainable and safer to use rails, so I'm not sure an autonomous bus is an innovation we want over trains.

Seamless payment is not a tech breakthrough at this point, it's just a matter of getting regulators and government contractors to implement seamless payments.

"Accessibility" is not a tech breakthrough and the things mentioned in the article make me question the author's understanding of the state of assistive technology and the actual current needs of people with disabilities.

As for "Minibus or ‘trackless train’", that's indeed a super interesting question that hasn't been solved in the space of transportation: given a very dense ad-hoc demand for transportation from region A to region B, how can you broker a collective transportation solution that is cheap, efficient and desirable over, say, a slower multimodal option, or more expensive private transportation. Sadly, the article discusses minibuses (which we've had, in Brazil at least, for longer than I can remember) and only mentions they "can" be routeless but doesn't fully explain how that could be achieved.

If contemporary podcasts had the habit of publishing a trailer to their RSS feed by the time they announced the upcoming launch.

A satire page that reviews HN's weekly top posts in a very condescending manner (the humor to me very much welcome but you may be put off by it)

My strategy pretty much consists of subscribing to good creators and curators across all channels.

I have a bookmark folder (aptly named 1) which opens:

    - My Gmail "newsletters" filter view
    - My AOL Reader
    - HackerNews
    - MetaFilter
    - My Facebook "Must read" user list
    - My Twitter "Must read" list
    - My Reddit "Must read" list
    - My Youtube "Subscriptions" page

If I have the time, I also go for the noisier and long-form channels in 2:

    - Newspapers
    - My YouTube "Watch Later" list
    - My Pinboard "Read later" list
    - HN Explain (in case I missed something big)

Podcasts have a routine of their own because I listen during commute and workout but I treat it like my inbox: two daily scrubs of new content, and what seems interesting goes to the "Up next" playlist.

Running an FB campaign focused on performance is, like I said, a game of finding the lowest on-target/high-conversion CPM (conversely: finding your intended audience at its cheapest). It's not in Facebook's interest to disclose this information too easily, as part of their profit margin comes from squeezing campaign spread.

So my thinking here is that their tools are poor at performance optimization by design, so that we have to jump through hoops, experiment and throw money at different audience mixes in order to find just the right creative-segment-budget allocation. So I don't think that is headed to change so long as they are allowed to keep playing black box and walled garden.

I was astounded how easy it was to get better CPA/ROI running Facebook campaigns on, say, DBM or Criteo even at a premium on the CPM. It goes to show just how lacking their tools are in fast audience and creative optimization.

There is no point in acquiring page likes, for two reasons: first, as you mentioned, after you paid to acquire the like you'll still have to pay to reach those people with your campaign (organic reach is peanuts these days); second, targeting ads at fans rather than any other segmentation makes no difference for your campaign cost structure.

To be fair, all things being equal, Fans have better CPM than interest-based clusters ("people who like such pages and such topics") on average. But that's not a Facebook incentive, it's merely a statistical correlation between someone having liked your page and the likelihood of their reaction to your ads being positive (which drives the relevance score up, in turn bringing the CPM down). But you can find even better results with proper behavior-based targeting (in particular remarketing).

When I'm surveying the competition, net fan growth is a useful metric to keep in hand because it leaks information. High churn is indicative of sponsored content targeted towards fans only (which usually comes hand-in-hand with outdated content strategies such as increasingly like-bait content and equally distributed total engagement across many posts), while positive net fan growth can be coupled with total engagements and views and some qualitative observations in order to ballpark competitor's budget and broad-strokes strategy.

If I'm being honest, looking at the cost-effectiveness of both branding and performance campaigns on Facebook, it remains a secondary channel and gives no signs of ever meriting a prime role in my campaigns. Production costs, data lock-in opportunity costs and its highly kafkaesque tools and available metrics only make things worse.

In my years in advertising it's been repeatedly demonstrable that about every other DSP performs better than Facebook (across all industries and campaign goals I've worked with), whose only clear strength seems to be having massive inventory with a pretty decent coverage, making it a one-stop-shop for small and medium businesses and making itself a required line item in large companies media planning.

That's great for them, I'm sure, but they simply don't deliver as well as about anything else I work with, and that translates into a "when in doubt start by decreasing the Facebook budget and reallocating it somewhere else" pattern that you see everywhere. That may turn out to be a long term threat for them, I don't know. Their recent closing of FBX is telling: I for one had better results running Facebook campaigns through 3rd party DSPs than through Facebook itself, even at a premium on the CPM.

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edit. – I realize I mentioned CPM 3 times and no other metric, here's why: most Facebook optimizations involve finding the cheapest inventory that is on-target (for branding campaigns) or high-conversion (for performance campaigns). So trying to grok your campaign results always leads back to CPM, even though my job is usually to deliver something more useful to the client such as low CPA, high ROI or even additional reach with better CPP for their TVC campaign.

I was thinking verticals as a whole, not individual companies. The budget for TV, print, radio and so forth tells the size of the market, the fact that there are more players in these verticals than in online search is maybe yet another reason to attack them rather than Google.

The way it stands, Snapchat already has more data points to tap from and richer content and interaction opportunities than traditional media (television, radio, print, OOH...), and this could be further improved in future versions. You don't need to set out to compete against Google and Facebook when the actual big fish in the market are in fact easier to position yourself against.

Kakao's business model history is actually rather fascinating, and they keep grabbing sizeable market shares in unlikely or previously inexpressive markets to great success.

In 2012, KakaoTalk's $42 million revenue is broken down to 67.5% ($31.1M) gaming, 26.2% ($12.1M) advertising, and 6.3% ($2.8M) emoticon sales. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KakaoTalk#Company_Business_Mod...

Growing up in a coffee farm in countryside São Paulo state, I was a late BBSer (from 1994 to the early 2000s). As other people have it with Usenet and early web forums, I just loved how tight-knit and contentful the Internet was back then. I don't subscribe to the Eternal September "newcomers ruined everything" feeling (in fact I'm quite a big fan of massified Internet culture), but I do love and cherish those sorts of small, focused online communities, every day more protective of themselves and thus harder to find.

I still wonder if it's possible to have a large community (beyond, say, Dunbar's number active member) that is able to sustain the feeling of those small ones — as far as I'm concerned, it's an open question in modern design. Points and reputation systems (such as HN, Slashdot and Reddit sport) and closed doors (secret groups on Facebook and other communities that are hard to access or join) are fair compromises, but I still feel no-one has quite squared the market opportunity around those communities yet. But maybe they do have to stay small. And maybe it's a thing that will elude monetization forever, who knows. Right now, as far as I'm concerned, no-one's making money out of those small-and-focused community patterns which are the best and oldest of the Internet.

This reminds me of Shoes. Of course, Javascript isn't designed for simplicity like Ruby, and Electron is aimed at serious product development rather than novice and weekend programmers. The product design just isn't "there" yet if we are to measure it by _why's standards. But it's nice to see an ACCESSIBLE actively-maintained tool for making cross-OS apps that "just work" again.

In fact, _why released Shoes around 2007 and disappeared in 2009. To put this in perspective, Google Chrome and the 1st iPhone were released in 2008. The web standard mess (JS in particular) was only beginning to be untangled back in 2007. Maybe today's _why would have preferred to try and make Javascript more approachable rather than choose a simple language like Ruby and make it more powerful. I don't know.

At any rate, the trend for things like Electron is to become increasingly complicated to the point where it merits a mention in developers' CVs — as it happened with Rails and Node and countless other frameworks before. Hopefully at this point there are players with stakes high enough at making things accessible to push for an entry-level version of Electron. Maybe Codecademy or one of its cousins.

I'll start by pointing out that this article makes no sense whatsoever for large businesses and agency-managed campaigns, where expertise and scale mean CPC and CPM are analytical tools and not goals. When you have enough expertise to integrate data and attribute results, it makes no sense to optimize for anything other than ROI/CPA.

Now. Both Google and Facebook get a lot of revenue from small and medium businesses. SMBs often have short budgets, little expertise and limited work-hours to dedicate to online advertising, so it's not at all uncommon for them to concentrate all or most of their effort into a single platform.

For that reason, both Google and Facebook have a constant incentive to constantly innovate in formats, targeting options and channels catered to long-tail small pockets.

The problem with this article is that it mixes large and small. The over-crowded web display network caters mostly to big fish (common-enough exception: small fish by proxy, through retailer campaigns). Am I saying SMBs running web display campaigns is unheard of? Not at all, but clearly that's not Google's strongest proposition. For SMBs, that would be Search. App display and exclusive channels (such as Gmail's promotions inbox) being the next logical step.

Now I work at a fairly specialized agency so I can only guess what my online advertising portfolio would look like if I were an SMB or a boutique agency with off-the-shelf solutions for SMBs, but I honestly don't see Google being ruled out or even majorly threatened for most use cases by this inflation in the web display network.

Large companies and agencies will keep otimizing display campaigns for ROI/CPA. Small businesses (and their agencies) will flock around either Facebook or Google Search mostly, as they already do.

You're assuming a fixed workload-based salary. If we're talking about a salary that has a big variable component (commissions, fees, bonuses), the cut may have been smaller.

In that case, we'll give you: News Feed, Pages, Groups, Messenger, Events, the Platform, and Connect, which have all been pivotal to Facebook's success (I guess more than one of these has been the first time email was dethroned as unquestionable medium for doing some thing or another).

They glossed over the tidal force in the movie and I assumed it was a deus ex of sorts (in fact, I assumed the whole final act of the movie was more concerned with resolution of the story than with proper Physics). Thank you for this explanation, this is fascinating stuff.

So this is where we stand:

    Encrypted (Certified)    COOL GREEN
    Encrypted (Self-Signed)  EVIL RED
    Unencrypted              NOTHING / NEUTRAL CHROME