Tags: marketing

build a world, not an audience — kening zhu

I didn’t want to play the game of striving to be seen.

I just wanted to be.

Scams upon scams: The data-driven advertising grift – Another angry woman

On day 1 of your class about behaviour change in a science course, you learn that behaviour change is not a simple matter of information in, behaviour out. Human behaviour, and changing it, is big and complex.

Meanwhile, on your marketing courses, which I have had the misfortune to attend, the model of changing behaviour is pretty much this: information in, behaviour out.

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Hello. I was asked by the Design Business Association to talk to you today about “web3 and AI.”

I’d like to explain what those terms mean.

“Web3”

Let’s start with “web3.” Fortunately I don’t have to come up with an explanation for this term because my friend Heydon Pickering has recorded a video entitled “what is web 3.0?”

What is web trois point nought?

Web uno dot zilch was/is a system of interconnected documents traversible by hyperlink.

However, web deux full stop nowt was/is a system of interconnected documents traversible by hyperlink.

On the other hand, web drei dot zilch is a system of interconnected documents traversible by hyperlink.

Should you wish to upgrade to web three point uno, expect a system of interconnected documents traversible by hyperlink.

If we ever get to web noventa y cinco, you can bet your sweet @rse, it will be a system of interconnected documents traversible by f*!king hyperlink.

There you have it. “Web3” is a completely meaningless term. If someone uses it, they’re probably trying to sell you something.

If you ask for a definition, you’ll get a response like “something something decentralisation something something blockchain.”

As soon as someone mentions blockchain, you can tune out. It’s the classic example of a solution in search of a problem (although it’s still early days; it’s only been …more than a decade).

I can give you a defintion of what a blockchain is. A blockchain is multiple copies of a spreadsheet.

I find it useful to be able to do mental substitions like that when it comes to buzzwords. Like, remember when everyone was talking about “the cloud” but no one was asking what that actually meant? Well, by mentally substituting “the cloud” with “someone else’s server” you get a much better handle on the buzzword.

So, with “web3” out of the way, we can move onto the next buzzword. AI.

“AI”

The letters A and I are supposed to stand for Artificial Intelligence. It’s a term that’s almost as old as digital computing itself. It goes right back to the 1950s.

These days we’d use the term Artificial General Intelligence—AGI—to talk about that original vision of making computers as smart as people.

Vision is the right term here, because AGI remains a thought experiment. This is the realm of super intelligence: world-ending AI overlords; paperclip maximisers; Roko’s basilisk.

These are all fascinating thought experiments but they’re in the same arena as speculative technologies like faster-than-light travel or time travel. I’m happy to talk about any of those theoretically-possible topics, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about today.

When you hear about AI today, you’re probably hearing about specific technologies like large language models and machine learning.

Let’s take a look at large language models and their visual counterparts, diffusion models. They both work in the same way. You take a metric shit ton of data and you assign each one to a token. So you’ve got a numeric token that represents a bigger item: a phrase in a piece of text, or an object in an image.

The author Ted Chiang used a really good analogy to describe this process when he said ChatGPT is like a blurry JPEG of the web.

Just as image formats like JPG use compression to smush image data, these models use compression to smush data into tokens.

By the way, the GPT part of ChatGPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. The pre-training is that metric shit ton of data I mentioned. The generative part is about combining—or transforming—tokens in a way that should make probabalistic sense.

Terminology

Here’s some more terminology that comes up when people talk about these tools.

Overfitting. This is when the output produced by a generative pre-trained transformer is too close to the original data that fed the model. Another word for overfitting is plagiarism.

Hallucinations. People use this word when the output produced by a generative pre-trained transformer strays too far from reality. Another word for this is lying. Although the truth is that all of the output is a form of hallucination—that’s the generative part. Sometimes the output happens to match objective reality. Sometimes it doesn’t.

What about the term AI itself? Is there a more accurate term we could be using?

I’m going to quote Ted Chiang again. He proposes that a more accurate term is applied statistics. I like that. It points to the probabalistic nature of these tools: take an enormous amount of inputs, then generate something that feels similar based on implied correlations.

I like to think of “AI” as a kind of advanced autocomplete. I don’t say that to denigrate it. Quite the opposite. Autocomplete is something that appears mundane on the surface but has an incredible amount of complexity underneath: real-time parsing of input, a massive database of existing language, and on-the-fly predictions of the next most suitable word. Large language models do the same thing, but on a bigger scale.

What’s it good for?

So what is AI good for? Or rather, what is a language or diffusion model good for? Or what is applied statistics or advanced autocomplete good for?

Transformation. These tools are really good at transforming between formats. Text to speech. Speech to text. Text to images. Long form to short form. Short form to long form.

Think of transcripts. Summaries. These are smart uses of this kind of technology.

Coding, to a certain extent, can be considered a form of transformation. I’ve written books on programming, and I always advise people to first write out what they want in English. Then translate each line of English into the programming language. Large language models do a pretty good job of this right now, but you still need a knowledgable programmer to check the output for errors—there will be errors.

(As for long-form and short-form text transformations, the end game may be an internet filled with large language models endlessly converting our written communications.)

When it comes to the design process, these tools are good at quantity, not quality. If you need to generate some lorem ipsum placeholder text—or images—go for it.

What they won’t help with is problem definition. And it turns out that understanding and defining the problem is the really hard part of the design process.

Use these tools for inputs, not outputs. I would never publish the output of one of these tools publicly. But I might use one of these tools at the beginning of the process to get over the blank page. If I want to get a bunch of mediocre ideas out of the way quickly, these tools can help.

There’s an older definition of the intialism AI that dairy farmers would be familiar with, when “the AI man” would visit the farm. In that context, AI stands for artificial insemination. Perhaps thats also a more helpful definition of AI tools in the design process.

But, like I said, the outputs are not for public release. For one thing, the generated outputs aren’t automatically copyrighted. That’s only fair. Technically, it’s not your work. It is quite literally derivative.

Why all the hype?

Everything I’ve described here is potentially useful in some circumstances, but not Earth-shattering. So what’s with all the hype?

Venture capital. With this model of funding, belief in a technology’s future matters more than the technology’s actual future.

We’ve already seen this in action with self-driving cars, the metaverse, and cryptobollocks. Reality never matched the over-inflated expectations but that made no difference to the people profiting from the investments in those technologies (as long as they make sure to get out in time).

By the way, have you noticed how all your crypto spam has been replaced by AI spam? Your spam folder is a good gauge of what’s hot in venture capital circles right now.

The hype around AI is benefiting from a namespace clash. Remember, AI as in applied statistics or advanced autocomplete has nothing in common with AI as in Artificial General Intelligence. But because the same term is applied to both, the AI hype machine can piggyback on the AGI discourse.

It’s as if we decided to call self-driving cars “time machines”— we’d be debating the ethics of time travel as though it were plausible.

For a refreshing counter-example, take a look at what Apple is saying about AI. Or rather, what it isn’t saying. In the most recent Apple keynote, the term AI wasn’t mentioned once.

Technology blogger Om Malik wrote:

One of the most noticeable aspects of the keynote was the distinct lack of mention of AI or ChatGPT.

I think this was a missed marketing opportunity for the company.

I couldn’t disagree more. Apple is using machine learning a-plenty: facial recognition, categorising your photos, and more. But instead of over-inflating that work with the term AI, they stick to the more descriptive term of machine learning.

I think this will pay off when the inevitable hype crash comes. Other companies, that have tied their value to the mast of AI will see their stock prices tank. But because Apple is not associating themselves with that term, they’re well positioned to ride out that crash.

What should you do?

Alright, it’s time for me to wrap this up with some practical words of advice.

Beware of the Law of the instrument. You know the one: when all you have is a hammer, everything looks a nail. There’s a corollary to that: when the market is investing heavily in hammers, everyone’s going to try to convince you that the world is full of nails. See if you can instead cultivate a genuine sense of nailspotting.

It should ring alarm bells if you find yourself thinking “how can I find a use for this technology?” Rather, spend your time figuring out what problem you’re trying to solve and only then evaluate which technologies might help you.

Never make any decision out of fear. FOMO—Fear Of Missing Out—has been weaponised again and again, by crypto, by “web3”, by “AI”.

The message is always the same: “don’t get left behind!”

“It’s inevitable!” they cry. But you know what’s genuinely inevitable? Climate change. So maybe focus your energy there.

Links

I’ll leave you with some links.

I highly recommend you get a copy of the book, The Intelligence Illusion by Baldur Bjarnason. You can find it at illusion.baldurbjarnason.com

The subtitle is “a practical guide to the business risks of generative AI.” It doesn’t get into philosophical debates on potential future advances. Instead it concentrates squarely on the pros and cons of using these tools in your business today. It’s backed up by tons of research with copious amounts of footnotes and citations if you want to dive deeper into any of the issues.

If you don’t have time to read the whole book, Baldur has also created a kind of cheat sheet. Go to needtoknow.fyi and you can a one-page list of cards to help you become an AI bullshit detector.

I keep track of interesting developments in this space on my own website, tagging with “machine learning” at adactio.com/tags/machinelearning

Thank you very much for your time today.

How to be a writer on a marketing team without sounding like a jerk – A Whole Lotta Nothing

Good writing advice from Matt.

Representation and what happened to women in Tech

Men specialized in hardware while software development was seen as an exciting alternative to secretarial work. In 1967, Cosmopolitan published an article titled The Computer Girls, encouraging young women to pursue careers in computer science. So the curve went up, and continued to do so up until 1984. That’s when personal computers appeared.

Marketing matters:

When Apple released the Macintosh 128K and the Commodore 64 was introduced to the market, they were presented as toys. And, as toys were gendered, they were targeted at boys. We can look at advertisements from that time and quickly find a pattern: fathers and sons, young men, even one where a man is being undressed by two women with the motto Two bytes are better than one. It’s more evident with the ads for computer games; if women appear, they do so sexualized and half-naked. Not that appealing for young girls, one could imagine.

I got an email a little while back from Michael at Repeater Books asking me if I wanted an advance copy of Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism by Wendy Liu. Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I said “Sure!”

I’m happy to say that the book is most excellent …or at least mostly excellent.

Contrary to what the book title—or its blurb—might tell you, this is a memoir first and foremost. It’s a terrific memoir. It’s utterly absorbing.

Just as the most personal songs can have the most universal appeal, this story feels deeply personal while being entirely accessible. You don’t have to be a computer nerd to sympathise with the struggles of a twenty-something in a start-up trying to make sense of the world. This well-crafted narrative will resonate with any human. It calls to mind Ellen Ullman’s excellent memoir, Close to the Machine—not a comparison I make lightly.

But as you might have gathered from the book’s title, Abolish Silicon Valley isn’t being marketed as a memoir:

Abolish Silicon Valley is both a heartfelt personal story about the wasteful inequality of Silicon Valley, and a rallying call to engage in the radical politics needed to upend the status quo.

It’s true that the book finishes with a political manifesto but that’s only in the final chapter or two. The majority of the book is the personal story, and just as well. Those last few chapters really don’t work in this setting. They feel tonally out of place.

Don’t get me wrong, the contents of those final chapters are right up my alley—they’re preaching to the converted here. But I think they would be better placed in their own publication. The heavily-researched academic style jars with the preceeding personal narrative.

Abolish Silicon Valley is 80% memoir and 20% manifesto. I worry that the marketing isn’t making that clear. It would be a shame if this great book didn’t find its audience.

The book will be released on April 14th. It’s available to pre-order now. I highly recommend doing just that. I think you’ll really enjoy it. But if you get mired down in the final few chapters, know that you can safely skip them.

Let’s Define CSS 4 · Issue #4770 · w3c/csswg-drafts

Jen kicked off a fascinating thread here:

It’s come up quite a few times recently that the world of people who make websites would greatly benefit from the CSS Working Group officially defining ”CSS 4”, and later “CSS 5“, etc.

The level is discourse is impressively smart and civil.

Personally, I don’t (yet) have an opinion on this either way, but I’ll be watching it unfold with keen interest.

The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising - The Correspondent

The benchmarks that advertising companies use — intended to measure the number of clicks, sales and downloads that occur after an ad is viewed — are fundamentally misleading. None of these benchmarks distinguish between the selection effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that are happening anyway) and the advertising effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that would not have happened without ads).

It gets worse: the brightest minds of this generation are creating algorithms which only increase the effects of selection.

A terrificly well-written piece on the emperor’s new clothes worn by online advertising. Equal parts economic rigour and Gladwellian anecdata, it’s a joy to read! Kudos to Alana Gillespie for the great translation work (the original article was written in Dutch).

We currently assume that advertising companies always benefit from more data. … But the majority of advertising companies feed their complex algorithms silos full of data even though the practice never delivers the desired result. In the worst case, all that invasion of privacy can even lead to targeting the wrong group of people.

This insight is conspicuously absent from the debate about online privacy. At the moment, we don’t even know whether all this privacy violation works as advertised.

The interaction design of this article is great too—annotations, charts, and more!

Plain Text vs. HTML Emails: Which Is Better? [New Data]

Spoiler: it’s plain text. Every time.

Nothing boosts opens and clicks as well as an old school, plain-text email.

I feel vindicated.

People say they prefer HTML emails ..but they actually prefer plain-text.

This seems like a plausable explanation:

Think about how you email colleagues and friends: Do you usually add images or use well-designed templates? Probably not, and neither does your audience. They’re used to using email to communicate in a personal way, so emails from companies that look more personal will resonate more.

Now get off my lawn, you pesky HTML-email lovin’ kids.

AMP as your web framework – The AMP Blog

The bait’n’switch is laid bare. First, AMP is positioned as a separate format. Then, only AMP pages are allowed ranking in the top stories carousel. Now, let’s pretend none of that ever happened and act as though AMP is just another framework. Oh, and those separate AMP pages that you made? Turns out that was all just “transitional” and you’re supposed to make your entire site in AMP now.

I would genuinely love to know how the Polymer team at Google feel about this pivot. Everything claimed in this blog post about AMP is actually true of Polymer (and other libraries of web components that don’t have the luxury of bribing developers with SEO ranking).

Some alternative facts from the introduction:

AMP isn’t another “channel” or “format” that’s somehow not the web.

Weird …because that’s exactly how it was sold to us (as a direct competitor to similar offerings from Apple and Facebook).

It’s not an SEO thing.

That it outright false. Ask any company actually using AMP why they use it.

It’s not a replacement for HTML.

And yet, the article goes on to try convince you to replace HTML with AMP.

The second talk of the first day of An Event Apart Seattle is from Margot Bloomstein. She’ll be speaking about Designing for Trust in an Uncertain World. The talk description reads:

Mass media and our most cynical memes say we live in a post-fact era. So who can we trust—and how do our users invest their trust? Expert opinions are a thing of the past; we favor user reviews from “people like us” whether we’re planning a meal or prioritizing a newsfeed. But as our filter bubbles burst, consumers and citizens alike turn inward for the truth. By designing for empowerment, the smartest organizations meet them there.

We must empower our audiences to earn their trust—not the other way around—and our tactical choices in content and design can fuel empowerment. Margot will walk you through examples from retail, publishing, government, and other industries to detail what you can do to meet unprecedented problems in information consumption. Learn how voice, volume, and vulnerability can inform your design and content strategy to earn the trust of your users. We’ll ask the tough questions: How do brands develop rapport when audiences let emotion cloud logic? Can you design around cultural predisposition to improve public safety? And how do voice and vulnerability go beyond buzzwords and into broader corporate strategy? Learn how these questions can drive design choices in organizations of any size and industry—and discover how your choices can empower users and rebuild our very sense of trust itself.

I’m sitting in the audience, trying to write down the gist of what she’s saying…

She begins by thanking us for joining her to confront some big problems. About ten years ago, A List Apart was the first publication to publish a piece of hers. It had excellent editors—Carolyn, Erin, and so on. The web was a lot smaller ten years ago. Our problems are bigger now. Our responsibilities are bigger now. But our opportunities are bigger now too.

Margot takes us back to 1961. The Twilight Zone aired an episode called The Mirror. We’re in South America where a stealthy band are working to take over the government. The rebels confront the leader. He shares a secret with them. He shows them a mirror that reveals his enemies. The revolution is successful. The rebels assume power. The rebel leader starts to use the same oppressive techniques as his predecessor. One day he says in his magic mirror the same group of friends that he worked with to assume power. Now they’re working to depose him, according to the mirror. He rounds them up and has them killed. One day he sees himself in the mirror. He smashes the mirror with his gun. He is incredibly angry. A priest walking past the door hears a commotion. The priest hears a gunshot. Entering the room, he sees the rebel leader dead on the ground with the gun in his hand.

We look to see ourselves. We look to see the truth. We hope the images coincide.

When our users see themselves, and then see the world around them, the images don’t coincide.

Internal truths trump external facts.

We used to place trust in brands. Now we’ve knocked them off the pedestal, or they’ve knocked themselves off the pedestal. They’ve been shady. Creeping inconsistencies. Departments of government are exhorting people not to trust external sources. It’s gaslighting. The blowback of gaslighting is broad. It effects us. An insidious scepticism—of journalism, of politics, of brands. This is our problem now.

To regain the trust of our audiences, we must empower them.

Why now? Maybe some of this does fall on our recent history. We punish politicians for flip-flopping and yet now Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump simply deny reality, completely contradicting their previous positions. The flip-flopping doesn’t matter. If you were a Trump supporter before, you continued to support him. No amount of information would cause you to change your mind.

Inconsistency erodes our ability to evaluate and trust. In some media circles, coached scepticism, false equivalency, and rampant air quotes all work to erode consensus. It offers us a cosy echo chamber. It’s comforting. It’s the journalism of affirmation. But our ability to evaluate information for ourselves suffers. Again, that’s gaslighting.

You can find media that bolsters your existing opinions. It’s a strange space that focuses more on hiding information, while claiming to be unbiased. It works to separate the listener, viewer, and reader from their own lived experiences. If you work in public services, this effects you.

Do we get comfortable in our faith, or confidentally test our beliefs through education?

Marketing relies on us re-evaluating our choices. Now we’ve turned away from the old arbiters of experts. We’ve moved from expertise to homophily—only listening to people like us. But people have recently become aware of their own filter bubbles. So people turn inward to narcissism. If you can’t trust anyone, you can only turn inward. But that’s when we see the effects of a poor information diet. We don’t know what objective journalism looks like any more. Our analytic skills are suffering as a result. Our ability to trust external sources of expertise suffers.

Inconsistency undermines trust—externally and internally. People turn inward and wonder if they can even trust their own perceptions any more. You might raise an eyebrow when a politician plays fast and loose with the truth, or a brand does something shady.

We look for consistency with our own perceptions. Does this fit with what I know? Does this make me feel good? Does this brand make me feel good about myself? It’s tied to identity. There’s a cycle of deliberation and validation. We’re validating against our own worldview. Referencing Jeffrey’s talk, Margot says that giving people time to slow down helps them evaluate and validate. But there’s a self-perpetuating cycle of belief and validation. Jamelle Bouie from Slate says:

We adopt facts based on our identities.

How we form our beliefs affects our reality more than what we already believe. Cultural predisposition is what give us our confirmation bias.

Say you’re skeptical of big pharma. You put the needs of your family above the advice of medical experts. You deny the efficacy of vaccination. The way to reach these people is not to meet them with anger and judgement. Instead, by working in the areas they already feel comfortable in—alternative medicine, say—we can reach them much more effictively. We need to meet a reluctant audience on their own terms. That empowers them. Empowerment reflects and rebuilds trust. If people are looking inward for information, we can meet them there.

Voice

The language a brand uses to express itself. You don’t want to alienate your audience. You need to bring your audience along with you. When a brand changes over time, it runs the risk of alienating its audience. But by using a consistent voice, and speaking with transparency, it empowers the audience.

A good example of this is Mailchimp. When Mailchimp first moved into the e-commerce space, they approached it from a point of humility. They wrote on the blog in a very personal vulnerable way, using plain language. The language didn’t ask more acclimation from their audience.

ClinicalTrials.gov does not have a cute monkey. Their legal disclaimer used to have reams of text. They took a step back to figure what they needed to provide in order to make the audience comfortable. They empowered their audience by writing clearly, avoiding the passive voice.

Volume

What is enough detail to allow a user to feel good about their choices? We used to think it was all about reducing information. For a lot of brands, that’s true. But America’s Test Kitchen is known for producing a lot of content. They’re known for it because their content focuses on empowering people. You’re getting enough content to do well. They try to engage people regardless of level of expertise. That’s the ultimate level of empathy—meeting people wherever they are. Success breeds confidence. That’s the ethos that underpins all their strategy.

Crutchfield Electronics also considers what the right amount of content is to allow people to succeed. By making sure that people feel good and confident about the content they’re receiving, Crutchfield Electronics are also making sure that people good and confident in their choices.

Gov.uk had to contend with where people were seeking information. The old version used to have information spread across multiple websites. People then looked elsewhere. Government Digital Services realised they were saying too much. They reduced the amount of content. Let government do what only government can do.

So how do you know when you have “enough” content? Whether you’re America’s Test Kitchen or Gov.uk. You have enough content when people feel empowered to move forward. Sometimes people need more content to think more. Sometimes people need less.

Vulnerability

How do we open up and support people in empowering themselves? Vulnerability can also mean letting people know how we’re doing, and how we’re going to change over time. That’s how we build a conversation with our audience.

Sometimes vulnerability can mean prototyping in public. Buzzfeed rolled out a newsletter by exposing their A/B testing in public. This wasn’t user-testing on the sidelines; it was front and centre. It was good material for their own blog.

When we ask people “what do you think?” we allow people to become evalangists of our products by making them an active part of the process. Mailchimp did this when they dogfooded their new e-commerce product. They used their own product and talked openly about it. There was a conversation between the company and the audience.

Cooks Illustrated will frequently revisit their old recommendations and acknowledge that things have changed. It’s admitting to a kind of falliability, but that’s not a form of weakness; it’s a form of strength.

If you use some of the recommendations on their site, Volkswagen ask “what are you looking for in a car?” rather than “what are you looking for in Volkswagen?” They’re building the confidence of their audience. That builds trust.

Buzzfeed also hosts opposing viewpoints. They have asides on articles called “Outside Your Bubble”. They bring in other voices so their audiences can have a more informed opinion.

A consistent and accessible voice, appropriate volume for the context, and humanising vulnerability together empowers users.

Margot says all that in the face of the question: do we live in a post-fact era? To which she says: when was the fact era?

Cynicism is a form of cowardice. It’s not a fruitful position. It doesn’t move us forward as designers, and it certainly doesn’t move us forward as a society. Cynics look at the world and say “it’s worse.” Designers look at the world and say “it could be better.”

Design won’t save the world—but it may make it more worth saving. Are we uniquely positioned to fix this problem? No. But that doesn’t free us from working hard to do our part.

Margot thinks we can design our way out of cynicism. And we need to. For ourselves, for our clients, and for our very society.

Luke has written up the selection process he went through when Clearleft was designing the Virgin Holidays app. When it comes to deploying on mobile, there were three options:

1. Native apps
2. A progressive web app
3. A hybrid app

The Virgin Holidays team went with that third option.

Now, it will come as no surprise that I’m a big fan of the second option: building a progressive web app (or turning an existing site into a progressive web app). I think a progressive web app is a great solution for travel apps, and the use-case that Luke describes sounds perfect:

Easy access to resort staff and holiday details that could be viewed offline to help as many customers as possible travel without stress and enjoy a fantastic holiday

Luke explains why they choice not to go with a progressive web app.

The current level of support and leap in understanding meant we’d risk alienating many of our customers.

The issue of support is one that is largely fixed at this point. When Clearleft was working on the Virgin Holidays app, service workers hadn’t landed in iOS. Hence, the risk of alienating a lot of customers. But now that Mobile Safari has offline capabilities, that’s no longer a problem.

But it’s the second reason that’s trickier:

Simply put, customers already expected to find us in the App Store and are familiar with what apps can historically offer over websites.

I think this is the biggest challenge facing progressive web apps: battling expectations.

For over a decade, people have formed ideas about what to expect from the web and what to expect from native. From a technical perspective, native and web have become closer and closer in capabilities. But people’s expectations move slower than technological changes.

First of all, there’s the whole issue of discovery: will people understand that they can “install” a website and expect it to behave exactly like a native app? This is where install prompts and ambient badging come in. I think ambient badging is the way to go, but it’s still a tricky concept to explain to people.

But there’s another way of looking at the current situation. Instead of seeing people’s expectations as a negative factor, maybe it’s an opportunity. There’s an opportunity right now for companies to be as groundbreaking and trendsetting as Wired.com when it switched to CSS for layout, or The Boston Globe when it launched its responsive site.

It makes for a great story. Just look at the Pinterest progressive web app for an example (skip to the end to get to the numbers):

Weekly active users on mobile web have increased 103 percent year-over-year overall, with a 156 percent increase in Brazil and 312 percent increase in India. On the engagement side, session length increased by 296 percent, the number of Pins seen increased by 401 percent and people were 295 percent more likely to save a Pin to a board. Those are amazing in and of themselves, but the growth front is where things really shined. Logins increased by 370 percent and new signups increased by 843 percent year-over-year. Since we shipped the new experience, mobile web has become the top platform for new signups. And for fun, in less than 6 months since fully shipping, we already have 800 thousand weekly users using our PWA like a native app (from their homescreen).

Now admittedly their previous mobile web experience was a dreadful doorslam, but still, those are some amazing statistics!

Maybe we’re underestimating the malleability of people’s expectations when it comes to the web on mobile. Perhaps the inertia we think we’re battling against isn’t such a problem as long as we give people a fast, reliable, engaging experience.

If you build that, they will come.

10 Progressive Web App Examples that Brand Owners can Learn From - Iflexion

Adriana Blum lists progressive web apps that are doing very, very well from Twitter, Trivago, Starbucks, Forbes, Debebhams, West Elm, Washington Post, Pinterest, AliExpress, and Lancôme.

Instead of choosing between the immediacy of a mobile website and the rich experience offered by native apps, you can now offer your target audiences the best of both and improve the commercial performance of your business to boot.

I’ve come to believe that the goal of any good framework should be to make itself unnecessary.

Brian said it explicitly of his PhoneGap project:

The ultimate purpose of PhoneGap is to cease to exist.

That makes total sense, especially if your code is a polyfill—those solutions are temporary by design. Autoprefixer is another good example of a piece of code that becomes less and less necessary over time.

But I think it’s equally true of any successful framework or library. If the framework becomes popular enough, it will inevitably end up influencing the standards process, thereby becoming dispensible.

jQuery is the classic example of this. There’s very little reason to use jQuery these days because you can accomplish so much with browser-native JavaScript. But the reason why you can accomplish so much without jQuery is because of jQuery. I don’t think we would have querySelector without jQuery. The library proved the need for the feature. The same is true for a whole load of DOM scripting features.

The same process is almost certain to occur with React—it’s a good bet there will be a standardised equivalent to the virtual DOM at some point.

When Google first unveiled AMP, its intentions weren’t clear to me. I hoped that it existed purely to make itself redundant:

As well as publishers creating AMP versions of their pages in order to appease Google, perhaps they will start to ask “Why can’t our regular pages be this fast?” By showing that there is life beyond big bloated invasive web pages, perhaps the AMP project will work as a demo of what the whole web could be.

Alas, as time has passed, that hope shows no signs of being fulfilled. If anything, I’ve noticed publishers using the existence of their AMP pages as a justification for just letting their “regular” pages put on weight.

Worse yet, the messaging from Google around AMP has shifted. Instead of pitching it as a format for creating parallel versions of your web pages, they’re now also extolling the virtues of having your AMP pages be the only version you publish:

In fact, AMP’s evolution has made it a viable solution to build entire websites.

On an episode of the Dev Mode podcast a while back, AMP was a hotly-debated topic. But even those defending AMP were doing so on the understanding that it was more a proof-of-concept than a long-term solution (and also that AMP is just for news stories—something else that Google are keen to change).

But now it’s clear that the Google AMP Project is being marketed more like a framework for the future: a collection of web components that prioritise performance …which is kind of odd, because that’s also what Google’s Polymer project is. The difference being that pages made with Polymer don’t get preferential treatment in Google’s search results. I can’t help but wonder how the Polymer team feels about AMP’s gradual pivot onto their territory.

If the AMP project existed in order to create a web where AMP was no longer needed, I think I could get behind it. But the more it’s positioned as the only viable solution to solving performance, the more uncomfortable I am with it.

Which, by the way, brings me to one of the most pernicious ideas around Google AMP—positioning anyone opposed to it as not caring about web performance. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s precisely because performance on the web is so important that it deserves a long-term solution, co-created by all of us: not some commandents delivered to us from on-high by one organisation, enforced by preferential treatment by that organisation’s monopoly in search.

It’s the classic logical fallacy:

1. Performance! Something must be done!
2. AMP is something.
3. Now something has been done.

By marketing itself as the only viable solution to the web performance problem, I think the AMP project is doing itself a great disservice. If it positioned itself as an example to be emulated, I would welcome it.

I wish that AMP were being marketed more like a temporary polyfill. And as with any polyfill, I look forward to the day when AMP is no longer necesssary.

I want AMP to become extinct. I genuinely think that the Google AMP team should share that wish.

Doc Searls Weblog · Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica problems are nothing compared to what’s coming for all of online publishing

What will happen when the Times, the New Yorker and other pubs own up to the simple fact that they are just as guilty as Facebook of leaking its readers’ data to other parties, for—in many if not most cases—God knows what purposes besides “interest-based” advertising? And what happens when the EU comes down on them too? It’s game-on after 25 May, when the EU can start fining violators of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Key fact: the GDPR protects the data blood of EU citizens wherever they risk having it sucked in the digital world.

Ethan quite rightly points out some semantic sleight of hand by Google’s AMP team:

But when I hear AMP described as an open, community-led project, it strikes me as incredibly problematic, and more than a little troubling. AMP is, I think, best described as nominally open-source. It’s a corporate-led product initiative built with, and distributed on, open web technologies.

But so what, right? Tom-ay-to, tom-a-to. Well, here’s a pernicious example of where it matters: in a recent announcement of their intent to ship a new addition to HTML, the Google Chrome team cited the mood of the web development community thusly:

Web developers: Positive (AMP team indicated desire to start using the attribute)

If AMP were actually the product of working web developers, this justification would make sense. As it is, we’ve got one team at Google citing the preference of another team at Google but representing it as the will of the people.

This is just one example of AMP’s sneaky marketing where some finely-shaved semantics allows them to appear far more reasonable than they actually are.

At AMP Conf, the Google Search team were at pains to repeat over and over that AMP pages wouldn’t get any preferential treatment in search results …but they appear in a carousel above the search results. Now, if you were to ask any right-thinking person whether they think having their page appear right at the top of a list of search results would be considered preferential treatment, I think they would say hell, yes! This is the only reason why The Guardian, for instance, even have AMP versions of their content—it’s not for the performance benefits (their non-AMP pages are faster); it’s for that prime real estate in the carousel.

The same semantic nit-picking can be found in their defence of caching. See, they’ve even got me calling it caching! It’s hosting. If I click on a search result, and I am taken to page that has a URL beginning with https://www.google.com/amp/s/... then that page is being hosted on the domain google.com. That is literally what hosting means. Now, you might argue that the original version was hosted on a different domain, but the version that the user gets sent to is the Google copy. You can call it caching if you like, but you can’t tell me that Google aren’t hosting AMP pages.

That’s a particularly low blow, because it’s such a bait’n’switch. One of the reasons why AMP first appeared to be different to Facebook Instant Articles or Apple News was the promise that you could host your AMP pages yourself. That’s the very reason I first got interested in AMP. But if you actually want the benefits of AMP—appearing in the not-search-results carousel, pre-rendered performance, etc.—then your pages must be hosted by Google.

So, to summarise, here are three statements that Google’s AMP team are currently peddling as being true:

1. AMP is a community project, not a Google project.
2. AMP pages don’t receive preferential treatment in search results.
3. AMP pages are hosted on your own domain.

I don’t think those statements are even truthy, much less true. In fact, if I were looking for the right term to semantically describe any one of those statements, the closest in meaning would be this:

A statement used intentionally for the purpose of deception.

That is the dictionary definition of a lie.

Update: That last part was a bit much. Sorry about that. I know it’s a bit much because The Register got all gloaty about it.

I don’t think the developers working on the AMP format are intentionally deceptive (although they are engaging in some impressive cognitive gymnastics). The AMP ecosystem, on the other hand, that’s another story—the preferential treatment of Google-hosted AMP pages in the carousel and in search results; that’s messed up.

Still, I would do well to remember that there are well-meaning people working on even the fishiest of projects.

Except for the people working at the shitrag that is The Register.

(The other strong signal that I overstepped the bounds of decency was that this post attracted the pond scum of Hacker News. That’s another place where the “well-meaning people work on even the fishiest of projects” rule definitely doesn’t apply.)

Frances has written up some of the history behind her minting of the term “progressive web app”. She points out that accuracy is secondary to marketing:

I keep seeing folks (developers) getting all smart-ass saying they should have been PW “Sites” not “Apps” but I just want to put on the record that it doesn’t matter. The name isn’t for you and worrying about it is distraction from just building things that work better for everyone. The name is for your boss, for your investor, for your marketeer.

Personally, I think “progressive web app” is a pretty good phrase—two out of three words in it are spot on. I really like the word “progressive”, with its echoes of progressive enhancement. I really, really like the word “web”. But, yeah, I’m one of those smart-asses who points out that the “app” part isn’t great.

That’s not just me being a pedant (or, it’s not only me being a pedant). I’ve seen people who were genuinely put off investigating the technologies behind progressive web apps because of the naming.

The name is one of the reasons I didn’t look into PWAs 6 months ago. Can we change the name itself? 😎

— Julian Gaviria (@juliangav) March 24, 2017

Here’s an article with the spot-on title Progressive Web Apps — The Next Step In Responsive Web Design:

Late last week, Smashing Magazine, one of the largest and most influential online publications for web design, posted on Facebook that their website was “now running as a Progressive Web App.”

Honestly, I didn’t think much of it. Progressive Web Apps are for the hardcore web application developers creating the next online cloud-based Photoshop (complicated stuff), right? I scrolled on and went about my day.

And here’s someone feeling the cognitive dissonance of turning a website into a progressive web app, even though that’s exactly the right thing to do:

My personal website is a collection of static HTML files and is also a progressive web app. Transforming it into a progressive web app felt a bit weird in the beginning because it’s not an actual application but I wanted to be one of the cool kids, and PWAs still offer a lot of additional improvements.

Still, it could well be that these are the exceptions and that most people are not being discouraged by the “app” phrasing. I certainly hope that there aren’t more people out there thinking “well, progressive web apps aren’t for me because I’m building a content site.”

In short, the name might not be perfect but it’s pretty damn good.

What I find more troubling is the grouping of unrelated technologies under the “progressive web app” banner. If Google devrel events were anything to go by, you’d be forgiven for thinking that progressive web apps have something to do with AMP or Polymer (they don’t). One of the great things about progressive web apps is that they are agnostic to tech stacks. Still, I totally get why Googlers would want to use the opportunity to point to their other projects.

Far more troubling is the entanglement of the term “progressive web app” with the architectural choice of “single page app”. I’m not the only one who’s worried about this.

I’ve seen too many devs assume PWA is a subset of SPA. We need to improve our messaging

— Jake Archibald (@jaffathecake) June 4, 2016

Here’s the most egregious example: an article on Hacker Noon called Before You Build a PWA You Need a SPA.

No! Not true! Literally any website can be a progressive web app:

• switch over to HTTPS,
• add a JSON manifest file with your metacrap, and
• add a service worker.

That last step can be tricky if you’re new to service workers, but it’s not unsurmountable. It’s certainly a lot easier than completely rearchitecting your existing website to be a JavaScript-driven single page app.

Alas, I think that many of the initial poster-children for progressive web apps gave the impression that you had to make a completely separate app/site at a different URL. It was like a return to the bad old days of m. sites for mobile. The Washington Post’s progressive web app (currently offline) went so far as to turn away traffic from the “wrong” browsers. This is despite the fact that the very first item in the list of criteria for a progressive web app is:

Responsive: to fit any form factor

Now, I absolutely understand that the immediate priority is to demonstrate that a progressive web app can compete with a native mobile app in terms of features (and trounce it in terms of installation friction). But I’m worried that in our rush to match what native apps can do, we may end up ditching the very features that make the web a universally-accessible medium. Killing URLs simply because native apps don’t have URLs is a classic example of throwing the baby out with the bath water:

Up until now I’ve been a big fan of Progressive Web Apps. I understood them to be combining the best of the web (responsiveness, linkability) with the best of native (installable, connectivity independent). Now I see that balance shifting towards the native end of the scale at the expense of the web’s best features. I’d love to see that balance restored with a little less emphasis on the “Apps” and a little more emphasis on the “Web.” Now that would be progressive.

If the goal of the web is just to compete with native, then we’ve set the bar way too low.

So if you’ve been wary of investing the technologies behind progressive web apps because you’re “just” building a website, please try to see past the name. As Frances says:

It’s marketing, just like HTML5 had very little to do with actual HTML. PWAs are just a bunch of technologies with a zingy-new brandname.

Literally any website can—and should—be a progressive web app. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

I was at an event last year where I heard Chris Heilmann say that you shouldn’t make your blog into a progressive web app. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. He repeats that message in this video chat:

When somebody, for example, turns their blog into a PWA, I don’t see the point. I don’t want to have that icon on my homepage. This doesn’t make any sense to me.

Excuse me!? Just because you don’t want to have someone’s icon on your home screen, that person shouldn’t be using state-of-the-art technologies!? Excuse my French, but Fuck. That. Shit!

Our imaginations have become so limited by what native mobile apps currently do that we can’t see past merely imitating the status quo like a sad cargo cult.

I don’t want the web to equal native; I want the web to surpass it. I, for one, would prefer a reality where my home screen isn’t filled with the icons of startups and companies that have fulfilled the criteria of the gatekeepers. But a home screen filled with the faces of people who didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission to publish? That’s what I want!

Like Frances says:

Remember, this is for everyone.

Naming Progressive Web Apps | fberriman

AMP is a symptom that someone, somewhere, thinks the web is failing so badly (so slow, so unresponsive) for a portion of the world that they want to take all the content and package it back up in a sterile, un-webby, branded box. That makes me so sad. PWAs, to me, are a potential treatment.

It didn’t take long for Patterns Day to sell out (in the sense of the tickets all being sold; not in the sense of going mainstream and selling out to The Man).

I’m very pleased about the ticket situation. It certainly makes my life easier. Now I can concentrate on the logistics for the day, without having to worry about trying to flog tickets AKA marketing.

But I also feel bad. Some people who really, really wanted to come weren’t able to get tickets in time. This is usually because they work at a company where to have to get clearance for the time off, and the cost of the ticket. By the time the word came down from on high that they’ve got the green light, the tickets were already gone. That’s a real shame.

There is, however, a glimmer of hope on the horizon. There is one last chance to get tickets for Patterns Day, and that’s through sponsorship.

Here’s the deal: if I can get some things sponsored (like recordings of the talks, tea and coffee for the day, or an after-party), I can offer a few tickets in return. I can also offer your logo on the Patterns Day website, your logo on the slide between talks, and a shout-out on stage. But that’s pretty much it. I can’t offer a physical stand at the event—there just isn’t enough room. And I certainly can’t offer you a list of attendee details for your marketing list—that’s just wrong.

In order of priority, here’s what I would love to get sponsored, and here’s what I can offer in return:

1. £2000: Sponsoring video recordings of the talks—4 tickets. This is probably the best marketing opportunity for your company; we can slap your logo at the start and end of each video when they go online.
2. £2000: Sponsoring tea and coffee for attendees for the day—4 tickets. This is a fixed price, set by the venue.
3. £2000+: Sponsoring an after-party near the conference—4 tickets. Ideally you’d take care of booking a venue for this, and you can go crazy decking it out with your branding. Two pubs right across from the conference venue have upstairs rooms you can book: The Joker, and The Hare And Hounds.

There you have it. There’s no room for negotiation, I’m afraid, but I think they’re pretty good deals. Remember, by sponsoring Patterns Day you’ll also have my undying gratitude, and the goodwill of all my peers coming to this event.

Reckon you can convince your marketing department? Drop me a line, let me know which sponsorship option you’d like to snap up, and those four tickets could be yours.

Performance is a feature. Why performance is an opportunity for online businesses.

The problem is that performance is a feature that is not on anyone’s product roadmap.

For whatever reason, the fact that it correlates directly to bounce rate, time on site, pages-per-visit etc. has not struck home with many product owners.

Most websites, certainly in the publishing industry where I have worked for a good part of my career, see those metrics as core KPIs. So you would think that anything that improved them would get prioritised. But no.