From pull to ‘stream’ economies

I was interested to read Ben Evan’s recent take on the “Facebook of eCommerce”. He concludes:

That kind of scalable automation, though, could also go in completely the opposite direction for some things — away from any kind of decision at all. You put an Amazon Dash on the machine, or perhaps it can measure what you’re used and re-order by itself, and so you in effect subscribe to the product, and once done you’ll probably never bother to change brand. Or, say to Siri or Alexa or Google Assistant ‘Hey, order some more soap powder’ and the same brand is added to your next delivery. (And in both cases your choice of channel is just as now locked in as your choice of soap powder, once you’ve set the default.) Either way, an impulse purchase in one of 2 or 3 retailers you might have stopped in at, based on real-estate portfolio on one hand and eye-level placement and brand equity on the other, shifts to auto-renewal or a natural language parser. Given that P&G and Unilever’s combined ad budget is larger than the global revenue of the recorded music industry, this means that subscription soap powder could be a much bigger deal than subscription music. What will you have to pay to be Google Assistant’s default choice of dishwasher tablets?

It’s a well made point. But I think it could be looked at from another angle.

One of the core philosophies we developed for building systems at Storyfulwas a switch away from search-based systems to stream-based systems. I always felt that one of Twitter’s core innovations…