FWD: Outlook — October 22, 2015 — FWD: Outlook

FWD: Outlook — October 22, 2015

The top two stories in tech from around the web

“Twitter Moments as a Platform”
– Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures

I spent a little time talking about this in yesterday’s FWD: Outlook. It’s great to see the Twitter Cards PM answering questions on Product Hunt or the Moments PM engaging in the comments section of Fred’s blog.

This is just one of the things I love about this industry — and, I believe, this open dialogue is an infectious aspect of Twitter’s culture.

What will the future of Moments look like? How will it be curated for each user such that it becomes the “crowdsourced newspaper” that Fred and so many others believe it can be?

Yesterday, I saw a tweet that said “For everyone who’s sick of the Back to the Future references, now you know how non-sports fans feel every day of the year.” Someone responded that the entire Sports section of Moments was a wasted space for them. How will Twitter tailor Moments to each user with the least friction possible?

If Twitter used retweets, hashtags, favorites, and follows to roughly gauge a person’s interest in a field, then they could effectively curate Moments without ever having to go through a check-box screen. To get around hashtags, they could also use NLP for major events. (Did someone tweet about the World Series and Star Wars on the same night? Do they follow the same accounts that a user follows who also uses hashtags? That’s one workaround for people like me who don’t use a lot of #.) My two cents. I think Moments has tremendous potential as the crowdsourced newspaper of the web.

“What Comes After the Smartphone?”
– Steven Sinofsky and Benedict Evans of Andreessen Horowitz

The PC is being perfected — at least it is according to Benedict Evans. And when something is perfected in tech and there’s nothing more to add to it, technology moves on to the next platform, leaving the old one in the dust.

Steve and Benedict hail the end of the PC era in this podcast. Problem is, “we don’t know what’s coming up next.” (M.G. Siegler – tablet, anyone?)

The smartphone put the PC to bed. Look at the specs for an entry level Macbook Air — it’s nearly exactly two iPhone 6S’s strapped together in terms of processing power and screen size. We’re moving to a platform in which primary-use devices (think laptops at work or remote controls for the TV) are switching from a drag-and-drop PC platform to a smartphone platform. After some back and forth on what PCs are relative to smartphones, Benedict finalizes the discussion: “You can put all these definitions together, but actually the only distinction that’s meaningful is, which of these are based on the future, and which of these are based on the past?” Another way of asking this is, “On which ecosystem will the future be built?” On the smartphone ecosystem, or on the PC ecosystem?

This podcast throws around the question, What does the future look like? Is it the IoT? Benedict predicts a future in which there there’s no more PC consumer ecosystem to build on. Once the IoT reaches where the iPhone is today, Benedict thinks there won’t even be a smartphone. There will be all these connected devices, but he leaves off on an open-ended question —