Say Goodbye To Platforms As You Know Them

Every few months, some click-baiting tech blogger announces that Facebook is finally dying and, while their stock soars, everyone gets in on the fun and rehashes the same old canned lines. That’s not my intention here. I believe that platforms as we understand them are about to dramatically lose their once cherished value.

Number of monthly active Twitter users worldwide.

Case Study: Twitter

At the height of Twitter’s user growth (from 2012–2013), I remember thinking, “why is everyone so crazy about this product?” Sure, it was an engaging, real-time platform that weaponized a cliche form of communication — shorthand. Add in rich media and the scale to share anything, anywhere, anytime and you’ve got a winning sauce. But why did journalists and celebrities sign onto it without hesitation en masse?

Throughout the Obama years, big news agencies struggled to separate journalists’ personal tweets from their corresponding news stories. Couldn’t some of the larger brands have developed a similar, more robust/customizable platform? An owned domain where “their journalists” posted succinct stories. By eagerly handing over their breaking news (their substance) to Twitter, they empowered the platform into existence. They gave it its reason for existing. So why load all the burden of reporting onto a platform you don’t own or control?

I have a few hypotheses:

1. Brands and organizations undervalued the usefulness of the technology Twitter introduced, considering it more of a fun bonus than a paradigm shift in news-making.
2. There was the built-in audience potential. If you used Twitter, you got the free crowd already bought-in (even though that audience wasn’t everything it was cracked up to be).
3. No brands or organizations could feasibly build and scale a similar product at the time (even though I think some of them had the time and resources to; e.g. The New York Times).

ESPN deployed something similar to what I’m describing with their homepage redesign a few years back. Making the page more like a stream and less like a magazine index. Infinite, succinct descriptions of the day’s sports. No need to go anywhere else (even Twitter).

ESPN’s homepage.

Native integration *will* supplant the platform

I’ve been thinking a lot about the false sense of security platforms have, given how quickly technology continues to scale. Think, as internet bandwidth increases, data indexing scales. The size of loadable features is growing and this will eventually provide an instantaneous experience to the user regardless of file size. That means that more and more things you traditionally think about “going to the internet” for will be directly integrated into your device. It will be a complete break in the way we perceive the internet and apps.

Example of Instant Apps.

Facebook Instant Articles and Google AMP are only the beginning — the beta test, if you will, of the technology that’s coming. Google is already testing native app experiences directly from Search. If an app exists on Google Play, it can be cached on a Google Search page-load and served directly from your click. Imagine searching for a Wendy’s menu in Google, clicking the first result and interacting natively with a customized Wendy’s app experience that requires no download. Chat with other Wendy’s lovers, order food, play a game. That’s the future. Hate the experience? Hit back.

I think the value of platforms has been over-promised and under-delivered. The idea of integrating on one particular platform assumes an anachronistic view of the internet; a Web 2.0 view where people don’t really “use the internet ” except where they feel comfortable and useful. In a Web 2.0 world, aggregating people together on a single platform makes sense because it provides a low-cost solution to a complex problem: how do we get everyone communicating on the same page/in the same way?

Number of monthly active Facebook users in the United States and Canada

However, living currently in the age of the net (Web 3.0?), everyone is constantly connected and the need for that hand-holding is less important. The slow in the growth user bases (psst.. Facebook is seeing this too) is due to this very principle. Folks no longer NEED a platform to coexist and communicate. They simply use platforms because they provide a pre-baked audience (and resulting ad opportunities) that another medium may not have. This is why, in my opinion, you see a company like Facebook diversifying so rapidly. To remain strictly a platform would be disastrous. But a media company? There’s something to work with there.

There’s a lot of crazy native integrations coming down the pipe and the folks at Google, specifically, are not shy about their innovations. Major publishers (e.g. Buzzfeed, ESPN, Huffington Post, New York Times, Washington Post) all have a tremendous opportunity to innovate in this space. Not to mention big brands like Nike, Coca Cola and others, whose success depends on a trusting consumer base.

They just need to start thinking like products and app-builders instead of like companies buying up ad space.

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