Spotlight
Something happened a couple of weeks ago that likely slipped under the radar for many of us outside of India: Facebook invested $5.7 billion into Jio Platforms.
Why does this matter?
Amongst many other ventures, Jio controls the largest telecom network in India. This makes them incredibly powerful (and a ‘home team player’) in a market where Facebook has often struggled (frequently due to protectionistic governmental interference). One of the remaining holes that keeps Jio’s portfolio from becoming a WeChat-like ‘super app’ is a reliable communication/messaging platform, and, fortuitously, Facebook’s presence in India today is primarily WhatsApp.
If it pans out, this investment could become a Yahoo/Alibaba-esque entry into tech lore. Or, like so many of these tech megacorp tie-ups (remember the Facebook phone?), it could be a total bureaucratic bust with overestimated ’synergies’ that never pan out in reality.
For a far more knowledgable exploration of what the Facebook/Jio deal means long-term, this article from The Ken is a great read.
Industry Buzz
Farewell from Cliqz
Search is really hard. We’ve seen empires rise and fall before (just ask Yahoo!)
The thing is, those revolutions were precipitated by step-function improvements in results quality. And as Cliqz has just discovered, user privacy and gimmicks are nice, but they just don’t provide that sort of step-function improvement. The default benchmark for a new search engine is still ‘I know I’m giving something up…how much worse than Google is this alternative?’
PageRank wasn’t just a gimmick. When Google falls (and it will happen eventually), the replacement will be a similar paradigm shift from how web search engines work today.
Chipotle's tech push paid off big when the coronavirus pandemic hit - CNET
Chipotle’s digital, app-focused strategy has been a hit for years.
Now, from the ‘coronavirus has massively accelerated trends that were already happening’ file, it appears this has set the company up really well for the challenges of a worldwide pandemic.
Walled Gardens
Roku's ad platform launches with Drizly, Experian, Intuit TurboTax and Lexus
Even though Roku started out as ‘the hardware pipes’, it’s been taking baby steps into owning what goes through those pipes for a while (e.g., selling their own streaming subscriptions a year ago).
In other words, Roku is tired of relying on everyone else, and decided those baby steps should lead straight into a new walled garden.
The next logical step would be owning even more of the monetization infrastructure...which is exactly what is happening here.
Privacy & Security
The 2020 URL Querystring Data Leaks — Millions of User Emails Leaking from Popular Websites to Advertising & Analytics Companies
This report got quite a bit of traction in the media last week. Unfortunately, most of the mainstream coverage — such as from The Verge and Variety — left out all of the important technical details, and twisted the story into lazy, clickbait-y headlines.
There are a few things to note here:
- On the part of the media outlets, dumbing down the narrative this way — whether intentionally or not — is irresponsibly misleading to the point of malfeasance.
- The report author clearly has a chip on his shoulder. Throwing around words like ‘data breach’ and partially-baked allusions to GDPR liability, all in a pretty clear attempt to drum up press attention, is in poor taste at best.
- Buried under all the spin, there actually is a legitimate bug to fix.
So, what’s the real problem?
While most of the headlines turn this into something that fits the standard narrative of brand intentionally sharing PII with creepy martech companies with a side of massive data breach, in reality that’s not the case.
What’s actually happening is unintentional PII leakage, via data parameters appended in plaintext to URLs. That’s definitely not a best practice, but it’s not inherently a leak (at least, so long as you’re using HTTPS, which everyone should be by now).
However, this becomes a leak when the page has analytics scripts embedded. These scripts capture the page URL (including data parameters appended in plaintext) and forward it to third parties.
This should definitely be cleaned up, but it’s not the normal, scaremongering narrative of ‘creepy data sharing’ we’ve grown used to.
UX
This week’s example of a great app-first user experience: Food Network leveraging deferred deep links and Deepviews to drive app engagement and acquisition from Facebook.
Podcast
Depop: Farah Abuzeid
Why Data Storytelling is Marketing Gold
How does someone with a passion for cooking end up leading a team driving business-critical decisions? What does it take to teach yourself how to code then apply that to how you are able to help a company grow?
This and how she learned to tell stories with data at Visa, the 2x2 matrix thinking model and when to make a career jump into (or out of) the startup world on this episode of How I Grew This with Farah Abuzeid of Depop.
Listen now: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Stitcher
Events
Mobile On Air 2020: A virtual gathering of the brightest minds in mobile
Join us on May 21st as we bring together mobile trailblazers for a day of learning and networking.
Mobile On Air is the ultimate digital event for the mobile community, at a time when the industry adjusts to gathering, working, collaborating, and sharing ideas online. From best practices around user acquisition to building a privacy-first product, Mobile On Air will explore every corner of the mobile landscape and facilitate a productive day of discussion.
Co-hosted by Radar, Braze, Mixpanel, mParticle, Branch, Airship, Segment, Amplitude, and WillowTree.
Mobile Growth Online: Calm + Netflix
Panelists: Calm and Netflix.
Where: virtual event.
When: Thu, May 21, 10:00 AM (PDT).
Mobile Growth Online: France
Panelists: Batch, Kard, and Ecov.
Where: virtual event.
When: Tue, May 19, 11:00 AM (CEST).
Mobile Growth Online: ANZ
Panelists: Keep It Cleaner, flybuys, and Afterpay.
Where: virtual event.
When: Thu, May 14, 3:00 PM (AEST).
Yesterday evening, many iOS apps (including some of the most recognizable names) suddenly started crashing on launch.
Turns out all of these apps use the Facebook SDK, and Facebook had messed up a piece of server-side configuration.
Mistakes like this can happen anywhere, including at Facebook, and this one was fixed pretty quickly. However, the interesting part of the situation actually comes from what developers discovered while trying to debug the crash: turns out the Facebook SDK injects itself directly into the app launch sequence, which means it still loads even when all code calls to it are removed.
Takeaways:
- Yes, Facebook really is everywhere. The media still seems to think this will be a surprise to users.
- It's really important for SDKs to be open source. Many in the mobile industry try to make excuses for closed source SDKs, but Facebook will most likely clean up its act now this is public. That probably wouldn't have happened with a closed source SDK, because they could have swept the whole thing under a rug.
Alex Bauer