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In their conversation, they bring up mobile as a recent platform shift that caused a lot of disruption. But I think it's interesting to remember how slow that t

In their conversation, they bring up mobile as a recent platform shift that caused a lot of disruption. But I think it's interesting to remember how slow that took. The iPhone was released in 2007, but the real winners of mobile were launched years later -- Uber (2010), Snapchat (2011), and TikTok (2016) -- and those winners took several more years to even start to gain true traction in the market. I don't think a lot of people back in 2007 could have predicted that the biggest thing to come from mobile would be an app that let teens remix music videos and share with their friends. This is why I think it is a little pointless to try and create mental models for what products and features to build to capitalize on AI (though it can be fun). It's so early that we're not capable of understanding what's possible yet. If anything, we're probably at the viral "fart app" stage that mobile was in for its first few years.

disgruntledphd2 3y ago
>I don't think a lot of people back in 2007 could have predicted that the biggest thing to come from mobile would be an app that let teens remix music videos and share with their friends. I think that the biggest thing to come from mobile was always available location, exemplified by Google Maps which already existed before mobile happened. Many of the most successful apps relied on this. TikTok is different, in that it could have existed on desktop (but would have looked very different) whereas Uber (for example) definitely couldn't.
- eru 3y ago
  Something like Uber could have been built on top of SMS, though. It didn't necessarily need Smartphones. (Perhaps SMS plus some feature-phone-level of GPS integration.)
  - varjag 3y ago
    Not really. The hard thing here is not the network transport but user interface.
    - actionfromafar 3y ago
      If people can learn the Snapchat UX, they can learn some SMS text adventure style Uber.
      - varjag 3y ago
        People can be illiterate, dyslexic, inebriated, dumb or with poor command of the language. Good luck with free-text interface. You'll pretty much would have had human operators over every interaction. That very much hinders the Uber-like growth of the service.
        eru 3y ago
        If you can support 95% of the market (with mechanical means), you can capture 95% of the market.
        varjag 3y ago
        That wouldn't be 95% of market, more like 50-60%, and a strain to use even for those apt. Not everyone is an Infocom playing nerd.
        eru 3y ago
        Normal people use SMS just fine all the time. Falling back to a human operator isn't that bad either: just charge people a little bit extra to talk to a human.
  - pawelwentpawel 3y ago
    I don't think that Uber through SMS would be strong enough to compete with taxi services. One of the core features that made me use Uber was the map - I could see where the driver is going and how far away is he. Also, the app is localised into language that I can understand and I can see the price upfront without having to worry about getting scammed. Recently I had to book a taxi over the phone at the end of the world (literally - Ushuaia) in a language that I can barely speak and the experience was rather stressful in comparison with using an app.
    - flagrant_taco 3y ago
      Seeing a price up front is just a different business model and localization could be easily handled with a setting on your account. Neither is tech-dependent, both could have worked over SMS too. Real-time mapping would be tricker if that's really a killer feature for you.
      - eru 3y ago
        Some real life traditional taxi services used to offer pre-agreed fixed fairs. But many of them were regulated away.
  - another-dave 3y ago
    For Uber though there's the driver side experience as well as the customer side. I don't know if you could've made something seemless enough for drivers to use from an old feature phone
    - eru 3y ago
      Drivers have a car. So they could have used a bigger device. Eg a laptop, or something with a touch screen. Or a voice connection with an operator.
- another-dave 3y ago
  I don't use TikTok so maybe I'm offbase, but I tihnk while technically it could've existed without mobile, socially I'm not so sure. I wouldn't under estimate the amount of friction reduced in having an app on your phone which a) is always with you, b) can also record top quality video and c) has a data plan good enough to upload there and then.
  - hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
    This is my read as well. The ability to record video clips as easily as a person with a keyboard can tweet was the true kindling for the viral fire.
    - alwayseasy 3y ago
      To take it a notch further, it's the video editing simplicity that really blew TikTok up.
      - disgruntledphd2 3y ago
        > To take it a notch further, it's the video editing simplicity that really blew TikTok up. Yup, definitely. Effective mobile editing was a big driver of it's success. That being said, while it's definitely more effective and popular on mobile how much of that is just down to more people using the internet on mobile relative to desktop. This is unlike Maps or Uber which only make sense with mobile and always available location.
  - mailarchis 3y ago
    Not exactly tiktok, but something similar was tried on desktop - Dailybooth was a YC startup which enabled users to take a photo from the desktop website and post it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DailyBooth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DailyBooth
  - antifa 3y ago
    > I wouldn't under estimate the amount of friction reduced in having an app on your phone which I wish I could do software development from my phone the way people casually watch tiktok videos. The least unproductive thing I can currently do when trapped with only a phone is read HN.
- gbasin 3y ago
  TikTok's success is primarily about the creator tools, not the viewing experience. Making video editing mobile-friendly and accessible to more people is what enabled the proliferation of short-form content.
- stevofolife 3y ago
  Wait…how do you expect TikTok users to upload videos so easily if it is on desktop? TikTok wouldn’t be TikTok anymore.
totetsu 3y ago
I am constantly surprised of how prescient my Media studies professor was back in 2007 about how everything has shaking out since then. "Your data is valuable don't give it away" is ringing in my ears as I give all my data away to openai
- eru 3y ago
  Data can be copied. Giving your data away doesn't make it less valuable to you. (There might be other concern, eg around privacy, about giving your data away. But worrying about value isn't really one of them as an individual.)
  - onion2k 3y ago
    Data can be copied. Giving your data away doesn't make it less valuable to you. Data is a moat. If you share it you're giving your advantage away.
  - n4r9 3y ago
    That doesn't necessarily follow. Film data can be copied, but production companies don't give them away.
  - Takennickname 3y ago
    Sure it does. A secret stops becoming a secret once you give it away to enough people. I feel like you're trying to justify piracy but picked the wrong argument.
    - eru 3y ago
      I'm talking about personal data. Piracy is rarely a concern here. (And btw, piracy only makes the data less valuable, because you lose the ability to sell it to someone who already has it. Not because the game or movie etc would become less enjoyable.)
- marban 3y ago
  Even in 2007, he was ~50 years late.
nonrandomstring 3y ago
> I don't think a lot of people back in 2007 could have predicted that the biggest thing to come from mobile would be an app that let teens remix music videos and share with their friends. That's funny for me to read almost 15 years after rjdj [0] There is a difference between an idea that is possible, and an idea whose time has come. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RjDj https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RjDj
raincole 3y ago
> But I think it's interesting to remember how slow that took. The iPhone was released in 2007, but the real winners of mobile were launched years later -- Uber (2010), Snapchat (2011), and TikTok (2016) You mean how fast that took, right?
- ghaff 3y ago
  And really something more like 2010 is probably a better date for when the iPhone really took off with the 3GS generation. There were obviously earlier smartphones as well (Blackberry, Treo) but they weren't really mainstream devices and didn't especially enable third-party apps. So, yeah, there was a maybe five year (and certainly less than ten) period when smartphones went from a fairly niche thing to ubiquity which is very fast compared to technology adoption generally.
heymijo 3y ago
Might be worth looking at the limiting factors that caused the delay between iPhone (2007) and the advent of Uber, et al. Then overlay that with the limiting factors for AI/LLMs. I had a third-party logistics startup in 2007 that I would have loved to turn into Uber for shipping, but it would be at least a few years before the cell networks and ownership of smartphones reached a point where it was possible. I don't know if there are limiting factors that will delay LLMs potential to disrupt the status quo.
destraynor 3y ago
Flickr → Instagram (Had FB not bought Insta, it could have been Facebook to Insta too) Plenty of Fish → Tindr

disgruntledphd2 3y ago

>I don't think a lot of people back in 2007 could have predicted that the biggest thing to come from mobile would be an app that let teens remix music videos and share with their friends. I think that the biggest thing to come from mobile was always available location, exemplified by Google Maps which already existed before mobile happened. Many of the most successful apps relied on this. TikTok is different, in that it could have existed on desktop (but would have looked very different) whereas Uber (for example) definitely couldn't.

eru 3y ago
Something like Uber could have been built on top of SMS, though. It didn't necessarily need Smartphones. (Perhaps SMS plus some feature-phone-level of GPS integration.)
- varjag 3y ago
  Not really. The hard thing here is not the network transport but user interface.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    If people can learn the Snapchat UX, they can learn some SMS text adventure style Uber.
    - varjag 3y ago
      People can be illiterate, dyslexic, inebriated, dumb or with poor command of the language. Good luck with free-text interface. You'll pretty much would have had human operators over every interaction. That very much hinders the Uber-like growth of the service.
      - eru 3y ago
        If you can support 95% of the market (with mechanical means), you can capture 95% of the market.
        varjag 3y ago
        That wouldn't be 95% of market, more like 50-60%, and a strain to use even for those apt. Not everyone is an Infocom playing nerd.
        eru 3y ago
        Normal people use SMS just fine all the time. Falling back to a human operator isn't that bad either: just charge people a little bit extra to talk to a human.
- pawelwentpawel 3y ago
  I don't think that Uber through SMS would be strong enough to compete with taxi services. One of the core features that made me use Uber was the map - I could see where the driver is going and how far away is he. Also, the app is localised into language that I can understand and I can see the price upfront without having to worry about getting scammed. Recently I had to book a taxi over the phone at the end of the world (literally - Ushuaia) in a language that I can barely speak and the experience was rather stressful in comparison with using an app.
  - flagrant_taco 3y ago
    Seeing a price up front is just a different business model and localization could be easily handled with a setting on your account. Neither is tech-dependent, both could have worked over SMS too. Real-time mapping would be tricker if that's really a killer feature for you.
    - eru 3y ago
      Some real life traditional taxi services used to offer pre-agreed fixed fairs. But many of them were regulated away.
- another-dave 3y ago
  For Uber though there's the driver side experience as well as the customer side. I don't know if you could've made something seemless enough for drivers to use from an old feature phone
  - eru 3y ago
    Drivers have a car. So they could have used a bigger device. Eg a laptop, or something with a touch screen. Or a voice connection with an operator.
another-dave 3y ago
I don't use TikTok so maybe I'm offbase, but I tihnk while technically it could've existed without mobile, socially I'm not so sure. I wouldn't under estimate the amount of friction reduced in having an app on your phone which a) is always with you, b) can also record top quality video and c) has a data plan good enough to upload there and then.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
  This is my read as well. The ability to record video clips as easily as a person with a keyboard can tweet was the true kindling for the viral fire.
  - alwayseasy 3y ago
    To take it a notch further, it's the video editing simplicity that really blew TikTok up.
    - disgruntledphd2 3y ago
      > To take it a notch further, it's the video editing simplicity that really blew TikTok up. Yup, definitely. Effective mobile editing was a big driver of it's success. That being said, while it's definitely more effective and popular on mobile how much of that is just down to more people using the internet on mobile relative to desktop. This is unlike Maps or Uber which only make sense with mobile and always available location.
- mailarchis 3y ago
  Not exactly tiktok, but something similar was tried on desktop - Dailybooth was a YC startup which enabled users to take a photo from the desktop website and post it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DailyBooth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DailyBooth
- antifa 3y ago
  > I wouldn't under estimate the amount of friction reduced in having an app on your phone which I wish I could do software development from my phone the way people casually watch tiktok videos. The least unproductive thing I can currently do when trapped with only a phone is read HN.
gbasin 3y ago
TikTok's success is primarily about the creator tools, not the viewing experience. Making video editing mobile-friendly and accessible to more people is what enabled the proliferation of short-form content.
stevofolife 3y ago
Wait…how do you expect TikTok users to upload videos so easily if it is on desktop? TikTok wouldn’t be TikTok anymore.

totetsu 3y ago

I am constantly surprised of how prescient my Media studies professor was back in 2007 about how everything has shaking out since then. "Your data is valuable don't give it away" is ringing in my ears as I give all my data away to openai

eru 3y ago
Data can be copied. Giving your data away doesn't make it less valuable to you. (There might be other concern, eg around privacy, about giving your data away. But worrying about value isn't really one of them as an individual.)
- onion2k 3y ago
  Data can be copied. Giving your data away doesn't make it less valuable to you. Data is a moat. If you share it you're giving your advantage away.
- n4r9 3y ago
  That doesn't necessarily follow. Film data can be copied, but production companies don't give them away.
- Takennickname 3y ago
  Sure it does. A secret stops becoming a secret once you give it away to enough people. I feel like you're trying to justify piracy but picked the wrong argument.
  - eru 3y ago
    I'm talking about personal data. Piracy is rarely a concern here. (And btw, piracy only makes the data less valuable, because you lose the ability to sell it to someone who already has it. Not because the game or movie etc would become less enjoyable.)
marban 3y ago
Even in 2007, he was ~50 years late.

nonrandomstring 3y ago

> I don't think a lot of people back in 2007 could have predicted that the biggest thing to come from mobile would be an app that let teens remix music videos and share with their friends. That's funny for me to read almost 15 years after rjdj [0] There is a difference between an idea that is possible, and an idea whose time has come. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RjDj https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RjDj

raincole 3y ago

> But I think it's interesting to remember how slow that took. The iPhone was released in 2007, but the real winners of mobile were launched years later -- Uber (2010), Snapchat (2011), and TikTok (2016) You mean how fast that took, right?

ghaff 3y ago
And really something more like 2010 is probably a better date for when the iPhone really took off with the 3GS generation. There were obviously earlier smartphones as well (Blackberry, Treo) but they weren't really mainstream devices and didn't especially enable third-party apps. So, yeah, there was a maybe five year (and certainly less than ten) period when smartphones went from a fairly niche thing to ubiquity which is very fast compared to technology adoption generally.

heymijo 3y ago

Might be worth looking at the limiting factors that caused the delay between iPhone (2007) and the advent of Uber, et al. Then overlay that with the limiting factors for AI/LLMs. I had a third-party logistics startup in 2007 that I would have loved to turn into Uber for shipping, but it would be at least a few years before the cell networks and ownership of smartphones reached a point where it was possible. I don't know if there are limiting factors that will delay LLMs potential to disrupt the status quo.

destraynor 3y ago

Flickr → Instagram (Had FB not bought Insta, it could have been Facebook to Insta too) Plenty of Fish → Tindr