Iterations: Snoopify, The Greatest Mobile Photobombing App Of All Time

Here’s yesterday’s column on TC. People really seemed to like this, but the best part is the shout-out from Snoop Dogg/Lion himself on Twitter, which you can see here and below!

Shout out 2 @techcrunch n @semil for tha great write up! This is only the beginning. We just getting started. #Snoopify 2.0 comn soon!!

— Snoop Dogg (@SnoopDogg) May 12, 2013

“What are the cool new apps you’ve seen lately?” To this oft heard question, lately, there have been lots of answers. So, mobile is indeed exciting and moving fast. And, just recently, a fun new app came out that instantly captured my attention — no, it’s not from a Stanford dropout or from the  ”innovation lab” of a large technology company. No. It’s from Snoop Dogg — excuse me — Snoop Lion. Yes, that’s right, the same artist so many of you grew up with. He’s diversified his musical career into the business of his own branded apparel, a television show, and now he invades the greatest consumer stage of our times — our mobile phones. And, what’s more impressive is just how he did it — the genius to observe and iterate, to pull out the nuggets of lessons we have learned and package it together with marketing that’s both fun, easy, and devilishly derivative yet simultaneously novel.

The app is called “Snoopify.” I think it’s both a noun (the app) and a verb (as in, to “Snoopify” a photo). Essentially, you can take a new or existing picture, and then open up a box of Snoop stickers (that’s right, stickers) and overlay them onto the picture before sharing it on every social platform . Most of the stickers, as you can imagine, have something to do with Snoop and his brand, which makes for a hilarious “Snoop filter” on these doctored photographs. The first time I downloaded the app, I  ”Snoopified” about five times in the span of 10 minutes and shared them everywhere. Snoop has essentially digitized himself and appified a scalable way to photobomb any picture with his signature brand. And, this is the best part — if you want to unlock the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th pages of stickers, pull out your credit card because they’re locked behind a paywall.

In-app purchases. Genius.

From a marketing and branding standpoint, this is all fascinating to me. Look at the intersections of trends here: (1) Photos remain the premium communication currency in our mobile world. Like SnapChat showed with their expiring images, there’s no end to the creative manipulation mobile software can offer to pictures. (2) Influencers with their own global, diverse audiences can leverage networks like Twitter and Instagram to breakthrough the noise and clutter of the iOS app storedistribution minefield. There’s the tactic  of growth hacking, yes — and then there’s the pure organic lift a celebrity can leverage to surpass everyone else. And (3) Stickers. Just a few months ago, everyone was hemming and hawing about Path’s latest 3.0 update which include new sets of free and paid stickers, perhaps influenced by the growth of mobile messaging apps in Asia (such as Line, an app which reportedly raked in US$50M+ in Q1 of 2013 by selling virtual goods in-app).

So, Snoop and his team watch all these trends converge, and steal a page out of the apps like Line and Path. Great artists steal, right? And, what do you know, it worked — I bought stickers, my first in-app purchase of a digital good. Brilliant.

I’ll be writing more about the overall trends I’m seeing at the app layer here in my column this summer, but an app like Snoopify, which rose quickly in the charts earlier this week, breaks convention with how much of the startup world views  how apps are supposed to be made and distributed. Distribution may, in the end, be just as, if not more, important than the actual app. Maybe. The creator of the app doesn’t actually have to do the hard-coding of the software — he or she can commission it, and it can be developed elsewhere. Of course, as I finalize this post, the app has already slipped in the charts. When I started drafting this post a few days ago, “Snoopify” was in the Top 25 trending free apps according to App Annie, but now as I finalize this early Sunday morning, it’s slipped to #36 (on AppData) and #58 (on App Annie) and is ranked #156 for grossing according to the official Apple App Store.

An app like Snoopify was destined to be faddish and not a business. Or, maybe this is just the first move by Snoop Lion to cut into the iPhone, on the app level. At scale, it’s an incredibly clever technique to extend his brand on top of other peoples’ pictures — the greatest photobomb at scale….ever! Perhaps he doesn’t see enough quality engagement on his work in popular music apps like Spotify or Rdio or other myriad music apps. Maybe he’s tired of Instagramming and receiving hearts in return, or maybe Twitter is just for distribution to his fan base. Maybe after stickers, he’s going to open private messaging inside his app, or broadcast scenes from his next concert to a select audience. (I’m having fun with this, naturally, though it’s not out of the realm of possibility.)

The opportunities on mobile are continuing to prove endless, and for someone as creative as Snoop, even a little mobile icon can represent the largest of sandboxes. Of course, not every artist can go to the lengths that Snoop went to in developing and promoting his mobile app, but of the ones who do have this luxury, Snoop’s foray into the  app store was a brilliant move, complete with a built-in revenue model, a platform for showcasing his brand, and artfully blending some of the biggest trends in consumer mobile behavior we have all collectively observed. Well played, Snoop — well played.

Iterations: A Youthful Rebellion Against The Permanence Of Facebook’s Walled Garden

Below is my column from last week. I’m not sure it was that good. It’s a difficult topic, but one that has fascinated me for a few months. Truth be told, I haven’t yet wrapped my head around it. I’d love to hear your thoughts…

Facebook’s mission is to make the world more open and connected. Indeed, great things can come from this, and for many of its one billion users, Facebook isn’t just on the web — it is the web. It is where images, biographical data, and every speck of a connection to a person, place, or thing lives, both the dream of a doting family spread miles apart and a marketer close by. It is a place where generations of people now reside, hang out, fawn over public statuses and peek into the lives of others. Ironically, while Facebook’s aim is to make the world more open, they themselves are building a new web within their own closed garden, inaccessible and (mostly) unexportable to all. As the saying states, “what goes on the Internet is written in ink,” so what goes onto Facebook is etched in stone walls.

Yes, much of Facebook’s traffic comes from mobile now, too. For most people who don’t care about all the latest and greatest apps, Facebook works splendidly for them, simply yet powerfully connecting them to exercise the habits they’ve picked up on the web version. Yet, at the same time, mobile platforms (phones and tablets) have presented newer and younger audiences with new graphs of people, folks whose first computing device may have been of the latest iPod touches (complete with Facetime), folks who live in other countries with exploding mobile growth adoption curves. As working professionals have come to use the Internet to help define, cement, and reinforce their perceptions of their own identities, younger generations in search of their own identity can use a battery of new services and mobile apps which containerize their activities, isolating them from the permanence of the web, a permanence embodied by the likes of Facebook and Google+.

These ascendent generations may have a Facebook account for the web and to use Messenger, but they seem to be disinterested in a network where everyone hangs out, where their parents or schoolteachers may be lurking. (To be fair to Facebook, Google seems to invoke similar fears of permanence given all the apps data they have on us, combined with their integration of Google+.) The emergence of this trend isn’t an implicit criticism of Facebook, though the company sure does push its users to adopt certain behaviors — rather, this trend is merely the world evolving alongside the rapid spread of personalized computing interfaces, giving rise to services which snap, share, and explode digital pictures (SnapChat), allow users to buy disposable phone numbers (Burner), or to assume various pseudonyms and tag pictures associated with negative, potentially shameful, or embarrassing feelings to an audience who will empathize with them (Whisper) — and pay a monthly membership fee for the right to send private messages. (There are services which go steps further, encrypting information — such as Bitcoin or Wickr — allowing people to move without a trace.)

What I’m writing about here is not new or original. I have read a lot about this and have simply grown fascinated by the trend itself, the trend whereby more and more people enjoy the ease and shelter provided by lightweight mobile applications, ones that seemingly never touch the web and spread like a Facebook share. For a brief selection of items I’ve read on the topic, I’d suggest: PandaWhale’sAdam Rifkin on why teens are flocking to Tumblr over Facebook; TechCrunch’s Billy Gallagher on the “impermanence” of new mobile apps; Branch’s Josh Miller’s look into technology trends among teens; and USV’s Andy Weissman’s personal essay about how he doesn’t want to bring video memories from another era on to YouTube.

All in all, the questions this trend trigger are equally fascinating: Is this just the beginning of a big wave, or this simply a trendy byproduct of a world obsessed with social networking? If this is a trend, does it have the legs to provide the foundation for a company or set of companies to form around this organizing principle? What does this mean for the future of the Facebook newsfeed and its relevance to users? Will Facebook be reduced to a utility for public sharing backed by real identity, but miss out on all the texts, snaps, and other bits of mobile messaging exploding these days? Is this a new type of movement, or simply the ebb and flow of behavior as generations pass? And, as the trend continues, will the younger generation of users who grow up “app-first” seek to bypass the web and explicit social networks altogether, or will they join the masses as they mature?

I’ve been talking about this trend with knowledgeable folks for a few months now, and everyone has a different, interesting point of view. I certainly don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but questions themselves are undeniably fascinating. It’s not even been an entire year that Facebook has been a public company, and they are on track to make lots of money (especially on mobile), but there’s no denying that despite their growing mobile metrics and revenues, mobile apps that provide all varieties of private messaging seem to challenge Facebook’s immediate relevance. As these mobile apps grow, and as Facebook approach’s it’s 10th birthday next year, the next 10 years will likely be defined by a whole new set of what is considered “social networking” — and that might already be the new reality today. What is clear, however, is that while on the web, Facebook’s walled garden enjoys a captive audience already trained to do what it wants — on mobile, that walled garden is relegated to the size of an app icon alongside a sea of competing icons with very different or non-existant “sharing models,” and if today’s currents provide any trustworthy bellwether, the next 10 years for Facebook could present quiet a thorny challenge.

Off Peak, On Line

I prefer to do things at “off-peak” times. “Peak” hours, or rush hours, are the worst. They literally attack my will to live. After years of going to sporting events and all sorts of live concerts, these peak gatherings also lost their charm. Some people find excitement in the gathering of crowds, and I once did, too. No more. For the past few years, I’ve tried to arrange my life and schedule such that I rarely have to commute when everyone else is, and I’ll avoid all the events (and trappings) that seem to shut down parts of the city. Once, my lovely wife wanted nothing to go to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in the park — since we now live outside SF, I drove in, dropped her off to meet her friends, and proceeded to look for parking for 90+ minutes before I got lucky. I’m usually in SF now about two times per week, but I always leave after each rush hour and plan my day around it. Not doing so just ruins life.

I try to operate online at off-peak times, as well. I’ve been using Twitter now for almost five years. I use it a lot. It’s how I “see” the web. But, during the day, it’s just mostly people pushing their own work agenda. It’s mostly about professional broadcasting. That serves a good purpose, but it isn’t always fun. Late at night or on the weekend, however, Twitter has a much different flavor, so whereas peak traffic in my world may happen from 7am – 7pm, I try to be active outside of those hours. I don’t plan it that way, but it tends to happen. One of my favorite things to do recently on Friday nights (I hate going out on Fridays) was to cook dinner, unwind with wine, catch up on the email I ignored, and once everyone was asleep, chat with others on Twitter about things I was thinking about, and interacting with the other “off-peakers.”

This is just me. It is not normal behavior, but whatever. I just like being online and engaged when others put away their devices and unplug. I’ve been working out of different companies during the days and in dealflow meetings, so I miss all the news or instant commentary. I even disabled the “read it later” options. Peak traffic isn’t my thing.

Brief Thoughts On The Rollout Of Facebook “Home”

Earlier this week, I was helping a friend think through his post on Facebook’s recent ads for “Facebook Home.” He’s an early employee and investor, and the TV ads seemed to bother him. In our email conversation, I shared my brief view of Facebook Home overall, from concept to TV spots, and he suggested that I share them. So, I have reproduced them below, slightly cleaned up from our email change.

How I Think About “Facebook Home.”

• From a technical standpoint: It’s brilliant. They have reinvented “what is an app?” from the ground up.
• From an execution standpoint: It’s brilliant. It’s not easy to pull off a v1 like this, and they made the right move.
• From a strategic standpoint: It’s great. One carrier and handset to let them iron out any kinks, after which they can choose to move accordingly.
• From a product point-of-view: Hmmm….I’m not sure I’d want “Home,” but more importantly, the younger demographic seems to shun the idea of permanence, the web, and Facebook altogether.
• Analyzing positioning during launch: It was OK. Not bad. They got their overall point across.
• TV commercials: A pure disaster. They’re off-key. not cool. too weird. potentially ruin brand further. It’s a tone-deaf mistake that allows the chattering classes to easily point to how out of touch FB may actually be.

From My Archives: The Facebook iPhone (Sept 2011)

I wrote this post back in September 2011 to speculate what I’d do with iOS if I worked for Facebook…

In The Facebook Effect, David Kirkpatrick posits the great social network is the one entity that could bully Apple, today’s most powerful technology company. As the iPhone and other iOS devices have paved the way toward an unprecedented level of convergence, the collective power of Facebook’s user base presents a daunting challenge to Apple: specifically, could Facebook literally imprint its own applications on iOS devices, most notably the iPhone, to the point where it could, theoretically, transform the device into “The Facebook Phone” without ever having built its own hardware and/or standard mobile operating system?

At the moment, Facebook is believed to be undertaking what has been dubbed “Project Spartan,” its own Trojan Horse for stitching its social layer into multiple mobile platforms in lieu of building its own phone (like Apple) and/or its own mobile operating system (like Android). As “Spartan” has been written about before in detail (which I won’t recount here), the basic idea, as it applies to Apple, is the development and rollout of multiple HTML5 applications which would allow Facebook to create a range of mobile applications without having to adhere to the rules and toll charges imposed by Apple’s app-store.

Now, let’s consider an alternative scenario: What if Facebook releases an entire suite of iOS apps, as fast as “Messenger” (which feels faster than SMS) and powered by users’ own social networks?

Specifically, what if Facebook decides to apply resources to construct a full “suite” of federated yet interconnected native iPhone and iPad applications to satisfy a number of interactions within Facebook, entirely powered by your friends? Consider, for a moment, the possibility of having individual apps for asking questions, playing games, sharing pictures and videos, digesting your newsfeed, listening to music with friends, accessing your address book, participating in groups, viewing pictures and videos, and so on. You could have them all, or just use a few. I’m not suggesting that it will happen, but theoretically, Facebook has the muscle to create these apps and, with its huge user base, they would be downloaded in droves.

A few months ago, Apple announced a partnership to tie Twitter into its operating system. Many lauded the deal as a win for both sides, and to be sure, it is a great idea. But to be fair, it also underscores the lengths to which Apple, a company without a social network and notorious for wanting to control its platform, made strange bedfellows with Twitter. Earlier, when Apple had tried to bake Facebook into its iTunes player experience, Ping, apparently it didn’t work out because one side exerted more strength than the other. Guess who?

Whether Project Spartan continues, or whether Facebook builds out all these native iOS apps, Facebook will increasingly become the mobile identity gatekeeper and power source behind some of the newer application layer services. For example, one of the most anticipated iPhone apps to arrive this month is Turntable.fm, which requires that users login via Facebook only.

One thing is clear: Facebook is determined to get onto your iPhone. And your Android, and any other major mobile platform, too. The number of platforms doesn’t matter—this game is platform-agnostic. It will either build its own “lingua franca” for mobile via HTML5, or maybe it will build an entire fleet of apps. Or, they Facebook simply improve upon its current iOS app and not fragment the experience. Or, maybe it will develop its own mobile operating system (like Android) or, shoot, maybe build its own phone (Apple). Well, maybe those aren’t as likely, but given what we’ve seen in the last few months, with Google buying Motorola, and with Android use growing and iPhone profits skyrocketing, expect Facebook to do something big, something ambitious, and something that leverages its massive user base to penetrate the fabric of the mobile experience with social, by all means necessary.

The Theatricality and Deception of Bitcoin

It’s been a while since everyone in my Twitter feed has been talking about something that seemed to have come out of nowhere: Bitcoin. Maybe the last time was when SnapChat exploded in the fall of 2012. Of course, Bitcoin has been around for a few years, but for a variety of reasons — the run on the Cypriot banks, general fear about the global economy and specifically the Euro Zone, and politically-based currency manipulations based on reserves — Bitcoin has raised in prominence in the tech world, become the subject of articles in everything from BusinessWeek to the MIT Tech Review to all the daily tech blogs.

Yesterday, I spent 90 minutes reading seven (7) different articles and primers on Bitcoin. There was so much chatter about it, yet if pressed, I couldn’t explain what it was beyond “internet currency.” After reading this pieces, I feel I have a good grasp on what Bitcoins are, but all of the articles I read explained “what” Bitcoins are and “why” they’ve risen in popularity, but none of them offered a glimpse into a future world where Bitcoins were mainstream. That led me to wonder, “Why?” I’ll explain my answer to that question below, but briefly, here’s what I learned about Bitcoins:

• Bitcoins are a form of web-based currency created by a developer, working under the name “Nakamoto,” who meticulously calibrated the economy around the coins with a finite set of units and around a distributed, peer-to-peer mathematical model of how a Bitcoin captures and retains value.
• In the past few weeks, the market price for a Bitcoin has increased a lot.
• There is a startup accelerator that is devoting its summer class to startups focused around Bitcoins, such as YC-backed Coinbase.
• Tech crowds may be unduly enamored by Bitcoin because it feeds a deeply libertarian utopia where currency is not backed by hard assets (such as gold) or political guarantees or regulatory environments (such as governments), but rather dispassionate algorithms which control both supply and demand.

This much, we all know now. The rise of Bitcoin is fun, fascinating, foreign, and depending on your point of view, scary, a joke, or a real fundamental shift in currency. The truth is, in this case, no one really knows. I’ve thought about writing about this for a few days, but held back because I didn’t think I could add anything that wouldn’t be redundant. Above, I’ve only summarized what I’ve read.

It’s hard for me to imagine a future with Bitcoins, not because I don’t think it’s possible, but because I simply can’t see it in my mind. What I did think about, instead, were some of the initial scenes in “Batman Begins” when Bruce Wayne met Mile Ducard and was educated about the ways of the League of Shadows: “Theatricality and deception are powerful weapons.” Even though people have written about potential regulations (from government, of course), my conclusion in reading those seven posts is that there is a theatricality and deception about Bitcoin that give it incredible potency, something that the crowd intuitively understands could be a shift in how value is stored and shared, but also one where the crowd doesn’t fully understand just how this could all fold — or how disruptive it could be. And, the fact that Bitcoin is faceless, dispassionate, and regulated by networks and models — not governments or hard assets — is so foreign to all of us, that it just may outlast all of the analysis we could conjure up. It could outlive us all and, in doing so, be immortal.