To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy. – Sun Tzu
Snapchat’s New Test: Grow Like Facebook, Without the Baggage:
A world in which every successful internet platform is expected to behave like Facebook is a more boring, less innovative world, with no companies to challenge Facebook’s vision of the future. It’s not a good sign that in order to survive as a competitor, Snap may have to abandon the qualities that made it different in the first place.
Snapchat was the great hope for a competitor to Facebook. But in order to challenge Facebook, Snapchat had to become more like Facebook. The rub is that even when they resisted and tried to stay unique, Facebook was able to become more like Snapchat (See, Stories, Facebook, Instagram).
God saw all that he had made, and it was … not as good as it used to be.
Tim Berners-Lee on the future of the web: ‘The system is failing’
“I’m still an optimist, but an optimist standing at the top of the hill with a nasty storm blowing in my face, hanging on to a fence,” said the British computer scientist.
The guy that invented the web is … concerned … with our stewardship of it.
It’s difficult to scale good ideas.
You can scale and automate ad buys, but scaling creativity is still difficult.
Across the industry, digital-media companies are finding that lines of business that caught fire for them early on—like creating custom content for brands—are becoming harder to scale up.
BuzzFeed Set to Miss Revenue Target, Signaling Turbulence in Media