This is not a super-technical deep dive. But I’ve been thinking it for a long time.
It’s a piece about UX. About form factors; past and future. Think of it as a palate cleanser between deep-dives on concurrency, Metal, and job interviews.
Chill (⛄️).
Whoever cracks this is going to make a billion dollars. Legit. That’s 5.5 million years of Premium Membership to Jacob’s Tech Tavern. Perhaps a few more if you subscribe annually.
But, before we get there, a history lesson 🧑🏫
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Inception
In 2007, the iPhone was announced. Like ChatGPT 15 years later, or Netscape Navigator 13 years prior, it ushered in the next great technological era: Mobile. In one swoop*, consumers had access to:
Multi-touch capacitive screen
A desktop-class web browser
Cellular and Wi-Fi networking
GPS and location
Motion sensors
A decent photo and video camera
An App Store that made your device more valuable every day
And you got all this in a portable handheld device!
*two swoops if you pedantically point out that the App Store/GPS/video didn’t arrive ‘till 2008. I see you.
Early apps got nearly-free distribution on relatively crappy hardware. To-do lists, fart apps, and static PNGs were making tens of thousands of dollars*.
*It’s true. I once worked with a greybeard who paid his mortgage by shipping a calendar app in 2010 and getting untold thousands of paid downloads.
Heavy hitters like Facebook scrambled to stake a claim in this new land-grab. So Zuck did what he knew best, shipping an HTML5 app that ported the existing news feed from the web.
Nobody knew how to make the most of the new platform. Not Meta. Not Apple. Not even Instagram.
In 2010, this mobile-native new challenger wrote OpenGL shaders to filter photos and squeeze out value from the meagre early camera hardware, transforming your iDevice into a surface for creation as well as consumption.
Many of the big hitters you know and love to hate began in this early scramble: Uber. Snapchat. Instagram. WhatsApp. Tinder. Waze. Erm, Yik Yak.
Business Model Innovation
In 2012, Facebook finally got its sh*t together and figured out how to monetise mobile, placing ads natively alongside items in the news feed.
In hindsight, this seems so obvious, but consider the perspective of the most beloved product that ever existed on the web. I’m not kidding. For years, 70% of people who had ever registered for Facebook were daily active users.
Your users are used to unobtrusive banner ads. How could you risk polluting the news feed, risking a defection to Instagram and WhatsApp*, for an unproven revenue opportunity?
*Remember those glory days when they weren’t all the same company?
Selling ads as content-ish objects, integrated alongside infinite updates from your friends, turned out to be drastically more profitable than the web could ever dream.
Form Factor Innovation
Social was the hottest industry in early-2010s-startupland. Business model innovation is nice, but the cool kids (who adopt your product) could not care less if you were monetising them. They probably also didn’t care that much about their data at the time. I dunno. I wasn’t one of them.
The big story is form factor. Well. The form factor is Story. Stories, that is.
Ahem.
Late 2013. Snapchat unleashed Stories on the world.
At last, there was a form factor that felt perfect for mobile, on both the creation and consumption sides:
It used the hardware camera as the starting point; vertical by default
It took Snapchat’s ephemeral messaging and turned it into broadcasting
This ephemerality encouraged mundane, casual, “low pressure” posting
This, in turn, encouraged repeat daily posting and consumption
Fullscreen consumption captured your whole attention and encouraged “tapping through” all the updates from your friends.
When you put everything together like that, it was obviously the ideal form factor for an early mobile device.
But also, it still wasn’t that obvious without hindsight.
In 2016, the problem of pressure to post the perfect photo began to really hurt engagement on Insta. Zuckko ripped the stories form factor straight off Speegz. At which point, he decided to yeet it everywhere.
The extremely obvious final form
Today, people no longer casually consume content shared by their acquaintances. Social media has bifurcated into private messaging with close friends; and watching videos made by strangers. Whatever market opportunity there was for catching up with acquaintances has dried up.
TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and Snapchat Spotlight (I had to look up the name) have converged on pretty much the exact same form factor. But, again, it all seemed so obvious!
TikTok burst onto the scene in 2019, and forced everyone to adopt its obviously superior form factor (or perish).
It brought the logical conclusion of the fullscreen stories format. Instead of an image, it’s a video. Instead of a crappy 4” screen, it’s on a stonking 6.5” chad of a glass rectangle. Instead of disappearing after six seconds, it’s broadcast to the world in a ruthless Darwinian survival game of attention.
On-demand full-screen video was a predictable ultimate form factor way back in 2010. But failure to implement this wasn’t due to a lack of creativity on those would-be Gen X entrepreneurs.