Developing Perspective

00:00:00 ◼   ► Hello and welcome to Developing Perspective. Developing Perspective is a podcast discussing

00:00:04 ◼   ► news of note and iOS development, Apple and the like. I'm your host, David Smith. I'm an

00:00:08 ◼   ► independent iOS developer based in Herne, Virginia. This is show number 154 and today is Friday,

00:00:13 ◼   ► December 13th. Developing Perspective is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

00:00:18 ◼   ► Today's topic is going to be a little less technical and a little bit more ephemeral,

00:00:25 ◼   ► but hopefully something that is useful and interesting. And so it's going to be coming

00:00:28 ◼   ► out of the experience I had this last week around the Tempest in a Tea Cup with Feedly,

00:00:39 ◼   ► which is an RSS syncing platform similar to Feed Wrangler, which is mine, but who made

00:00:44 ◼   ► a couple of choices that I strongly disagreed with and I kind of wanted to unpack that process.

00:00:51 ◼   ► Not necessarily because the end result isn't necessarily quite as interesting, but I think

00:00:56 ◼   ► I think the process and how I got there is fairly interesting.

00:00:59 ◼   ► And so that's what I wanted to kind of unpack today

00:01:01 ◼   ► and to just talk through and to try and explain how I got here,

00:01:07 ◼   ► because I think that process is probably

00:01:09 ◼   ► the more interesting experience and the more useful

00:01:11 ◼   ► and practical to someone else.

00:01:12 ◼   ► So to start off, just a little bit of the background.

00:01:15 ◼   ► So Feedly is a RSS syncing service,

00:01:16 ◼   ► just like Feed Wrangler is.

00:01:18 ◼   ► It takes a collection of RSS feeds, it groups them together,

00:01:20 ◼   ► and lets you browse them in a consolidated interface.

00:01:23 ◼   ► And at its core, that's what an RSS syncing service does.

00:01:28 ◼   ► And they've had a variety of-- you

00:01:30 ◼   ► can add a variety of features to that.

00:01:32 ◼   ► You can do things like I do with smart streams,

00:01:34 ◼   ► or full text searching, or organizing them

00:01:37 ◼   ► in different ways, doing filters.

00:01:38 ◼   ► There's all kinds of stuff that you

00:01:40 ◼   ► can do to kind of help users navigate

00:01:41 ◼   ► that influx of information.

00:01:44 ◼   ► But at its core, what you're trying to do

00:01:45 ◼   ► is take the content that someone is publishing

00:01:49 ◼   ► in this particular format and make

00:01:51 ◼   ► available to your customers.

00:01:54 ◼   ► And over the weekend and then early in the week,

00:01:57 ◼   ► Fieldly rolled out a few changes, both of which

00:02:00 ◼   ► they ultimately reverted, which were trying in some ways

00:02:05 ◼   ► to push the boundaries of that and to do things that

00:02:11 ◼   ► are ostensibly potentially good for the user,

00:02:14 ◼   ► but ultimately are kind of complicated for the relationship

00:02:18 ◼   ► that the reader has with the writer.

00:02:20 ◼   ► and getting into, honestly, a few legal questions

00:02:24 ◼   ► about copyright and things.

00:02:26 ◼   ► But what they were doing is taking-- for example,

00:02:31 ◼   ► one of the ones-- well, the first thing they did is they

00:02:33 ◼   ► took the share links for-- if you're on the Feedly app

00:02:36 ◼   ► or on their site, you hit Share.

00:02:39 ◼   ► And so you're going to post a link on Twitter, for example,

00:02:42 ◼   ► to an article that you read.

00:02:44 ◼   ► And it's a Feedly link, which at first, for a lot of people

00:02:47 ◼   ► do that kind of thing where it's just a short link

00:02:49 ◼   ► that we will then redirect the actual site.

00:02:54 ◼   ► But what they were instead doing is they were sending people

00:02:56 ◼   ► to a feely.com site that had a copy mirror of the article

00:03:01 ◼   ► that you were sharing to.

00:03:02 ◼   ► Which, you know, they could say, hey,

00:03:04 ◼   ► you know, we're just trying to make this beautiful reading

00:03:06 ◼   ► experience without distracting ads or other content or things,

00:03:10 ◼   ► you know, because what you shared

00:03:11 ◼   ► was just that article, so we're just

00:03:12 ◼   ► going to show you that article.

00:03:14 ◼   ► That gets into all kinds of other problems and things,

00:03:16 ◼   ► where obviously they're doing that with essentially copying

00:03:18 ◼   ► an article and publishing it without permission, and so on.

00:03:22 ◼   ► Which has all kinds of problems and challenges.

00:03:26 ◼   ► And so what I did, though, is-- like I said,

00:03:30 ◼   ► they reverted all those changes and things.

00:03:32 ◼   ► And so I don't want to dwell too much on those.

00:03:34 ◼   ► But it brought to light something

00:03:37 ◼   ► that I've been struggling with for a while.

00:03:39 ◼   ► Or I was struggling with-- this may be the wrong word.

00:03:40 ◼   ► But it's something that I've given a lot of thought to.

00:03:43 ◼   ► Because it is one of the more-- it's

00:03:46 ◼   ► It's a fundamental question about how I want to operate my business and the way in which

00:03:49 ◼   ► I want to make my living.

00:03:50 ◼   ► And so, you know, it's something that I think about a fair bit as a result.

00:03:53 ◼   ► So these are, you know, the things that they were doing are certainly things that I've

00:03:56 ◼   ► thought about doing.

00:03:57 ◼   ► And I mean, I have a list.

00:03:58 ◼   ► I wrote a blog post this week called "Decisions Intentions," which I'll have a link in the

00:04:02 ◼   ► show notes too, but that kind of outlines a couple of the other things that I've thought

00:04:06 ◼   ► about that could go even farther in this direction, that could do things that ostensibly would

00:04:11 ◼   ► be good for the user.

00:04:12 ◼   ► and there are features that I've thought about

00:04:14 ◼   ► because as a reader, I would, you know,

00:04:16 ◼   ► sometimes would appreciate them.

00:04:18 ◼   ► For example, you could automatically convert

00:04:20 ◼   ► a truncated RSS feed into full text RSS feeds.

00:04:23 ◼   ► So as an example, a site like The Verge,

00:04:25 ◼   ► their RSS feed only includes typically the first paragraph

00:04:30 ◼   ► and a half of text, and then it has like a read more link.

00:04:32 ◼   ► And if you wanna read the whole article,

00:04:33 ◼   ► they want you to go and visit theverge.com to read it.

00:04:38 ◼   ► Just because that's how they make their living.

00:04:39 ◼   ► They make their living from selling advertisements

00:04:42 ◼   ► on the verge.

00:04:44 ◼   ► And so fair enough.

00:04:45 ◼   ► They've made a decision that that's

00:04:48 ◼   ► how they want to make their money,

00:04:49 ◼   ► and so that's how they're going to monetize it,

00:04:51 ◼   ► is that they need you to be going to their site,

00:04:53 ◼   ► not just looking at their RSS feed.

00:04:55 ◼   ► But I could very easily, from a technical perspective,

00:04:58 ◼   ► just go and scrape all the sites that do that,

00:05:00 ◼   ► and include the full text right in my RSS feed.

00:05:04 ◼   ► I could strip out advertisements directly from feeds.

00:05:07 ◼   ► I could, in Pod Wrangler, I could

00:05:09 ◼   ► so it automatically removes sponsorship messages.

00:05:11 ◼   ► I could cache copies of content from behind paywalls.

00:05:14 ◼   ► I could do all kinds of things like this.

00:05:16 ◼   ► And in all cases, on their surface,

00:05:19 ◼   ► they're fairly good features in terms of they

00:05:22 ◼   ► provide a value to the customer.

00:05:24 ◼   ► And if your goal is just to say, oh, I'm

00:05:25 ◼   ► just going to do everything that would make my customer happy,

00:05:28 ◼   ► that would be good for my customer,

00:05:30 ◼   ► the tricky part is that you can end into a very awkward place

00:05:34 ◼   ► where you're starting to make decisions

00:05:36 ◼   ► that you may not really be proud of

00:05:38 ◼   ► or that have implications for decisions

00:05:41 ◼   ► that you have to make down the road that really aren't great,

00:05:43 ◼   ► that really aren't things that you want

00:05:46 ◼   ► to live with down the road.

00:05:47 ◼   ► And so this is something that I struggle with,

00:05:49 ◼   ► because the business I'm in is incredibly competitive,

00:05:54 ◼   ► both in the iOS App Store and as well as in the RSS syncing

00:05:57 ◼   ► business.

00:05:58 ◼   ► And I think the lessons and the things that come out of this

00:06:00 ◼   ► apply equally in both places, and in some ways

00:06:02 ◼   ► even more so in the App Store, because it is so competitive.

00:06:05 ◼   ► And then any edge that you can get, however slight,

00:06:07 ◼   ► comes back in such a dramatic way

00:06:11 ◼   ► that it's just you're constantly facing these questions of what

00:06:15 ◼   ► lines do you want to skirt around,

00:06:17 ◼   ► what are gray areas that you want to go even more black on,

00:06:19 ◼   ► you know, the black side of the gray versus the white side

00:06:22 ◼   ► of the gray.

00:06:22 ◼   ► There's all these kind of questions

00:06:24 ◼   ► that you have to deal with.

00:06:26 ◼   ► And I do think that it's important,

00:06:30 ◼   ► though, to be thoughtful about this,

00:06:32 ◼   ► to try and build a business that you're proud of,

00:06:35 ◼   ► to do things that when you look back on the decisions you made,

00:06:40 ◼   ► you don't have regret about them,

00:06:41 ◼   ► that you don't feel like you were making poor choices that

00:06:48 ◼   ► have short-term gains but long-term implications.

00:06:51 ◼   ► Because that's really what you're doing.

00:06:53 ◼   ► Any time you're making these decisions,

00:06:54 ◼   ► and you can get in--

00:06:55 ◼   ► I could bring up the old things about in-app purchases

00:06:59 ◼   ► and the way that they can be very manipulative

00:07:01 ◼   ► and that whole thing that I talked about at length

00:07:04 ◼   ► a couple months ago.

00:07:05 ◼   ► There's all kinds of areas that you can get into,

00:07:07 ◼   ► the type of advertisements you take, things

00:07:10 ◼   ► that you do in terms of promotion,

00:07:14 ◼   ► how misleading is your marketing,

00:07:16 ◼   ► all kinds of things that you do that come down to questions

00:07:18 ◼   ► about honesty.

00:07:20 ◼   ► It starts to get into things that are, I guess,

00:07:22 ◼   ► more moral questions than they are necessarily

00:07:24 ◼   ► business questions.

00:07:26 ◼   ► But I think it's important that you think about those.

00:07:29 ◼   ► Because while it's important that you make a living,

00:07:32 ◼   ► I think it's far more important how you make that living.

00:07:36 ◼   ► If you listen to the show for any amount of time,

00:07:38 ◼   ► you'll know that it's not that I'm

00:07:40 ◼   ► saying you don't want to do things that make you money.

00:07:42 ◼   ► That if you find a way, an angle, an ability that you

00:07:47 ◼   ► can exploit that will give you an edge in the marketplace,

00:07:50 ◼   ► that will help you make more revenue,

00:07:52 ◼   ► that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

00:07:53 ◼   ► Often those are the things.

00:07:55 ◼   ► That's innovation in a nutshell, I suppose.

00:07:57 ◼   ► But the challenge comes when those things

00:08:01 ◼   ► coming at the expense of crossing lines that you wouldn't want to cross.

00:08:06 ◼   ► And the temptation is so present, I suppose.

00:08:11 ◼   ► I've been doing this for over five years now.

00:08:14 ◼   ► And there are many times throughout this experience where I've had these opportunities that I've

00:08:17 ◼   ► been like, "Ooh, I wonder if I did this or I wonder if I did that.

00:08:20 ◼   ► I wonder if that would boost my sales a little bit.

00:08:23 ◼   ► I wonder if I tweaked the name of an app or put an app in the store that has a confusingly

00:08:28 ◼   ► similar name to something else."

00:08:30 ◼   ► that are probably going to work, that are probably things that would make me some amount of money.

00:08:36 ◼   ► But ultimately, what I'm, the things that I have to keep telling myself is that I'm not doing this

00:08:42 ◼   ► to make money, you know, that making money is a result of the work that I do. But that's not the

00:08:47 ◼   ► goal of what I'm doing. I'm trying to do something that I'm proud of. I'm trying to do something

00:08:51 ◼   ► that where I can, you know, work or sort of work with integrity, and be an example of that to the

00:08:56 ◼   ► the community. And I would rather make something that I was proud of that ultimately ended

00:09:03 ◼   ► up failing financially or failing in the marketplace generally, that I would be to have a success

00:09:09 ◼   ► that I was kind of ashamed of. I'd rather not be able to have my name forever attached

00:09:15 ◼   ► to something that's like, "Oh yeah, that thing, it was really popular but kind of sketchy."

00:09:21 ◼   ► That's the thing that I want to avoid.

00:09:22 ◼   ► That's the place that I don't want to end up in.

00:09:26 ◼   ► And I think the important thing and the thing that I've learned is that it's very hard to

00:09:35 ◼   ► keep that integrity up unless you make lots of small decisions.

00:09:39 ◼   ► And this is a general thing that applies more broadly in life even.

00:09:43 ◼   ► But anytime you have these small little decisions that you make, where you capitulate into doing

00:09:49 ◼   ► the thing that you maybe shouldn't do.

00:09:53 ◼   ► Those add up because on the spectrum of whatever,

00:09:57 ◼   ► you have like sort of the right and wrong,

00:09:59 ◼   ► or on those choices that you have to make,

00:10:03 ◼   ► as normal gets closer and closer to either direction,

00:10:06 ◼   ► everything else will become more polarizing.

00:10:10 ◼   ► And so if you make lots and lots of small choices

00:10:12 ◼   ► that put yourself more and more onto the right side of things,

00:10:16 ◼   ► then when you look at the wrong choices or choices that

00:10:20 ◼   ► aren't as good, those will look more wrong.

00:10:23 ◼   ► But if you make lots and lots of small choices that

00:10:26 ◼   ► put you closer and closer to the other end of the spectrum,

00:10:28 ◼   ► then things become more extreme that way as well.

00:10:33 ◼   ► And that's a bit of a soapbox thing.

00:10:35 ◼   ► And it's just something that I wanted to talk about,

00:10:39 ◼   ► because I think it's important.

00:10:42 ◼   ► And I figured it made more sense to talk about here on the show

00:10:44 ◼   ► then the blog post I wrote about this was much more

00:10:46 ◼   ► of the business side of things, of some of the more

00:10:49 ◼   ► kind of business-y reasons and less--

00:10:54 ◼   ► it's like less personal side of that for why

00:10:57 ◼   ► I would make these decisions.

00:10:58 ◼   ► Because ultimately, there are a lot

00:10:59 ◼   ► of good business reasons for making these choices as well.

00:11:02 ◼   ► I want to make sure that I have a good relationship

00:11:05 ◼   ► with publishers, that it's in my interest for people

00:11:09 ◼   ► who write content to like my service,

00:11:12 ◼   ► because my service is useless without content.

00:11:15 ◼   ► And those are good and valid justifications.

00:11:17 ◼   ► And those are things that are important to think about.

00:11:19 ◼   ► But ultimately, there's a bigger part of it

00:11:22 ◼   ► that is wanting to be proud of what I do.

00:11:24 ◼   ► And so these are the challenges that I face all the time.

00:11:29 ◼   ► What lines are appropriate and good to cross,

00:11:32 ◼   ► and which edges are worth pushing?

00:11:34 ◼   ► What boundaries of-- it's like, what's

00:11:36 ◼   ► being innovative in a useful way?

00:11:38 ◼   ► Like, when I'm coming up with something, like, wow,

00:11:40 ◼   ► that's really cool.

00:11:41 ◼   ► and I'm putting it out there, that's true innovation.

00:11:44 ◼   ► That's coming up with something new and interesting to solve

00:11:47 ◼   ► a problem versus, oh, yeah, I found this interesting kind

00:11:49 ◼   ► of hacky way that I can game the App Store,

00:11:52 ◼   ► or I can find a way that I can do things like that.

00:11:54 ◼   ► And you can get into various-- it's like the old thing,

00:11:56 ◼   ► I guess, with search engine optimization, right?

00:11:58 ◼   ► Where it's like you have black hat and white hat search

00:12:01 ◼   ► engine optimization.

00:12:02 ◼   ► Where on the one hand, you're trying to make your content

00:12:07 ◼   ► indexable well by Google.

00:12:10 ◼   ► so that it's well optimized for searching.

00:12:13 ◼   ► And on the other side, it's putting things in your content

00:12:15 ◼   ► that are intentionally misleading to try and drive

00:12:18 ◼   ► traffic.

00:12:18 ◼   ► And those types of things are always these present.

00:12:20 ◼   ► And then today is maybe it's like I

00:12:23 ◼   ► can't worry about whether those kinds of choices

00:12:26 ◼   ► would potentially drive more traffic in that case

00:12:28 ◼   ► or make me more sales.

00:12:29 ◼   ► Because as soon as I consider it as even an option,

00:12:33 ◼   ► I've already lost in a lot of ways.

00:12:35 ◼   ► So that's just kind of like I said,

00:12:36 ◼   ► it's a bit of a soapbox today.

00:12:37 ◼   ► And I apologize for that if that's not really

00:12:39 ◼   ► what you're tuning for.

00:12:40 ◼   ► But I think it's important.

00:12:41 ◼   ► And so that's why I figured I'd talk about it today.

00:12:45 ◼   ► Yeah, and that's, I think, it for today's show.

00:12:47 ◼   ► As always, if you have questions, comments, concerns,

00:12:49 ◼   ► or complaints, I'm on Twitter @_davidsmith.

00:12:52 ◼   ► If you want to email me, david@developingperspective.com.

00:12:54 ◼   ► Otherwise, I hope you have a great weekend.

00:12:55 ◼   ► Good next week.

00:12:56 ◼   ► As we're getting into Christmas and New Year's,

00:12:59 ◼   ► my schedule may be a little bit off, but we'll see.

00:13:01 ◼   ► Hopefully, I'll be able to still get a couple episodes out

00:13:03 ◼   ► before the end of the year.

00:13:04 ◼   ► And I hope your preparations for the big App Store,

00:13:08 ◼   ► Christmas shutdown extravaganza are going well, and that you had a good year.

00:13:12 ◼   ► Alright, thank you. Bye.