firehose

Even the most famous weirdos have to eat, and Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim have never tried to hide their work making ads for companies like Old Spice and Absolut Vodka (not that they’d be able to deny any of the bizarre spots were theirs in the first place). Heidecker and Wareheim’s newest corporate client is multinational superconglomerate GE, which threw a little cash at the surrealist comedy duo to sell lightbulbs to the hyper-self-aware pre-post-ironic market. (Can’t light everything with your iPhone, millennials.) Heidecker and Wareheim got Jeff Goldblum—consistently one of the Internet’s top five favorite actors who wasn’t on Star Trek—to star in the ad, which looks twice as expensive as an average Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! bit, but with 100 percent less vomit.

Collectively declaring their right to enjoy the professional and personal exploits of tough-as-nails lady lawyers whenever they damn well please, more than 6 million Americans banded together to view the premiere of How To Get Away With Murder, whenever they could get around to watching it on their DVRs. The ABC drama starring Viola Davis as a defense attorney who specializes in getting the job done—no matter what—debuted this past Thursday to an audience of 14 million people. It was a strong showing, but within three days, viewership had swelled to 20.3 million. That represents the biggest live-plus-3 ratings jump in history, handily trumping other time-shifting champions like The Blacklist and Gotham, and giving ammunition to anyone interested in arguing that Viola Davis could best James Spader or Batman in a fight.

Impressive as How To Get Away With Murder’s record-busting is, it’s part of ...

stephenhawqueen:

the US is unreal like girls cant wear shorts to school, you can literally lose your job for being gay, and unarmed black children are brutally murdered on the regular but white ppl r still like “what a beautiful country. i can freely carry a gun for no reason and some of our mountains look like presidents. god bless”

Submitted by: anselmbe

A few of a marketer's favorite things.

Atlas Solutions

Facebook has officially relaunched the advertising platform Atlas in a new incarnation that will allow marketers to track users in new dimensions, according to a blog post from the company. Atlas will offer the ability to not only synthesize information about where users are seeing ads, but also to see how and whether those ad views play out into a purchase, even if it's offline.

Facebook acquired Atlas from Microsoft in 2013, and now the platform has been "rebuilt from the ground up." Atlas aims to accomplish what it calls "people-based marketing"—that is, the counterpoint to marketing based on a browser cookie or isolated social media profile.

Atlas's services purport to solve the "cross-device" problem, where marketers struggle to relate the browsing activity on a user's phone to what they do on their computer. This has become easier to an extent with Facebook profiles and logins, but Atlas also plans to add "partners" that "cross search, social, creative management and publishers" to track how ads are viewed and how successful they are on multiple "channels and platforms."

"What if you could text message a store instead of calling them?"

This is the stuff of a Silicon Valley fairytale — the promise of an app that’s never actually going to work. But this one does. Path Talk, the first standalone app from Dave Morin’s Path social networking enterprise, now lets you message businesses. I’ve been testing the app for the last few days with great results.

I messaged the Apple Store to find out if they had any 64 GB space gray iPhone 6’s in stock. I messaged Barney’s to see if they had a coat I was looking for. I even messaged Chipotle to find out how long the lunch line was. Path Talk works with any store — there’s no proprietary software for them to install or iPads to set up — since you aren’t actually messaging the store itself. Path’s call center is fields your responses, calls up stores, and types answers back to you in real-time. In most cases, I got a response within 10 minutes. Chipotle, however, never responded, which was an answer in itself.

Path Talk 1.1 for iPhone screenshots

Path Talk’s "place messaging" service is built on top of TalkTo, a three-year-old company Path acquired back in June. TalkTo employs a large number of callers, now dubbed "Path agents," who are dedicated to calling stores and restaurants for you. TalkTo founder Stuart Levinson wouldn’t say how many agents exist, but said that wait times are rarely longer than five or ten minutes, and the company staffs up in response to big product launches and events.

Path spent the last few months integrating TalkTo functionality, which now lives in a tab of its own inside Path Talk. Tap "Places," then either choose a nearby place or type in a place to send a message. Path uses Foursquare’s venue engine to find nearby places and phone numbers, but TalkTo also has its own database of places to pull from. Once you send a message to a place, you’ll get an instant response from Path confirming your question, and then, hopefully, a real response a few minutes later. In my tests, responses from some stores came after 15 minutes, but I doubt I'd be able to get through any quicker had I called myself.

It’s unusual for a messaging app to have a Places tab. Most of them, from WhatsApp to Facebook Messenger, focus only on talking with friends. Path vice president Cynthia Samanian says she hopes Path Talk’s unique combination of features will draw in new users and make Path Talk their primary messaging app. "Talk is the hub for all your important messages and communications," says Samanian. Before the TalkTo integration, Talk included novel features like status icons that say when a friend’s in the car, in the neighborhood, or low on battery.

But even with place messaging functionality and status icons, Path Talk as a primary messaging service is a tough sell. In most developed countries around the world, one or two apps with hundreds of millions of users dominate the messaging market, while Path has fewer than five million daily active users total. Neither Path nor Path Talk have broken through to the mainstream in any market, though Path is popular in Indonesia, where the company raised an additional round of funding back in January. Levinson wouldn’t say how many users TalkTo had before it was acquired.

"A lot of people have said to us — 'It’s like Siri, but it works.'"

Fortunately, people today download and use tons of apps, and I wholeheartedly recommend Path Talk as a great way to contact stores when you aren’t able to call them. One especially great feature is the ability to send a message late at night, and then get a response back once the store opens in the morning. "The more you use it, the more it feels natural, and it’s why a lot of people have said to us — 'It’s like Siri, but it works,'" says Levinson. According to Path, the top three queries so far have been for reservations, product pricing and availability, and appointments.

If Path Talk catches on, it could provide Path with an important new source of revenue. Employing an entire call center at a loss ain't easy. "70 percent of users are using this for purchase intent -— to express before they’ve bought something that they’re interested in this appointment, restaurant, or product," says Levinson. "There’s some really neat things we can do with monetization. Our brains are on fire with different things we can do right now." Monetization still seems like a ways off, however. In the meantime, I'm texting McDonalds to find out when the McRib is back.

The front page of the internet has a lot more money in the bank, with Reddit confirming $50 million in new funding. More interesting than the amount raised, however, was that investors promised 10 percent of their new equity in the company will be shared with community members, a highly unusual move. While the exact mechanics of how these shares will be distributed to users is not yet clear, lead investor Sam Altman told The Verge that it will most likely use a block chain method similar to the systems used to create and distribute Bitcoin.

"Community sites should own themselves."

Altman is the president of the startup incubator Y Combinator, but before he was an executive there he was a founder going through the program. "I went through YC the same class as Reddit, and so I was one of the first dozen or so users," he explained. "My thought at the time was these community sites should own themselves. For years I couldn't think of a great way to do that."

With the emergence of a decentralized system for creating currency, and contracts, Altman says it was time to try something new. "The block chain came along and I thought, huh, this might the biggest evolution of corporate structure since the limited-liability corporation. So we don't know exactly how it will work yet, but all the investors are committed to allocating these shares to the community if we can find a way to make it work."

"Money can become worthless very quickly."

Those other investors include big-name venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, along with prominent angel investors like Peter Thiel and Ron Conway, plus a smattering of celebrities like Jared Leto and Snoop Dogg. Reddit CEO Yishan Wong downplayed the funding, writing on Reddit's blog that, "An investment like this doesn’t mean we’re rich or successful ... Money can become worthless very quickly, value is something that is built over time through hard work." The new funding will be used to add staff, pay rising infrastructure costs, and develop new tools for community management and moderation.

One day this summer, I spent an afternoon with computing pioneer Jaron Lanier talking about virtual reality. Lanier is a leading critic of the internet’s advertising-based business models, and when Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus Rift came up, he pushed the company to look for alternative sources of revenue. "Every time there is a new platform, there is a chance to create a new economic model," Lanier said.

The desire for an alternative to Facebook goes most of the way in explaining the overnight sensation that is Ello, a three-month-old social network founded on the idea that ad-based internet businesses are corrupt. The service, which has yet to build a mobile app and is available only on the web, exploded in popularity this month after reports that artists and LGBT people were fleeing Facebook in favor of Ello, because unlike Facebook it allows them to use pseudonyms. A torrent of press coverage and commentary followed, and the currently invite-only network now has a waiting list of 1 million people.

Founded on the idea that ad-based social networks are corrupt

With this new platform comes the kind of chance Lanier talked about: an opportunity to create a service that succeeds without demanding ever more data about our personal lives. It’s an idea contained in Ello’s founding manifesto, which promises "a better way." "Collecting and selling your personal data, reading your posts to your friends, and mapping your social connections for profit is both creepy and unethical," the company says on its About page. "Under the guise of offering a ‘free’ service, users pay a high price in intrusive advertising and lack of privacy."

At this early stage, Ello offers a clean, modernist design with a bare-bones feature set. Its users post a motley assemblage of photos, one-liners, and disjointed conversations among early adopters. But really, Ello is a dream of starting over — a blank slate where you can create the network that has so far eluded you. Ad-free and pseudonym-friendly, it’s a place where you can easily toggle between your real friends and everyone else — "Noise," as Ello calls them — and where your sharing and messaging are never interrupted by the sight of an unwanted brand.

For now, there’s a lot about Ello that’s simply weird. When you log in, your screen is split into two main tabs. The left side of your screen shows you large circular avatars of the people you follow, in a highly inconvenient and basically useless reverse-chronological order from the point that you followed them. (All you can do with the avatars is click them to see the person’s feed of updates; it’s as if half your favorite website was taken up by its blogroll.) The right side of the feed is where you’ll find the posts of the people you follow, and it’s full of posts of every length, from simple greetings to extended essays.

There are photos there, as well, and animated GIFs; Ello has said it welcomes porn, so you may see some of that, too. Replies appear in your feed even when the person you follow is responding to someone you don’t; but you don’t get notified when someone responds to you, because there’s no system for notifications. As with any new network, early adopters are fond of using it to discuss the network itself: users are suggesting interesting accounts to follow; sharing tips (hit shift+1 to make your friends’ faces take up the entire screen!); and complaining about missing features (no block feature; no private messaging).

Ello is half-formed

Ello is half-formed, if that. It’s buggy, the search function doesn’t work, and the app has been plagued by down time in recent days — although perhaps not as much as you would expect, given how quickly it has been growing. There are no mobile apps for Ello as of yet; instead there’s a mobile web client that works well enough.

Founders say that users will eventually pay for the service via small fees for extra features — a few dollars for emoji or the ability to control multiple accounts from a single login. That will start to repay the $435,000 the company raised from FreshTracks Capital, a venture capital firm in Vermont. And over time, the founders say, they hope Ello evolves into a full-fledged alternative to existing networks.

Something will probably kill Ello before any of that happens, of course. But what if it doesn’t? Could this time be different?

Ello was conceived by a team led by Paul Budnitz, a 47-year-old artist and maker of designer toys. He previously founded Kidrobot, a shop for unusual children’s toys, and Budnitz Bicycles, a maker of custom city bikes. Budnitz and some friends wanted to discuss projects they were working on, but were unsatisfied with existing tools. Teaming with the design firm Berger & Föhr and the software developers at Mode Set, Budnitz shepherded the first version of Ello into existence. After teasing the site in April, he began extending invitations to the public in July, and the momentum built from there.

On Thursday, amid reports that drag queens were moving from Facebook to Ello so that they could post under their stage names, Ello was receiving 4,000 signup requests an hour. By Friday, that number was up to 40,000 requests per hour, and that number held steady through Monday, according to a spokesman. It has proven especially popular in privacy-conscious Germany, Ello says, though most of its users are from the United States.

40,000 sign-up requests per hour

The network’s rise was accompanied with growing skepticism that Ello could deliver on its promise of a private, ad-free network that remained mostly free to use. The writer and festival organizer Andy Baio was the first to note that Ello had raised venture capital without disclosing it on their site; he argued the company would find it difficult to sustain its operations unless it quickly raised more. (Ello’s paid features have yet to arrive.) Meanwhile, writer Quinn Norton highlighted the huge number of problems social networks face as they grow. "The code won’t scale. The revenue model won’t be quite right. The hosting will be problematic. People will blame you for bigotry, hate, and even aiding human rights abusers and criminals … and that’s just what happens if people love you."

So what happens if Ello succeeds? It’s going to need money in a hurry. It’s going to need to hire quickly to address all the issues Norton raises, and more. The founders seem aware of this; they declined my interview request, saying they were working around the clock to keep Ello from falling apart.

Much of the skepticism about Ello focuses on a single fact: networks founded on the premise of enhanced privacy have never resonated with a mass audience. People say they value privacy and then volunteer their entire life histories to Facebook. Google+ launched ad-free with a "Circles" model designed to encourage more private sharing; it never took off, and after the departure from Google of its creator, it has been all but in maintenance mode. Path, a four-year-old social network for mobile devices, is moribund in the United States. But the closest analog to Ello may be Diaspora, which raised $200,000 on Kickstarter in an effort to create a private, ad-free Facebook alternative. The resulting product floundered, though, and its creators left the project less than two years after starting it.

Interest motivated less by privacy than novelty

But the early interest in Ello seems motivated less by privacy than it is by novelty. Part of the appeal for early adopters — aside from the predictable land rush for desirable user names — is trying to figure out what Ello is, or could be. It’s a chance to rebuild your network of friends from scratch, to find an audience more in tune with your interests, and (for now) to escape the heavy brand presence found on every other form of media. It’s a place to mess around.

What it lacks in features, though, it makes up for in possibility — the sense that Ello could be anything its users want it to be. What’s most interesting about these ad-free social networks isn’t that they keep failing but rather that they keep returning. This time it will be different, we tell ourselves. And the fact that it never is won’t stop us from trying again.