Gadgetory

speaking of fascinating interesting dudes I want to bring out our next guest he's a really smart very creative guy and frankly I'm a little bit in love with him please welcome welcome Marco Arment I works right thank you thank you yes nice weird like we're stepping up the nerdiness we're going that we're going yeah we're getting increasingly nerdy at the end of the show we're just gonna be sitting here coding is that cool well as long as we put two big top windows on the screen and one red one green yeah two inside baseball all right is that a coding thing I'm confused to some people I'm totally confused right now so Marco we're just gonna pretend that ever happened I didn't get confused by that joke we're just moving right along here Marco you're an interesting man you are one of the people who created tumblr yep which as I said we've all used many many times multiple times a day your bosses I'm sorry and an inch of paper which now everybody it price says Instagram to you every time they talk about it right but like you created Instagram that's awesome how's it feel to have a billion dollars yeah can you believe I actually I heard a few of those yeah that was an interesting day so I'm sure you did Congrats yeah so tell me I want it but tumblr a little bit I mean tumblr has become a phenomenon I mean everybody uses it like every new site I see is just a tumblr site and and obviously it's been great for the porn industry no I'm sorry it hasn't been but for porn users but but where when did that start how did that start what was your role just can you give me like a little bit of background I'm sure you know spice it up sexy sexy stuff as sexy as two guys written code in an office for a couple years that's very sad that's very sad vibe so focused on sex right yeah I did see house a little bit in love with you it is late at night you know that's true so yeah so what where did that start it started as me and David Karp David had a consulting company just making websites for people and one day we were between clients for about two weeks and he said hey I've had this idea I want to work on it let's see what we can get done in the next two weeks before we got into this next project and that was tumblr and that was late 2006 and we built the prototype and it took off we kept iterating on it as we were doing client work until eventually the client work had to be dropped because we had to do this thing full time he had tumblr work yeah so so what was the idea was like I I I mean it's like this weird halfway place between WordPress and Twitter you know it's this kind of like was the idea like blogging is just too complicated but that was basically it it was that a lot of us especially if you were a nerd playing with the Internet in 2006 chances are you had started and abandoned a blog I write a lot of people did yeah and the problem is that the at the time what was really the traditional WordPress movable-type style format is more like a magazine column where it's a lot of work you know writing these longer pieces lots of paragraphs and throwing in images and stuff every day or once a week or least you got to you got to do as you know it takes a lot of time yes and every time conserve it right and and if you're doing it as just like a little side hobby and you only get like one or two comments in a week and one of them spam and the other ones telling you that you know you're stupid it's kind of hard to keep the motivation going to keep something like that up so tumblr was created to to lower the the friction to make publishing online easy and to lower the expectation that you had to produce this giant magazine column every day because in reality most people just wouldn't and they would abandon it and with tumblr that wasn't really an issue because what the platform cultivated and expected was much more sustainable because it was so much easier right did you did you think that I mean I know maybe I don't know the answer to this but did you think it would become this this kind of default almost I mean that's what it's become really but now when people start something I mean it feels like they're moved away from like oh I'm gonna start a wordpress blog too I'm just gonna start a tumblr and I like I have seven tumblr and they're all like I one day I was like I'm gonna do a tumblr just of pictures of bags I like why not cool right and I just started it I did one I was gonna add film trailer reviews I was just gonna do film trailer reviews that's good I did like six and now it's abandoned but it but tumblr makes it so it's so easy did you expect it would be this default or were you like well just be an easier way to do a blog I knew that you know once we had the product at a usable stage pretty early on I knew that people who used it we're going to love it but I think what surprised me is how much it took over outside of people who used to be the ones blogging you know that people who were blogging almost mostly nerds you know now it's a lot more people it's like normals it's everybody there's nobody here probably maybe who wandered in by accident maybe yeah they have a tumblr though we can agree or seven of them yes that's right and one is about the one is about bags so so you you stop working at tumblr when 2010 and a 2010 so pretty recently yeah and and so talk to me about instapaper this is your your next big sure project what why did you where did Instapaper come from and how was it were you sitting there one day you do I mean you really bookmarking something you're like there's got to be a better way to do this basically yeah I mean what happened was in in late 2007 I got an iPhone and I was still working at tumblr and I was commuting every day on the train not the subway you know the suburb train you know nobody here knows about an actual train an actual tree the the LIRR or the Metro North Metro North which leads up to what most people consider a farmland upstate even though it's like 10 miles you live on a farm pretty much no but everyone thinks I do we'll keep that up yeah so you know I had this long train commute and I would be browsing the web at work like I wasn't supposed to be doing but when you're making a platform about browsing the web it's really hard not to while you're testing it so I was browsing the web at work and I would find links to read and I wouldn't have time to read them because I was supposed to be working so I I would want to save them and read them sometime and at the same time I was on the train and I had this new iPhone that had this terrible edge connection and was offline half the time for the ride and I wanted to read things on the train but by the time I got there the connection was too slow to browse much to browse around and I would have already gone through RSS feeds Digg which at the time still mattered you know I would have gone through all these things and so it was like I was burning through my queue when I couldn't read it and when I could read it there was nothing there so I made Instapaper to bridge that gap to solve that problem to be just a temporary place just the one-click bookmark just save it I don't want to tag it I don't want to like categorize it and reference this forever in a giant you know library of things I've ever read it was just a temporary like I haven't read this but I want to you know save it until I have read it and then get rid of it do you feel it's the highest form of flattery that that Apple has completely ripped you off oh yeah I mean is that it is that weird for you I'd be really upset if I reading because you're you know you're just a guy yes a guy living on a farm right and here comes big bad apple and they're just like oh hey we're gonna make this other thing that does exactly what Instapaper does that's gonna be default in all of our browsers well it helped a lot that they really did kind of a half-baked job it's interesting do you think I did a half-baked job I mean the first version had pretty much no the first version was basically a bookmark folder right so you know now and they're adding offline support in mountain lion although I'm not suppose to know that but I'm not officially a Mac developer so I'm gonna have to tell you that you're not a you're not a Mac developer right right I actually even seen mountain lion uh-huh you probably have seen more of them I don't know anything about it but it's but you're but you're telling me that they're adding offline yeah that's somebody on Twitter told me they were adding offline it lets do I assume right that's good on the Internet oh you're sure I'm sure a person like Wikipedia uh-huh always right oh yeah but no it seems crazy to me has it has it hurt has it hurt business it's hard to tell my business is fine it would that way feature was released a year ago the main reading list feature and then you know we'll see this summer when they released the offline version of it it's hard to tell I mean the reality is that's only useful if you use safari everywhere right and only about 1/3 of my customers do well and you're using mobile everybody's using mobile safari right but I think that the desktop sinking part is very important I mean there are a lot of people who both get and save the links on their iOS devices right but there's also a lot who we're doing what the way I originally made it which was you save it on a computer and then you go read on your devices later right so so on the topic of instapaper there's been a lot of controversy about your if I want to call it allegiance to iOS but you you have not you won't make an Android application let me just say I'm gonna say bluntly yeah and you even you even had this like challenge which was if somebody makes I'd want to make sure I get this right it's like it's so misunderstood some buddy makes a good Android Instapaper client you'll call it Instapaper for Android and you'll split the profits close it was if that what Ravello per that I was linking to made it it wasn't it wasn't intended to be an open challenge because I don't like it open challenge the use of paper of course forever in the design world spec work is considered a very bad word which is the idea I'm sorry designers I'm getting this wrong the idea is like you kind of put out a call hey everyone do something you know work for free and if we like your thing we'll pick it and we'll pay you yes you have a whole people working for free and most of them just get nothing out of it I didn't want to do that I thought that's why I didn't intend for it to be like a hey everyone try and whoever gets there first wins it you know cuz I don't want people to waste all their time so this guy didn't do it I guess yeah it didn't happen what about anybody else have you looked yeah why don't you want to just admit why why don't you just make something for Android it means it is so I feel like it is it is in the market in a big way right that's agreed I totally like literally half of smart-shower blackberries yeah so I mean don't let's not be don't give me that straw man argument of course I mean it's a real platform it is a real platform and it's big no question but the thing is you know if you are in the business of trying to get as many users as possible something like Instagram that actually makes sense to spread to Android get as many use you can usually it's for free some kind of free service that makes sense tumblr has to have an Android app totally makes sense but when you're in the business of selling the app the majority of its papers revenue comes from the app sales so I'm selling a five-dollar app on iOS that's pretty expensive on Android that's probably impossible and I don't I buy Android apps all the time and everyone's just like you well I mean there are people buy an Android app okay I mean there are more than more developers make it after a I'm somewhere no I mean there are there definitely are I've tele to UIC I know people with Android phones that buy apps of course okay I do yeah you know April don't but you think that all the other people who are doing one go right for the verge right are like no way I don't need it well it's not all of them it's a question of really just economics and how to allocate limited resources which is the most limited resource that I have right now is my time and everyone's most limited resource you know you I only have this one awesome version of the app that I'm really focused on if I were to take time off and either even either do an Android app myself or pay someone else a whole bunch of money to do it that would significantly detract from my ability to make the iOS app great and now in the face of ever increasing competition I can't afford to let up I have to keep making the iOS app awesome I mean you're competing with Apple so you can't really screw it I'm computing with everyone who doesn't charge any money right and pocket and would readability yeah Evernote clear what do you think spool what do you think grabs balloon thing well and which one which one do you like the best out of all of your competition honestly I've seen very few of them you might want to check them out yeah I tell you something I mean it all seriousness I've talked to people in our industry there are other people they're like yeah I don't really check out the competition John Rubinstein from palm famously was like yeah I haven't really seen an iPhone well that went well so my suggestion the big ones okay there's a whole bunch of little ones I've seen the big ones and are you are you gonna add do you think you're gonna add features or try to compete on any of the stuff like pocket does a bunch of stuff that Instapaper doesn't I mean it does some things on a bunch it does more things that it does no I you know I I highly value originality and we have to distill have to distinguish there was that awesome HP Envy whatever that came out you know we have to distinguish between there's HP Envy whatever the you mean the computer look exactly like a MacBook yeah that thing yeah that's the HP MacBook Air yeah you know we we have to distinguish with originality you know the the problem of simultaneous invention versus true originality now it you know I I want to be the original in many ways of what ins paper does it is the original and I I like Apple products cuz many of them are very original not all of course but many and you know I value it a lot I'm I get a lot of satisfaction out of that and so I don't want to copy other people's products or features if it's not something obvious but I think if it is something obvious like okay I have a read later app and if you tap on a link should it just open or should it offer you an option to read that link later you know like that's it once you're building a read later app that's a pretty obvious feature right and so if someone else did that first and then I copied it later I wouldn't really feel bad about that so when I look at other competitors features and you know if some if a competitor doesn't feature before me and I'm getting a lot of pressure to add it I try to be original as much as possible in the sense that if I try to not just copy it directly I try to you know only do things that only copy things that I would have come upon anyway right that were obvious you're walking a fine line there or or if I can't do that if it's something that someone else just made a really good point and did this awesome feature that I never would have thought of it I'm like I really have to implement that to stay competitive I'll try to do it differently I'll try to do it like in a substantially different way somebody has a grade you'll make like a wheel I had the grid first okay no you're owning the greatest way yeah I'll flip or beat everybody well you know I I try to be original so even if I have to copy someone else's feature I'll try to do it my own way and so I respect other people who do that same thing so like I see in like the PC laptop space or the Android phone space versus Apple and you know other people I like when Android and when crazy PC manufacturers come up with their own solutions to problems like I respect that even if I don't like their solution as much I have more respect for that oh my god I want to have another separate conversation just about like what you don't like about Android cuz I've been I mean I'm sure there's some fascinating I haven't used it that much well there's your problem Android is not in my world it's not in my attention span most days yeah I don't spend that much time thinking about it because thinking about iOS and the website which even that I barely think about thinking about the iOS app is a full-time job right and stay competitive on the iOS app is a full-time job all right I'm gonna we have to wrap unfortunately cuz I have a bunch more things I want to talk to you about but I'll quickly want to know just a couple of I mean you're obviously very focused you just talked about being original and you obviously appreciate beautiful design what are some apps what are things that you use everyday that you're like I wish I could have made this or I'm in awe of this or this is a beautiful you know really smart design that I love like what's something free I madla just like you know yeah I have a long answer but if we don't time for a long answer you know design my opinion of design is very different from what most people my opinion of design is you know to quote Steve Jobs how it works most people think design is putting textures and gradients on everything and so for me apps that work really well or solve the probably well to me that's great design so I think a good example that is Instagram it Instagram took mobile it was basically Twitter for photos which ends up being a really big deal what it did Facebook should have done that the reason why they bought Instagram is because it freaked them out because it attacked that one of the biggest things people use Facebook for in an area that Facebook was not doing very well in addressing Instagram solve that problem so well and by the way the way to use Instagram I'll give my secret to everybody never use filters seriously changes the app makes you a better photographer unless you're terrible at photography in which case you but you know it but the purpose of the of Instagram photos is not to look old it's not to look like you took them took them wasn't it with an SLR and if you did and imported it that's kind of dirty don't do that people do that I know it's rude they take pictures of DSLRs and then import the and they're like hey check out this awesome picture I took Phil Schiller did that did he yeah and then he quit no wonder there he was like I'm sure I've been shamed into quit it yeah mark oh I wish I could talk to you longer you got to come back thank you so much thank you Mark our man everybody and