The Monday Note
That's what Frédéric Filloux and Jean-Louis Gassée call their blog (although they also call it a newsletter). Filloux is a freelance writer and media consultant based in Paris and Gassée, who lives in Palo Alto, is an ex-Apple executive now operating as a Valley VC. Theirs is an essential bulletin, filled with fresh thinking and bold statements. Consider this from the 2 August posting:
"Over the next twelve months, the media industry is likely to be split between those who master the Facebook system and those who don't. A decade or so ago, for a print publication, going on the internet was seen as the best way to rejuvenate its audience; today, as web news audiences reach a plateau, Facebook is viewed as the most potent traffic booster." The Facebook Gravitational Effect.
And in "A Toolkit for the Cognitive Container" they riff on Chris Anderson's controversial "The Web is Dead" Wired essay. Snippet:
"...there is no doubt the app phenomenon will significantly impact the way we consume news: apps might become their main cognitive container. They won't be as rich as a website, but they are likely to enable more focused usage. Consider the upside in the absence of links: On a web site, a link in a story means leaving it to go elsewhere. In an app, as the link uses an encapsulated browser instance, the reader doesn't feel she's leaving the story, the environment stays the same, the UI remains consistent. This results in a more immersive experience, like in a physical newspaper, or in a book where reading is not disrupted by context changes. Apps will be a good vector for complex writings (quantum mechanic vs. celebrity gossip) even though compulsive foragers will blame the impossibility to comment, share, propagate, squabble around contents.
Like in previous media transitions, the new genre of apps on smartphones or tablets, isn't likely to completely supplant web pages. Each category simply corresponds to a different need: the web for news-picking to socialize with; apps for long stuff to actually read."
The implications for content creators and publishers are clear: They will need to build apps into their products, except, of course, most of them don't have a clue how to go about it.
