Greg's Newsletter Wears AirPods [No. 060]
I'll TTYL
Hi pals,
Good to be back in the writing saddle. Just spent 10 days in Michigan, splitting time between Detroit and Ann Arbor and I have to say: it was glorious. Between catching up with friends and co-workers, spending time at my Dad's, and then a weekend with Rachel and the crew in A2, going out, tailgating, and generally smiling, I'm still invigorated.
Having a crisp fall day on Saturday to watch Michigan play was a cherry on top—the quality of Michigan's actual on-field play is quite a different story, despite the win. That's my life update for this one, but now, for the stuff that's been on my mind.
I'm still wildly concerned about the ongoing issues at the intersection of technology and society/culture, including privacy, (threats to) democracy, surveillance, and more.
You know, the really fun stuff to think about as I'm asking Alexa to turn my lights to “party mode” or running a home security system that still alerts me every time I enter the kitchen, which, like, come on dude, I know that I'm entering the kitchen (I need to work on setting adjustments).
But I've finally found some fun and immensely interesting technology developments that I'm trying to unpack. And so I want to start doing that here. This is a bit of an off-the-cuff riff, so bear with it.
First, some macro trends to consider. I'm not making value judgements on whether these trends are good or bad, only that they're enabling new things.
AirPods (and general always-in earphones): they're easy to make fun of, but I'll be damned if they don't work pretty well for what they set out to do. Just be a frictionless, relatively non-intrusive thing to enable listening to audio, talking with people, or asking Siri stuff.
Other voice interfaces: the aforementioned Alexa is one, but add in Google Home, you have a lot of places, spaces, and rooms that can be interacted with with a simple voice command (again, not making value judgements on this one, just stating that this is #AThing).
Take those two things and push them to their logical extreme (which isn't actually that extreme), and you get ubiquitous audio and voice. On the consumption side of things, that means people are more and more going to be listening to audio content. As much as I selfishly wish that was entirely made up of music (my ideal headline in 2025: BREAKING: People Are Listening To Better Music), I suspect most of the growth in audio content consumption will be everything else: podcasts, audiobooks, maybe lectures or educational courses. And what I'm most interested in, on that front, is that next format or content type that hasn't been created or invented yet.
Will there be a new thing—in its form, function, length, interaction model, whatever—that we place in the same category as a podcast episode or song? Does ubiquitous audio enable that? I don't know. But it's fascinating to think about.
The other side of this is ubiquitous voice. Consider this: if people have their AirPods in ~4 hours a day, and those AirPods are always connected to the internet/data through a phone or watch, what new things might that enable?
One is a sort of audio-first social network. There's an app I've been digging into with some friends called TTYL (shoutout to Burg Town). It works like this: you leave the app open on your phone, which leaves the mic running in the background (you can mute it, obviously). When another friend hops on the app, you get notified and can instantly talk. If multiple friends are on at the same time, y'all can join a group.
My first thoughts when hearing (hah) about TTYL was: always-on? IDK if I can do that! Do I really want to be available to talk to so many people, anytime? Maybe my being 33 and not 23 impacts some of that initial reticence. But then I thought about it more.
There's so much downtime during a day, when we have earphones in. But we don't know who of our friends or family might be available to chat without having a predetermined time to talk, texting/messaging to see if someone's available, or cold calling. This app removes that friction.
And then unlike a video chat/Facetime or group video chat, the barriers to start a conversation are super low. Especially if you're out-and-about, knowing that you've got three friends available, it's easy to just start a conversation. Nobody's going to be shy or think "eh, I don't want to turn the camera on, I'm not up for this." It just works.
I'm sure the founders of TTYL have written or presented much smarter things than I have about the thinking and vision for the app, but I think it's really a really interesting one. And they're one of a new wave of audio-first social networks/apps that are popping up. I think it's going to be fascinating to watch how the space opens up—what apps/user behaviors are going to win out?
Bigger picture, what will new social norms look like with ubiquitous voice and audio? And back to a question I asked earlier, what new content types and person-to-person communication interactions might emerge, that we haven't yet thought of?
OK, cool. Talk soon (add me on TTYL).