Twitch vs Facebook for livestreaming, learning to build an app from scratch and conversations with robots
Sometimes you pour your heart and soul into something and then no one cares about it. It’s a shitty feeling.
It takes courage to make something. To put it out into the world. To know someone might not like it but to do it anyway.
Creation is freedom. But too often we’re snowed under the amount of information we have access to. A quick browse of the internet and it seems everyone is after your time and attention.
I can’t talk, I make heaps of things. I want people to read my words. I want people to watch my videos. I’m grateful for the people who do but it doesn’t bother me if they don’t. I’m addicted to the feeling of tying ideas in my head together and making something out of nothing.
I’ve been trying to instil this creative mindset into my brothers. I want them to experience the same feeling I feel when I make something. Everyone should feel this feeling.
One of my brothers recently started livestreaming himself playing Fornite. We had to explain what livestreaming was to our parents. They had no idea it was even possible, let alone understand what it meant. We told our Dad it was the same thing as watching a rugby game live but others are watching him play video games. He got it. Sort of.
Will started livestreaming on Twitch for a month before moving to Facebook. Facebook is really pushing videos so his numbers went through the roof. Facebook is still the king when it comes to content distribution.
My other brother Josh launched his first app last month. When I was his age I had hopes of making my own app. He beat me to it. I failed to execute. No excuses. I failed. I asked him, what made you start building an app? He replied, “I wanted to see how hard it was to build an app, I thought of something simple and then said let’s execute.”
I want to live my life like that. Thinking of something and then executing on it. Friction annoys me. If rocks fall down and block my path, I clear them out or climb over them.
It’s natural to want to remove obstacles. We subconsciously seek out comfort. Our energy is precious. We’re still in the mindset of needing to conserve it or else we’ll die.
My brothers streaming numbers went up on Facebook because the friction of leaving the platform for Twitch was taken away. Instead of clicking a link and watching, they can watch him play right in their newsfeed.
If something takes more than 1-step, we avoid it. I do this.
You can have the best product in the world but if you don’t have shelf space, it’s useless. Facebook’s newsfeed is the shelf space for my brother’s stream. It’s like the stack of specials you see as you walk into the supermarket. Trying to get people to look elsewhere (linking to Twitch) is like getting them to walk to the back of the store. If they need milk, they’ll walk to the back. If not, they won’t.
The internet is a beautiful place. We can entertain ourselves with almost any form of content we like. And the platforms we use are getting better at continually serving us similar kinds of content. I haven’t searched for a YouTube video in a long time. But it’s not just a consumption paradise, we can also use it to learn almost anything we want.
Josh built his app after doing half an iOS course on Udemy. And I’ve been learning artificial intelligence and machine learning through only online resources.
There’s no shortage of education, only a shortage of willingness to learn.
There’s even more of a shortage of sharing what you learn. Everyone can be a teacher. Everyone should be a teacher. We could all learn something off each other. You learn something, you teach it to someone else, it cements your knowledge and helps them learn too. It creates a circle. Everyone wins.
We finished up the episode talking about Google’s latest breakthrough. Google Duplex. It’s an AI-powered personal assistant who’s able to make phone calls on your behalf. It sounds like a person. It even makes very human-ish sounds during the conversation. Whilst talking to a hairdresser, it casual dropped a ‘mhmmmm’. It’s the beginning of the movie Her. Perhaps I’ll be able to have a conversation with my Alexa soon.
Robots holding real conversations, learning to code and launching your app after $7.50 worth of an online course and broadcasting yourself playing video games to hundreds of people live online, we live in a crazy world. I love it.
See you next week. Hopefully, we’ll have half the technical difficulties.
PS good luck getting past 77 on Josh’s app. Our little brother, Sam, currently has the high score. Send me a message if you manage to beat it and I’ll give you a shoutout.
Links mentioned in the show:
- Josh’s App: SCT on the App Store
- Will’s Instagram
- Will’s Facebook Page
- Josh’s Instagram
- Google Duplex Demo
- Google’s Deep Learning for Electronic Health Records
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Originally published at mrdbourke.com on May 17, 2018.
