Timeline apps - past, present, future
Social Media is a disaster. Under the guise of connecting with friends and belonging to a community there's just one driver: profit.
And in that chase for profit we have lost out on core hygiene elements that platforms should consider:
- moderation
- stability
- access
- user control
The future however might not be so bleak because of the increasing popularity of "timeline apps". To understand them I'd like to set the scene for the trend and them explain the apps themselves.
Social Media advertising
Social Media advertising spend in 2024 was $164bil [*1] globally, but after digging into the data and predictions it seems to be designed by hockey stick hopefuls not real analysts.
In the UK social media paid ads are classified under "Display" ads, and UK digital advertising industry body (IAB.UK) shows that in 2013, Display ads were worth 1.89 billion pounds [*2]. In 2024 the revenue [*3] from Display ads went up to 6.5 billion pounds.
Nice growth you'd say? Sure, "+22% YoY" the IAB.UK quotes. The interesting thing however is how that money is split: video and non-video. Non-video is social media and other ads, which in 2024 amounted to 2.5 billion pounds.
Anecdotally I remember social being up to 11% in 2013, so 0.207 billion pounds vs 2.5 billion pounds. 12x increase in 11 years. Again not bad!
The driver for the ad industry is the not necessarily consistent return, they're not pension funds. The ad industry "rides the wave" and so they need to follow and the hottest trends and deploy capital accordingly. The driver is maximum return on investment, and maxROI is gained from deploying capital with a weight towards top performing segments.
In 2024 that segment was not social, it was digital video. And by a long margin 2x. As an ad agent you cannot pass on that opportunity.
Which leaves social advertising with a massive deficit in capital deployment: they will get at minimum 1/3 of ad spends.
Social advertising is not making money where "making" is the exponential scale that most business crave for.
RSS and the past
Social media advertising is generally in decline today, mostly because of the financial view explained above and because of other smaller platform related issues.
In 2013 social media ads were growing and performing well. In 2011 Google launched Google Plus+ and by 2013 the performance of Google Plus+, social advertising meant that Google decided to kill one of their most loved products, Google Reader.
Google Reader was built on top of RSS, a protocol that stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS allows a website to define what updates it has in the form of a feed. RSS Readers, like Google Reader would use these feeds to produce a custom feed for a user in a nice web interface.
Google Reader was nice and was the first "timeline app".
Timeline apps today
Today the big social media platforms are in trouble. They can't make revenue and most are adopting dark patterns to force us to share more details with a platform, whilst implementing harder and harder journey for exporting data and deleting accounts. A Facebook was notoriously hard to delete in 2013-2014, which is why people moved to Twitter.
Twitter, which started with a historical timeline, eventually moved to and "algorithm timeline" and pushed a lot of users and businesses to create solutions for this. TweetDeck was one such solutions and Twitter was relentless in making API changes that affected consumers like TweetDeck. Eventually Twitter bought TweetDeck and is not part of X Pro.
There are endless of other stories regarding social media companies acting like cartels and protecting the data within their platform and making it as painful as possible for anyone to development improved UIs that accessed that data. The reason is advertising.
RSS however bypasses that model and most websites on the web have one. RSS feeds are particularly popular on the IndieWeb, but also podcasts have RSS feeds, Youtube channels have RSS, even the new generation of federate social media has them Mastodon and it's famous cousin Bluesky.
Timeline apps use RSS to pull all this information into one UI.
feeeed for example is a fantastic app for a custom timeline. In addition to news, you can add any website or newsletter and you can even connect to Health track your walking goals in the app. Happy to report that no ads are present yet.
Tapestry is another good timeline app, but they've launched with ads baked in.
Whilst there are more examples out there, these above are the "latest" incarnation of the timeline app. Sure we still have tradition RSS readers which function similarly, but the slick UI and extra focus on the timeline is not there.
Timeline apps will more of a focus in the future, with more people choosing them other a locked in platform. Facebook for example is already moving towards an open platform with Threads and Instagram, but it remains to be seen if they will continue or lock everything down.
Should we have ads in timeline apps? In my honest opinion, no. The user space is more private and more self-aware, so ads should fade to subscriptions or donations.
We must learn from the lessons of the 2013-2024 social web and keep our data. Media empires should not be built on top our data, but rather small apps should be supported because they give us value with being absolutely extractive.
Give timeline apps a try and better still, go and make one!
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