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Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm michael copland and we are here with

benedict devons hey benick you've got this new post out and you started off by describing by saying

that the smart phone itself is a social platform i think that's something that's been clear for a year

or two really and in fact i've you've been saying it for a year or two.

That is to say any app you put on your smartphone can access your address book

and can get your photo library and your camera and your location.

And it can do push notifications and it gets an icon on your home screen.

And so you don't have to check another

site to see if something's happened. You don't have to upload it. It's easy to share photographs.

And you can get to any new social app you install just by tapping two buttons. And so all of the

friction that made it, and of course you install the app and instantly you can see all of your

friends and tell you who's already using this app. You don't have to go and, you know, log in to

Google or upload an address book file or something. And so all of the friction that made it

difficult to use more than one social network on the desktop web goes away on mobile, or almost

all of it. The only thing that remains is that, well, you've still got to get people actually to install an app.

But other than that, once you've got the app installed, it's extremely easy to have more than one of

these things, it's extremely easy to switch between the two of them.

And this is why we've seen in the last two or three years an explosion of social messaging

apps of various kinds from WhatsApp onwards. I think that much is kind of given that's been kind of fairly well understood for the last

couple of years.

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