Even Facebook gets it…
Meta unspools Threads – The Verge:
It’s an almost unthinkable reversal from Meta’s extremely lucrative walled-garden strategy, which it has employed for its entire history as a company. But Mosseri told me that decentralization is the future of social networks — even if it means that someday a disgruntled Threads user will be able to take the following they build in the app to another network, never to return.
Instagram Threads launched today. It’s a slicker and very nice text-based social platform. It’s basically what Twitter should have become.
I’ve used Twitter since it was TWTTR way back and had the original @sam handle in early 2006. I thought it was magical. And it was. So much of what we thought about making content on the web was changing and evolving.
Then Twitter really took off in 2006 with the tech crowd (as you can see here on this blog with all the posts tagged with “twitter”), and it was seriously magical. I remember staying in a Las Vegas hotel during a tech conference with the late great Wayne Porter when Twitter was still text-based, and him threatening to take my phone out into the desert and shoot it because it would not stop giving 40404 alerts (Twitter’s number) in early 2006.
Track was amazing. You could type “track mullins” into Twitter, and any mention of “mullins” (my hometown) would signal an alert. Amazing. I remember driving to the NASCAR race at Richmond in 2007 with my Blackberry and Twitter track set up… I had the best time.
2007 was a year of exploration. The world discovered Twitter along with social media. We elected a President in 2008 who broadcast his inauguration on social media in January 2009. It felt like we were living in the future. Twitter track, social media casts, Skype… it was all so amazing.
I made a video in early 2007 that I hastily uploaded to YouTube titled “How To Use Twitter,” which had over 2.5 million views and made me a good lump of change before I deleted it. It was the top-ranked video for Twitter at the time. Geez, I loved that platform.
Then… the 2010s happened. I won’t speak of those. But social media went in a different direction.
Now here we are with Threads by Instagram. It is clean and vibrant. It’s what Twitter could have been. But it feels empty and hollow in a way that Twitter never did. It will be a fantastic platform. Threads will completely trounce Twitter and make Elon Musk’s endeavor of purchasing and seemingly detaching Twitter from life support seem vainglorious.
But I will always hold out hope for the Bird. RIP, Twitter. You did well. You ushered in something so unique.
Now may we all return to our own blogs and our own places of content creation and learn the lessons we needed to learn about trusting in the altruism of large corporations when it comes to our human outputs (and why you shouldn’t).
“I’ll be on the road in one min, Beautiful. I’m waiting for my Watch to update.”
Me to Merianna just now before I head off to 4th of July festivities. What a time to be alive.
Amazing web app here (bottom link to direct Google Experiment) focused on major themes in Leonardo’s notebooks and connecting them with machine learning. I’m a huge fan of notebooks, and I use the example of Leonardo keeping his thoughts in them all the time with my own students.
If you’re like me and really into Leonardo’s “notebooking” practices and history, I highly suggest you check out the videos Adam Savage has done on his Tested YouTube channel. Wonderful and inspiring videos. May we all find something that moves us in such a way!
Leonardo da Vinci: Inside a genius mind post:
From the stages of his life to dispelling myths, and examining his masterpieces up close, everyone can delve into Leonardo’s mind as we’ve brought together for the first time 1,300 pages from his collections of volumes and notebooks. The codices, brimming sketches, ideas, and observations, offer a window into the boundless imagination of one of history’s greatest polymaths. With the aid of Machine Learning and the curatorial expertise of Professor Martin Kemp, the accompanying experiment also called “Inside a Genius Mind” unravels these intriguing and sometimes mysterious materials.
Ben: “Emmy, do you know what’s not funny?”
Emmy: “No?”
Ben: “Litter.”
Captain Planet lives on.
I realized last week while catching up on The Mandalorian that I have been using subtitles so much more recently. I chalked it up to getting older and not being able to hear dialogue as well. Interesting study here…
50% of Americans watch content with subtitles most of the time.
55% say it is harder to hear dialogue in shows and movies than it used to be.
62% of Americans use subtitles more on streaming services than regular TV.
57% watch content in public; 74% of Gen Z do so.
This is painful to read as a long-time Goodreads (and LibraryThing) user from the “before times”…
Goodreads, Amazon’s website for book lovers, causes problems in publishing – The Washington Post:
But after Amazon bought Goodreads, it gradually became clear that the technology was old and the data not well organized, and that a significant investment would be required to bring the site up to speed, according to two former Goodreads employees.
The reason “it feels stuck as a product,” one of the former Goodreads employees said, is because “it was painfully slow to create change.” As a result, proposed features like a recommendation algorithm or a news feed for the Kindle powered by Goodreads were never built.
This has no bearing on your life and won’t change how you think about your drive to work.
“It’s like a choir, with all these supermassive black hole pairs chiming in at different frequencies,” Chiara Mingarelli, a NANOGrav scientist who worked on the new findings, said in a press release.
However, this is a HUGE deal. And those of us who follow these things are FREAKING OUT. Science is amazing. Life is amazing. This Creation that we get to participate in briefly is AMAZING!
Scientists Find the Gravitational Wave Background: What It Means:
Well, here it is. And it really is the big one!
Scientists from the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) have officially made the first detections of the gravitational wave background.
They made the first detections of what? Fair question, especially if you haven’t, in fact, been extremely tuned in to physics and astronomy Twitter. So let’s back up…
“What’s next is everything,” she said in a press release. “This is just the beginning.”
Just found these in a box! “Ain’t it funny, how Time slips away…” to quote Willie Nelson.
The Buffet Is Back in the U.S., From Las Vegas to Small Southern Towns – The New York Times:
“The buffet is designed so the TikTokers and the Instagrammers can make their pretty pictures of the food,” Ms. Orner said.
