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Reverse Engineer. Blogger.
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Kevin Systrom, former CEO and co-founder of Instagram:
We’ve grown from 13 people to over a thousand with offices around the world, all while building products used and loved by a community of over one billion.
What a run! Talk about leaving while on top. A Seinfeld-esque move.
YES!!!!!! The Verge:
Twitter has made a surprise change to how it shows tweets to its users, following a viral thread earlier today that discussed ways to reverse the platform’s algorithmic timeline. Now, when you uncheck the settings box reading “Show the best tweets first,” Twitter will completely revert your timeline to a non-algorithmic, reverse-chronological order, which is how Twitter was originally designed and operated for years until the company introduced a default algorithmic model in early 2016.
I saw this tweet last night and immediately turned this on. Now with this new setting I don’t need it. Please keep this Twitter. Please!
Many people are looking for “the next Twitter”, but it’s not enough to replace Twitter with a new platform and new leadership. Some problems are inevitable when power is concentrated in only 2-3 huge social networks — ad-based businesses at odds with user needs and an overwhelming curation challenge. This might be Mastodon’s greatest contribution: getting people used to the idea of many smaller, interoperable communities.
I agree with this far more today than I have in the past. I too was looking for the next Twitter. But now I’m glad there won’t likely be a replacement but that we will divide our time and interests across many communities. It will likely keep them all more civil and better.
Longtime readers of my blog will know that I was on Mastodon and then didn’t log back in for a long time. My instance (mastodon.cloud) was sold? or was given? to a new Admin so my account was suspended and I couldn’t reset my password. I reached out to the current Admin via email and he/she said that they cannot restore my old account but could delete it and create a new one with the same name.
I decided to ask them to simply delete that account and I would create a new account on the OG instance at mastodon.social/@cdevroe
I have no specific plans to use this account other than to keep up with what is going on in the Mastodon world. But if you feel like connecting there please do.
We are excited about the future of Hubs and the potential for social VR experiences, but we need your help to test this and make it better. Check out the link below to try it out. Play with it. Share it. Break it. Contribute to it.
Well, break it we did. The team at Jujama put this thing through its paces and we broke it. But, I will say that the experience is nothing short of amazing considering that there is nothing to download or install and it works on every device we own.
The future of AR/VR on the web is very bright. In part because Mozilla is investing heavily in it.
Colin Walker wrote his hot take on Vero and it is exactly what I would have written (only his post is far more eloquent than mine would have been). Go read the entire post but here are a few highlights.
As soon as I saw what Vero was all about – the idea it “makes sharing online more like real life” using selective audiences I was immediately taken back to the promises of Google+ and its circles.
This is an apt comparison. As he rightly points out, managing ones Circles on Google+ and deciding who to share what with is exhausting to the user. On paper it seems like an excellent approach. But on every social network that has this feature – Facebook included – it is rarely used. Who wants to move people from one list to another only to move them back again when your relationship with them shifts?
Although Vero promises an algorithm free feed and no ads (it will monetise using subscriptions and charges for selling via the platform) I’m not sure that jumping from the frying pan of one silo straight into the as yet unproven fire of another is what we really need right now.
I thought about this when I signed up. However, it doesn’t take much for a platform like Vero to support the open web and be less of a silo than Facebook or Twitter. An open API, data portability, and support for one’s own domain are the main features. I can’t presume that no other platforms will support the open web eventually. In fact, imagine if Twitter did this like Medium has? Then what would people think of Twitter?
I wish them well and hope they prove me wrong but, while I think the noise about Russian developers and the CEO being the son of a former Lebanese prime minister is stupid and tantamount to inciting racial hatred, I’m afraid I won’t be signing up.
I’m very glad he brought this up. When I saw the drivel on Twitter about these details about this platform I was saddened. Are we saying all Russian developers are bad? Or all Lebanese billionaires? I would always urge caution when signing up to brand-new platforms but to think we’d all call these people out simply based on where they were born is… well Colin already said what it is.
Eliza and I poked around with Vero as much as we could while the app crashed and timed out. It won’t stick. Not because of the scaling issues – most platforms have those. It won’t stick because it will be far too noisy for users right out of the gate.
When Instagram pivoted from a check-in app to a filtered photo app it exploded because it made photo editing and publishing one simple step. It did one thing well. Slowly it has added other features but this primary feature is still the foremost one today. Vero has photos, music, links, books etc. Once the hype settles down people just want to post photos. Instagram should be scared of whatever comes next. Obviously people (including me) do not like the current algorithmic feed. But Vero is no Instagram killer.