Instagram’s Evolution

Last week Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri posted a video on Instagram about Instagram: View this post on Instagram A post shared by Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) Hey everyone, I thought it would be good to start sharing more about what we’re currently working on at Instagram...

3w

The Lightness of Windows

From Ian Sherr, writing about last week’s Windows 11 announcement for CNET: When you choose a computer or smartphone to buy these days, you have to pick between several factions. There’s Apple world, which includes the Mac computer, iPhones and iPads, all designed to work together to help you share files, video chat and watch TV as easily as possible....

4w

Pandemic Progress

If the Internet Archive is to be believed, Marc Andreessen’s April 2020 coronavirus-driven exhortation It’s Time to Build never actually included that futuristic picture of skyscrapers; it’s in the metadata so that it shows up on social media like Twitter: What is even more intriguing is when, exactly, the building happened; after all, Andreessen...

Jun 2021

The Cicilline Salvo

From the Wall Street Journal: House lawmakers proposed a raft of bipartisan legislation aimed at reining in the country’s biggest tech companies, including a bill that seeks to make Amazon.com Inc. and other large corporations effectively split in two or shed their private-label products. The bills, announced Friday, amount to the biggest congressional...

Jun 2021

Integrated Apple and App Store Risk

Apple acquired Dark Sky, the popular weather app and weather API provider, in March of 2020; the Android version was shut down in July, and the API in December. The real storm, though, arrived in yesterday’s WWDC keynote, when Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi spent 49 seconds previewing iOS 15’s new weather app, filled with...

Jun 2021

Spotify’s Surprise

This Article is a follow-up in two ways: First, last week I wrote about Podcast Subscriptions vs. the App Store; Spotify’s podcast announcements this week are interesting in the context of both. Second, last year I used the launch of Dithering to criticize the way that Spotify was closed off from the open web; these announcements change that significantly....

Jun 2021

Podcast Subscriptions vs. the App Store

There was a bit of a brouhaha a couple of weeks ago when Senators Amy Klobuchar and Mike Lee sent a letter to Apple accusing the company of failing to provide a witness for the App Store-focused antitrust committee hearing that is happening later today; Apple responded that it was all a misunderstanding due to a scheduling conflict. From Bloomberg:...

Jun 2021

Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

In July 2014 Taylor Swift wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal entitled, For Taylor Swift, the Future of Music Is a Love Story: There are many (many) people who predict the downfall of music sales and the irrelevancy of the album as an economic entity. I am not one of them. In my opinion, the value of an album is, and will continue to...

Jun 2021

Sovereign Writers and Substack

There has been a bit of controversy around Substack over the last week; I’m not going to get into the specifics of various accusations made about various individuals, or their responses; however, I do think that there are a few fundamental issues about the Substack model specifically, and the shift to sovereign writers generally, that are being misunderstood....

Jun 2021

Moderation in Infrastructure

It was Patrick Collison, Stripe’s CEO, who pointed out to me that one of the animating principles of early 20th-century Progressivism was guaranteeing freedom of expression from corporations: If you go back to 1900, part of the fear of the Progressive Era was that privately owned infrastructure wouldn’t be sufficiently neutral and that this could...

Jun 2021