Twitter to Kill Fleets on Aug 3

Ilya Brown, Twitter’s Head of Product, Brand & Video Ads, writing on the Twitter Blog:

[…] in the time since we introduced Fleets to everyone, we haven’t seen an increase in the number of new people joining the conversation with Fleets like we hoped. Because of this, on August 3, Fleets will no longer be available on Twitter.

It’s so good to see Twitter rolling back something that clearly wasn’t working. Twitter has released some really interesting new features in the last year, and I hope they continue to do so.

You should read the whole article linked above where Ilya details their learnings.

July 15, 2021 ✚ Permalink

Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft Team Up to Improve Browser Extensions

Stephen Shankland, reporting for CNET:

The teams behind the Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge browsers have banded together to improve extensions, the add-ons you can download to customize the software. That should mean your extensions will work better and come with a better security foundation to protect you from malware.

On Friday, the teams unveiled a discussion and development forum at the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, dedicated to developing standards for extensions. The forum, the WebExtensions Community Group, gives engineers a place to build a unified and more secure core foundation for extensions.

At WWDC 2020, Apple introduced the WebExtension API for Safari on macOS Big Sur — an effort to enable cross-platform browser extensions. However, I’m yet to see a change in the Safari extensions ecosystem because of that. Here’s hoping this new WebExtensions Community Group brings about a change.

June 5, 2021 ✚ Permalink

Cloudflare Announces a New Initiative to Replace CAPTCHA Annoyances

Thibault Meunier, writing on the Cloudflare blog:

We want to get rid of CAPTCHAs completely. The idea is rather simple: a real human should be able to touch or look at their device to prove they are human, without revealing their identity. We want you to be able to prove that you are human without revealing which human you are! You may ask if this is even possible? And the answer is: Yes! We’re starting with trusted USB keys (like YubiKey) that have been around for a while, but increasingly phones and computers come equipped with this ability by default.

Let’s face it, CAPTCHAs are annoying. I may have clicked on thousands of little photos of traffic lights so far, and it’s been an annoyance every single time.

If you have a YubiKey, you can try out the flow on https://cloudflarechallenge.com — a test website setup by Cloudflare.

I’d love to see where this initiative goes.

May 13, 2021 ✚ Permalink

Vodafone India's BGP Hijack Takes Down Several Global Networks

Ax Sharma, writing for BleepingComputer:

A large BGP routing leak that occurred last night disrupted the connectivity for thousands of major networks and websites around the world.

Although the BGP routing leak occurred in Vodafone’s autonomous network (AS55410) based in India, it has impacted U.S. companies, including Google, according to sources.

You should also read Anurag Bhatia’s fantastic analysis here.

Time and again, these companies prove that initiatives like this one and this one need to be taken a lot more seriously for the Internet to become a better place.

April 19, 2021 ✚ Permalink

23 Million Students & Teachers in Maharashtra to Get Google's Digital Learning Platform

Manish Singh, writing for Techcrunch:

The company, which recently announced plans to invest $10 billion in India, said it had partnered with the government of the western state of Maharashtra that will see 23 million students and teachers access Google’s education offering at no charge.

I recently learned from my cousin sister living in the small village of Matheran that their tiny school was now conducting online classes via Google Meet and how she had to keep convincing her dad to add mobile data plans to their single smartphone in the house.

Google deserves all the shit it gets for their privacy-invasive practices, but no other technology company has come close to localization and grassroots efforts in India. Google’s products are universal.

August 7, 2020 ✚ Permalink

A Guide to Organizing Your Gmail Inbox

Over the official Spark Email blog, I’ve just published this detailed guide to decluttering and organizing your Gmail inbox.

In this article, I’ll tell you the tips and tricks to organize your Gmail inbox and also explain some hidden or lesser-known features that help you organize your emails in Gmail. And for those of you who have thousands of unread emails in your Gmail inbox, I’ll help you bring some sanity to your inbox.

Gmail is arguably the most common email provider today and thus, it is very common to see Gmail inboxes that are just left unattended. I’ve outlined some pretty simple steps that can help you clean up your Gmail inbox in minutes.

August 6, 2020 ✚ Permalink

Email is Good for Remote Productivity

Bron Gondwana, CEO of FastMail, explains on the company blog why “Now more than ever, it’s time for email.“

He says,

Through all the interruptions and turmoil in your life, email is a constant. Everyone has email, and every email system can email every other. It lets us stay connected, but doesn’t demand an immediate response. You can read it in your own time, and have the space to craft a thoughtful reply.

The beauty of Email is that you can use it in your own way. While it’s a great form of asynchronous communication, it’s also a fantastic tool for collaborating with your team and getting work done much faster. At Readdle, we have been working on some exceptional new things for Spark that we can’t wait to show you.

I have been using FastMail as my primary email service provider for several years now, and it is worth every $$. It’s great to see an email service so focused on privacy and core email experience. FastMail has been rock solid over the years and I urge you to consider it. If you sign up using this link, you’ll get 10% off.

May 23, 2020 ✚ Permalink

Manton Reece's Archive of App.net

How cool is this? Manton Reece, creator extraordinaire and the man behind the awesome microblogging service Micro.blog, has created an archive of all posts from the now defunct microblogging platform App.net

In the final week before App.net shut down, I whipped up a few scripts to download every post on the platform via the API. After that finished, I also attempted to download small versions of many of the photos, but ran out of time. This data has been sitting on one of my servers for the last 3 years.

Why did I bother? At a high level, see my post from 2012 called Permanence. I also hoped to build a tool that would let anyone export their personal archive, or even migrate it to a blogging platform like Micro.blog.

Here are all my posts, with my first post created on December 16, 2012 and the last one on February 01, 2017, totaling 3320 posts.

The internet needs more things like App..net, and definitely more people like Manton Reece.

May 12, 2020 ✚ Permalink