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Threads, the ActivityPub-compatible Twitter clone from Instagram, briefly (and presumably inadvertently) was listed in the Google Play Store over the weekend. The app itself wasn’t available, but Alessandro Paluzzi captured screenshots. The icon is plain but clever: a thread in the shape of an “@”. It’s showing up in the Play Store in Europe, too.
That Threads is seemingly very close to launching makes Twitter’s rate-limiting all the more baffling. Twitter users want an alternative, and Elon Musk is now actively pushing them away. (Dave Lee, in a column for Bloomberg, dismisses Mastodon in a single painful sentence: “One of them, Mastodon, saw a big spike in users this weekend, but can’t shake its reputation as being overly complex for non-techy users.”)
Update: Threads is now pre-listed in the App Store, marked as being available on this Thursday, July 6. Here’s the icon. Shit’s getting real.
Matt Binder, reporting for Mashable:
According to developers paying Twitter, since the switch over to Elon Musk’s paid API subscription plans, Twitter’s API has experienced frequent issues that make it extremely difficult to run their apps.
Twitter’s API issues have frustrated developers in each of Twitter’s new API access tiers. Those with Basic or Pro plans — paying $100 and $5000 a month for API access, respectively — have experienced unannounced changes to their plans, numerous bugs, and often receive zero customer support. And developers shelling out for Twitter’s Enterprise API Plan, which starts at $42,000 per month, are experiencing sudden outages and disappointing service considering the money they’re paying.
“Everything used to work fine before we started paying half a million per year,” shared one developer in a private Twitter developer group chat shared with Mashable.
This is how Twitter is dealing with paid services. At this point, choosing to pay for Twitter Blue as a user looks about as smart as buying a ticket for OceanGate’s next submarine.
Matt Levine, in his Money Stuff column:
Well, look, if I were the newly hired chief executive officer of a social media company, and if the directors and shareholders who brought me in as CEO had told me that my main mission was to turn around the company’s precarious financial situation by improving our position with advertisers, and if I spent my first few weeks reassuring advertisers and rebuilding relationships and talking up our site’s unique audience and powerful engagement, and then one day my head of software engineering came to me and said “hey boss, too many people were too engaged with too many posts, so I had to limit everyone’s ability to view posts on our site, just FYI,” I would ... probably ... fire ... him?
I mean I suppose I might ask questions like “Is this because of some technological limitation on our system? Is it because you were monkeying with the code without understanding it? Is it because you tried to stop people from reading the site without logging in, and messed up and stopped them from reading the site even when they logged in? Is it because you fired and demoralized too many engineers so no one was left to keep the systems running normally? Is it because you forgot to pay the cloud bills? Is it because deep down you don’t like it when people read posts on our site and you want to stop them, or you don’t like relying on ad revenue and want to sabotage my ability to sell ads?” Those are all interesting questions, and I suppose having the answers would help my new head of software engineering fix whatever this guy broke. But no matter what the answers are, this guy’s gotta go. If you are in charge of the software engineers at a social media site, and you make it so that people can’t read the site, that’s bad.
The only way you wouldn’t fire the head of software at Twitter would be, say, if he owned the company.
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Hannah Murphy, reporting for The Financial Times:
Twitter’s new chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, is preparing a series of measures to bring back advertisers who had abandoned the platform under Elon Musk’s ownership, including introducing a video ads service, wooing more celebrities, and raising headcount.
The former NBCUniversal advertising head, who started as chief executive on June 5, is seeking to launch full-screen, sound-on video ads that would be shown to users scrolling through Twitter’s new short-video feed, according to three people familiar with the situation.
That sounds just lovely. Now I’m definitely going to pay for a Twitter Blue account. I just love sound-on video ads. Hopefully they’ll intersperse them between every 2 or 3 regular tweets.
Ivan Mehta, reporting for TechCrunch:
Over the weekend, Elon Musk limited the number of tweets users can read in a day, which he said was to prevent data scraping. While this measure has affected all Twitter users, TweetDeck users in particular are today reporting major problems, including notifications and entire columns failing to load.
Musk initially enforced read-limits of 6,000 daily posts for verified users and 600 daily posts for unverified users. Hours later, he increased these limits to 10,000 tweets and 1,000 tweets, respectively. Given that TweetDeck loads up multiple tweets through various columns simultaneously, it’s likely that the effects of the read restrictions are amplified within TweetDeck.
Needless to say it’s rather nutty that a business whose primary revenue stream is advertising would institute rate limits at all, let alone severe limits that typical users bump up against in about 20 minutes of browsing. Musk’s thinking, one presumes, is that this is the masterstroke that will prompt people to sign up for Twitter Blue at $8-11/month.
The bigger, more fundamental change Musk instituted over the weekend is making it such that tweets aren’t visible unless you’re logged in to a Twitter account. This broke all sorts of things. Messaging apps (like Apple’s Messages) can no longer render preview cards for tweets, for one thing. Closer to home, it broke the @daringfireball auto-posting account. More amusingly, as documented by Sheldon Chang, this change completely broke Twitter itself — some part of the Rube Goldberg-ian machine that assembles users’ timeline feeds was itself subjected to these rate limits, so Twitter wound up DDOSing itself. It’s like a gasoline company instituting rations that stranded its own fleet of tanker trucks.
From its inception through this weekend, Twitter has been like blogging, insofar as tweets being public. You visit the URL for a tweet, you see the tweet. Now it’s a walled garden, like most of Facebook, available only to logged-in users. I suspect this change will prevent the Internet Archive from caching tweets, too. That just sucks.
AnnaMaria Andriotis, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):
The Wall Street firm is in talks with American Express to take over its Apple credit card and other ventures with the tech giant, according to people familiar with the matter. Goldman went public with plans to scale back its consumer business late last year, but it appeared committed to the Apple relationship. The bank recently extended the partnership through the end of the decade, agreed to support Apple’s “buy now, pay later” offering and launched a bank account with the tech company.
Now it is in talks to offload those businesses and its credit-card partnership to Amex, according to people familiar with the discussions. A deal with Amex isn’t imminent or assured, people familiar with the conversations said, and it could take a while to transfer the partnership in any case. Apple would have to agree to a transfer. The tech company is aware of the talks, which have been ongoing for months, the people said. [...]
In January, Goldman disclosed that it had lost about $3 billion on the consumer-lending push since 2020.
It’s unclear how much of Goldman’s losses in their consumer banking foray are attributable to the Apple Card specifically, but Sridhar Natarajan reported for Bloomberg* back in January that it’s the source of most of their losses:
The division’s $1 billion pretax loss reported for 2021 was mostly tied to the Apple Card, people with knowledge of the numbers said. And about $2 billion in 2022 mainly stems from the Apple card and installment-lending platform GreenSky, the people said.
How you lose money issuing credit cards that charge usurious interest rates is beyond me. Not quite in the territory of Donald Trump somehow losing money while running casinos, but it’s up there. Are they issuing Apple Cards to deadbeats? (Apparently, yes: they’ve been issuing a lot of cards to people with bad credit.)
If Goldman does bail, AmEx would be as good a partner as any for Apple: they know how to deliver a premium experience and turn a good profit doing so.
* You know.
LoveFrom Serif in action, again:
The Astra Carta seal was designed by Sir Jony Ive and his team at the creative collective LoveFrom.
The design complements the Terra Carta seal, using the same typography and St Edward’s Crown. The structure is similarly defined by sacred geometry, overlaid with astronomical motion and heavenly bodies.
The animation is rather hypnotic. Somehow both busy and peaceful. (And the actual document — the Summarium — is entirely set in LoveFrom Serif as well.)
Humane:
Humane, Inc. today announced its first device will be called the Humane Ai Pin, the latest detail to be revealed ahead of its launch later this year. The Humane Ai Pin is a new type of standalone device with a software platform that harnesses the power of AI to enable innovative personal computing experiences. [...] Humane’s first device will be powered by an advanced Snapdragon platform from Qualcomm Technologies. [...]
Dev Singh, Vice President, Business Development of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. commented: “We are proud to be collaborating with Humane and that this first-of-a-kind clothing-based wearable device will be powered by Snapdragon. Humane’s Ai Pin will deliver a superior AI experience and feature an assortment of on-device AI capabilities. Its revolutionary and sleek form factor is packed with powerful performance so that it can make sense of real-time contextual information and provide the wearer with a new and exciting experience. We cannot wait to see where they take this device.”
We’ll have to take Singh’s word for it that the form factor is “revolutionary and sleek”, as they still aren’t showing it.
Humane continues to be mysterious about how the Ai Pin works, what exactly it will do, and even what it looks like. (Most mysterious of all: why in the world is “AI” not capitalized? What is “Ai?” Am I supposed to pronounce it like “eye?” I am confident this will infuriate The Verge’s copy desk and me in equal measure for years to come.)
The Daring Fireball Style Desk is on break for the extended U.S. holiday weekend, and hasn’t yet issued a ruling.
Matthew Panzarino returns to the show for a post-WWDC discussion about Vision Pro and VisionOS.
Sponsored by:
Tangential to typography, but it seems fitting with this week’s theme nonetheless. This comic, to me, is Randall Munroe at his best: distilling a vague universally held thought into crystallized form.
While I’m on a font kick, I greatly enjoyed this essay from Jonathan Hoefler:
Type designers love a good pangram. Pangrams, of course, are sentences that contain each letter of the alphabet at least once, of which the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is surely the most famous. Lettering artists of the previous generation bequeathed us jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz; puzzlers are fond of the impossibly compact Mr Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx for its 26-letter world record. Sometime in the early nineties, I whiled away an entire afternoon in a San Francisco café coming up with a bunch of my own, honoring typeface designers (mix Zapf with Veljović and get quirky Béziers), and philosophers (you go tell that vapid existentialist quack Freddy Nietzsche that he can just bite me, twice), and the uplifting grace of a cosmos in balance (Wham! Volcano erupts fiery liquid death onto ex-jazzbo Kenny G.) Pangrams are unctuous little brain ticklers, challenging to concoct, droll to read, and immensely popular for presenting fonts.
I find them singularly useless in type design, and I don’t use them in my work.
On another end of the new font spectrum, Womprat — designed by Louie Mantia, engineered by Ender Smith — is every bit as Star Wars-y, if not more so, than any typography from Lucasfilm itself. If I worked at Disney I’d write a check to buy the exclusive rights to Womprat. It’s so good, so right, so fun, and so amazingly technically detailed. It’s as much coded programmatically as it is designed visually. And it includes an assortment of dingbat icons. Hell, even the slogan is perfect.
Lindsey Adler, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:
Before the season began, New York Yankees pitcher Domingo Germán changed his jersey number from 55 to 0. It turned out to be a prescient move. On Wednesday night, Germán became just the 24th pitcher in MLB history to throw a perfect game, using just 99 pitches to mow through 27 Oakland A’s batters without allowing a single baserunner.
Entering the game with a 5.10 ERA in his first 14 starts of the season, Germán completed the first perfect game since Félix Hernández threw one for the Mariners in August 2012. There were three perfectos thrown that year — by Hernández, Matt Cain, and Phillip Humber — but nearly 11 seasons had passed without one occurring.
“Growing up, [Hernández] was my idol,” Germán said through a translator after the game. “I really looked up to the way he pitched.”
Mark Wilson, in a profile back in April for Fast Company about the creation of LoveFrom Serif, a new font family designed by many of the designers behind Apple’s remarkable San Francisco family:
Serifs (think Times New Roman) became the focus instead, and after an exhaustive search, LoveFrom designer Antonio Cavedoni landed on Baskerville as a source of inspiration. The typeface is one everyone has seen, so it would be quietly familiar, even timeless. But it has enough expressive components that it could live in many contexts. Just as great of an appeal was the historical context of John Baskerville himself.
“John Baskerville as a person, as a craftsperson, was uncannily similar in his obsessiveness and his character to those of us at LoveFrom,” Ive says. “And that really, in a very natural way, became the starting point for developing our own typeface.”
Baskerville was indeed obsessive, Cavedoni explains. As we wrote in our story on the Terra Carta, Baskerville first made his money in “japanned” lacquerwork items. As he reached his 40s, he had the resources to go heads-down on his passion for word-making. As a trained calligrapher, he wanted to elevate the quality of book printing. He obsessed over not just the design of his typeface Baskerville but of the crafted execution of the individual metal “punches” that pressed each letter to ensure the printing was sharp. He even formulated an improved ink, and learned he could place woven paper into hot brass cylinders to give it a glossy finish.
A type designer who veered into innovations in ink formulation and paper finishing — yes, that sounds like a kindred spirit to Ive and his colleagues.
The entirety of Steve Jobs’s Make Something Wonderful — both on the web and in the limited print editions — is, unsurprisingly, typeset in LoveFrom. Before that, I’d only encountered LoveFrom Serif in small doses, and typically at display sizes (like the LoveFrom website’s home page). Turns out it’s quite good — traditional but distinctive — as a long-form text face. Broadly speaking, most people perceive serif fonts as more formal, sans serifs more casual. LoveFrom Serif feels like a friendly, emotionally warm serif, but which cedes no ground on formality and structure. British, for sure, but somehow with a welcome whiff of California. It’s clearly derived from Baskerville, but evokes a different feel, particularly at text sizes, than the eponymous Baskerville that ships on Apple platforms.
Cavedoni presented a lecture just this week entitled “Unexpected Baskerville: The Story of LoveFrom Serif”, at San Francisco’s Main Public Library. It pains me to have missed what appears to have been a remarkable presentation, with noteworthy guests and historic books, but a video recording is forthcoming “later this year”.
Postscript: I’ve been sitting on this link for a few weeks, partly because, well, I do that, but also because I wanted to let the experience of having read Make Something Wonderful settle in. That book, to me, is LoveFrom Serif’s true debut. If you want to exercise a typeface, set a book in it. It has occurred to me several times during this stretch how much I miss Dean Allen, and specifically, herewith, I crave his thoughts on both the typeface and the book. Re-reading for the umpteenth time Twenty Faces, Dean’s remarkably concise and compelling “survey of available text typefaces”, I was reminded that his entry on ITC Baskerville points also to Mrs Eaves, Zuzana Licko’s inspired 1996 revival (has it been that long? I will forever think of Mrs Eaves as a “new” typeface), which Dean described thus: “an interesting if mannered experiment in reviving Baskerville by aping the unpredictability of form found in letterpress text.”
Apple TV, yesterday on Twitter:
3 days until the #Silo finale.
Here’s the entire first episode.
Embedded right in that promoted tweet is the entire series premiere.1
Putting aside, for this paragraph, the politics surrounding Twitter, this is a rather interesting promotional move. You can watch the premiere episodes for all Apple TV+ original series for free in the Apple TV app: Silo, Ted Lasso, Severance, The Morning Show, Hijack (the new thriller starring Idris Elba) — all of them. It’s an obvious strategy: get hooked on even one of these premieres and it costs just $7/month to watch the rest. The biggest obstacle to any streaming service is just getting someone to try it. Everyone with an iPhone or iPad or Mac already has Apple’s TV app installed, and a lot of people already have the app on their TVs or set top boxes. But Apple isn’t linking from Twitter to the TV+ app — they’ve shared the entire episode right on Twitter itself. Not YouTube, not Facebook. Twitter. That wasn’t even technically possible until last month.
But asking anyone today to put aside the politics of Twitter is a bit like the old “But other than that, how’d you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” joke. There is a number one user on Twitter, and that user is Elon Musk, and his politics and policies are veering more toxic, not less, as time goes on. Advertising is fundamentally about paying to reach an audience, not an endorsement of content, but at some level it’s a partnership. Publishers and platforms reject objectionable ads, and advertisers eschew objectionable platforms. Where is that line for Apple with Twitter?
Musk, unsurprisingly, seems exultant over Apple’s Silo promotion, which includes a custom hashflag icon. And here’s no less an influencer than MrBeast, Jimmy Donaldson, replying to Musk: “Really is a smart move, I never would have heard of this show and now I’m watching episode 1 and invested lol.” If you’re wondering why Apple would even consider continuing to advertise on Twitter, there’s your answer: the platform still has tremendous reach.
Apple spends a veritable fortune on advertising across a slew of mediums. But the only place where I see anyone asking “Why is Apple advertising there?” is Twitter. It’s hard not to think that Twitter, bereft of premium brand advertisers and looking to jumpstart its foray into hosting long-form video content, is getting more from this Silo promotion than Apple is getting from newfound viewers. It’s not the money (which Musk has plenty of), it’s the prestige (of which Twitter is by most accounts bankrupt). You can’t buy prestige, and Apple has chosen to bestow some on Twitter through this promotion. Is it outrageous that Apple continues to advertise on Twitter? I say no. But it feels a bit skeevy, and more than a little curious, that they choose to.
I started watching Silo a few weeks ago and I like it a lot. Season one does a good job revealing a bit more of the overall mystery each week, while simultaneously doling out some answers along the way. Strong premise, good cast, good production values. It’s no Severance but it’s really good. (I feel the same way about Foundation, but I like Silo better.) It’s a good show and I’m glad it’s already been renewed for a second season. In some alternate universe, Silo was a show on Netflix, where more people would have seen it but it would have been cancelled nonetheless. ↩︎
Ron Amadeo, writing for Ars Technica:
I didn’t do anything to deserve this. The phone sat on my desk while I wrote about it, and I would occasionally stop to poke the screen, take a screenshot, or open and close it. It was never dropped or exposed to a significant amount of grit, nor had it gone through the years of normal wear and tear that phones are expected to survive. This was the lightest possible usage of a phone, and it still broke.
The flexible OLED screen died after four days. The bottom 10 pixels of the Pixel Fold went dead first, forming a white line of 100 percent brightness pixels that blazed across the bottom of the screen. The entire left half of the foldable display stopped responding to touch, too, and an hour later, a white gradient started growing upward across the display. [...]
Manufacturers keep wanting to brush off the significant durability issues of flexible OLED displays, thinking that if they just shove the devices onto the market, everything will work out. That hasn’t been the case, though, and any time you see a foldable phone for sale, you don’t have to look far to see reports of dead displays. I’m sure we’ll see several reports of broken Pixel Folds once the unit hits the general public.
Earlier today I described the market for foldables as a niche (people willing to spend nearly $2,000) within a niche (people willing to buy any phone that doesn’t support using a protective case) within a niche (people who want a foldable phone in the first place). But that’s within another level of niche: people who don’t care that foldables are relatively fragile.
Ploum, in a piece titled “How to Kill a Decentralised Network (Such as the Fediverse)”:
In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore. And started a long quest to create a messenger, starting with Hangout (which was followed by Allo, Duo. I lost count after that). [...]
While XMPP still exist and is a very active community, it never recovered from this blow. Too high expectation with Google adoption led to a huge disappointment and a silent fall into oblivion. XMPP became niche. So niche that when group chats became all the rage (Slack, Discord), the free software community reinvented it (Matrix) to compete while group chats were already possible with XMPP. (Disclaimer: I’ve never studied the Matrix protocol so I have no idea how it technically compares with XMPP. I simply believe that it solves the same problem and compete in the same space as XMPP).
Would XMPP be different today if Google never joined it or was never considered as part of it? Nobody could say. But I’m convinced that it would have grown slower and, maybe, healthier. That it would be bigger and more important than it is today. That it would be the default decentralised communication platform. One thing is sure: if Google had not joined, XMPP would not be worse than it is today.
This is in the context of the situation with Mastodon and Facebook’s upcoming “Threads” project, and the subset of Mastodon instance admins who are pledging preemptively to block it. Basically it’s an argument that Google applied Microsoft’s old Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy to kill XMPP, and that thus XMPP is a better example than email when debating whether large scale federated protocols should allow large corporate instances to join.
I don’t buy it. XMPP is an instant messaging protocol. Instant messaging is effectively dead. AIM is gone and I learned only while writing this post that ICQ is apparently still around. All modern messaging protocols have some form of message persistence; instant messaging did not. With instant messaging you could only send a message to someone while they were logged in with the client app open and running. You can’t prove a negative, but I see no scenario where XMPP would have any relevance today, regardless of Google’s decisions a decade ago.
Annie Palmer, reporting for CNBC last week:
The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday sued Amazon, alleging the nation’s dominant online retailer intentionally duped millions of consumers into signing up for its mainstay Prime program and “sabotaged” their attempts to cancel.
The agency claims Amazon violated the FTC Act and the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act by using so-called dark patterns, or deceptive design tactics meant to steer users toward a specific choice, to push consumers to enroll in Prime without their consent.
Some links:
I find the FTC’s case against Amazon to be weak sauce at best, and bordering on frivolous. Their argument that Amazon has made it difficult to cancel a Prime subscription is just wrong. Yes, it’s a few more clicks than it takes to sign up for Prime, but I don’t think any of those steps are arduous or unnecessary or unfair or confusing. And in the context of Amazon’s entire website — infamously sprawling — it’s really rather easy to find.
The FTC might have a better case that Amazon has used deceptive dark patterns to get people to sign up for Prime, but I don’t find their case compelling. (Note, however, my above remark that their complaint is heavily redacted. Perhaps some of the redactions cover essential evidence.) But it fails the sniff test in one regard: I’ve never once heard of anyone complaining that they were tricked into a Prime membership that they didn’t knowingly sign up for. I’ve seen people complaining about how hard it is to cancel all sorts of other subscriptions and memberships. Cable TV providers like Comcast make it really hard to cut the cord. Gyms are notorious for requiring you to cancel a membership in person. And The New York Times only recently began allowing subscribers to cancel over the web, rather than calling and talking to a human whose job it is to talk you out of cancelling. Like I mentioned above, The Wall Street Journal still requires this. That should be illegal.
But Amazon Prime? I’ve never seen anyone complain about this.
It’s way easier to cancel a Prime membership than most subscriptions. And most of the steps the FTC delineates are reasonable “Are you sure?” precautions. It’s like complaining that it takes a few more steps to empty the Trash in MacOS (or Recycle Bin on Windows) than it does to create a new file or folder — destructive actions should take a few extra steps.
I’d be all in favor of the FTC pursuing and enforcing laws that require all subscription services to have clear, discoverable cancellation options online. In fact, it seems ridiculous that the FTC hasn’t already done this. But singling out Amazon only makes sense insofar as that Lina Khan made a name for herself as a critic of the company.
See also: Ben Thompson, today at Stratechery:
This, to my mind, is the chief reason why this complaint rubs me the wrong way: even if there is validity to the FTC’s complaints (more on this in a moment), the overall thrust of the Prime value proposition seems overwhelmingly positive for consumers; surely there are plenty of other products and subscriptions that aren’t just bad for consumers on the edges but also in their overall value proposition and reason for existing.
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