Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 10/16 - Twitter Gonna Twitter

Episode Date: October 16, 2019

Twitter explains how world leaders can break its rules but they’ll kinda, sorta crack down on them. LinkedIn launches Events, Giphy launches Giphy arcade, DoNotPay fascinates me, and a debrief on yesterday’s Google event. Sponsors: WeWorkRemotely.com Leap.FidelityCareers.com Links: Twitter says it will restrict users from retweeting world leaders who break its rules (TechCrunch) Huawei Reports Stronger Sales Growth (NYTimes) LinkedIn gets physical, debuts Events hub for people to plan in-person networking events (TechCrunch) Giphy Arcade lets you play, create, and share mini-games on the web as if they were GIFs (The Verge) This brilliant app waits on hold for you (The Verge) Go inside Pixel 4's new camera features with Google's photo technology experts (CNET) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechMeme right home for Wednesday, October 16th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Twitter explains how world leaders can break its rules, but they'll kind of sort of still crack down on them. LinkedIn launches Jiffy launches Jiffy Arcade, Do Not Pay, fascinates me, and a debrief on yesterday's Google event.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Twitter's just got to be Twitter, I guess. Why make a definitive judgment on an issue when it can judge? hedge and equivocate a thousand different ways. Twitter says it is going to restrict user interactions with tweets made by world leaders that violate Twitter's own terms of service. It will let users quote tweet any offending tweets by a prominent politician, but not retweet, like, reply, or share the tweets in question. Quoting TechCrunch.

Twitter has been in a bind amid allegations that the company has not taken action against world leaders who break its rules. Quote, when it comes to the actions of world leaders on Twitter, we recognize that this is largely new ground and unprecedented, Twitter said, in an unbi-lined blog post on Tuesday. Last year, Twitter said it would not ban President Trump despite incendiary tweets, including allegations that he threatened to declare war on North Korea. However, in the case of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Sayyad Ali Kamani, he had one of his tweets deleted from the site. quote, we want to make it clear today that the accounts of world leaders are not above our policies entirely, the company said.

Any user who tweets content promoting terrorism, making, quote, clear and direct threats of violence towards individuals, and posting private information are all subject to ban. But Twitter said in cases involving a world leader, quote, we will err on the side of leaving the content up if there is a clear public interest in doing so, end quote. As Ryan Mack tweeted, quote, Twitter's updated policies on dealing. with world leaders leaves some big loopholes on tweeted threats. Key phrasing is, quote, clear and direct threats of violence from a world leader is that it has to be against an individual. So calls for civil war are okay, end quote. One other quick note.

Over on the Vergecast, Twitter product lead Kvon, Bigpur says the company is exploring, quote, a form of ephemerality to avoid the risk of old tweets that you might regret. resurfacing years later. Casey Newton on that same podcast that I listened to simply asked for all of his tweets to just go private after a year or something like that, which indeed would be nice. Huawei seems to be making progress against some Western government's efforts to hobble it. The Chinese company reported quarterly sales of $86 billion up around 25% year over year, with more than 185 million smartphones shipped. up 26% year over year. The reporting comes from the period January to September of this year, so right in the teeth of when Huawei was in the international spotlight. You might recall that when the U.S. added Huawei to an export blacklist earlier this summer, revenue growth numbers appeared to take a hit. But if these numbers are to be believed,

Huawei is largely shrugging that off. Except, we still don't know what the loss of Google stuff will do to sales, especially in Europe, quoting the New York Times. Waiway may be feeling the absence of one American partner more acutely. Because the company is barred from working with Google, the latest Huawei flagship smartphone, the Mate 30 series, has been released without Google's Play Store and therefore without normal access to Google apps. That makes no difference for Huawei's many fans in China, where most Google services are blocked anyway, but it could seriously turn off phone buyers across Europe and the rest of the world for whom a phone without Google Maps, Gmail, and YouTube apps may well be a

a shiny brick, end quote. LinkedIn has announced events. A new free tool to plan, announce, and invite people to meet up in the physical world, launching tomorrow, October 17th in English-speaking countries. The new feature will appear as a menu item on the LinkedIn website and mobile app, quoting TechCrunch. Ajadda, the head of product for LinkedIn India, where the app was developed, believes that there is a clear gap in the market for a feature like this,

much like you could argue Facebook's events feature has served a role in the out-of-work world to plan casual events. Quote, I think there is a massive white space for events today, he said. People don't have a single place to organize work-related offline meetups specific to an industry or a neighborhood. People want to find other people, end quote. You may recall a limited trial of the events feature about a year ago in New York and San Francisco. The kinds of events that LinkedIn said were created with the pilot included meetups, training sessions, off-sites, sales events, and happy hours. So expect to see these popping up in the live product, too, end quote.

And Jiffy has launched Jiffy Arcade, a gaming platform that lets users create, play, and share mini-games, quoting the Verge. Arcade has three components. The first is the standard game-playing feature from its web app, which is accessible on desktop browsers or on mobile ones. You can see a series of playlist featuring popular pre-made games. The experiences range from standard mobile-style endless runners to riffs on arcade classics like Breakout and Centipede. One noticeable difference is the art style.

All of Jiffy Arcades' games feature crude internet art pulled from popular jiffs, memes, emoji, and other artifacts of the web and pop culture. And almost every game has a simple one-tap or tap-and-drag mechanic that can be done with a mouse or your finger on a touchscreen. But Jiffie doesn't just want people to play its admittedly rudimentary web games. users to remix them as well, which is Jiffy's term for taking the same ingredients and developing a new twist on the game you just played. That typically means picking new art for the playable characters by searching Jiffy's Jiff database, choosing a different moving background image from the available collection, and selecting music from a list of tracks Jiffie has created just for

arcade. You can also go through the process of creating a game from the ground up, starting with one of eight templates that includes some obvious nods to popular mobile and classic arcade titles like floppy bard and blast them up, end quote. And then there's the sharing functionality. A simple link will allow you to share a game you like or a game you create, allow people to play or remix what you've shared all outside of any apps, all right there on the open web, which it's great to see Jiffie embracing the non-silod version of the internet that Jiff meaming is core to and that Jiffy itself has done so much to keep alive. I find the startup do not pay absolutely fascinating. Let me sum up what they already

do for you. You might know that they help you get out of parking tickets. They also help you cancel subscriptions you've forgotten about, but continue to pay every month out of laziness. I didn't realize this, but they actually even offer a credit card that does the automatic canceling when free trials end. And they help you do things like book DMV appointments and fill out bureaucratic forms. And now get this. they've also just launched an app called Skip Waiting on Hold. Here's how Josh Constine describes it, quote. Just type in the company you need to talk to and do not pay calls for you using tricks to get a human on the line quick. Then it calls you back and connects you to the agent so you never have to listen to that annoying hold music.

And in case the company tries to jerk you around or screw you over, the Do Not Pay app lets you instantly share a legal recording of the call to social media to shame them. For skip waiting on hold, do not pay built out a database of priority and VIP customer service numbers for tons of companies. For legality, if you opt in to recording the exchanges, the app automatically plays a message informing both parties they'll be recorded. A human voice detection system, here's when a real agent picks up the phone and then rings your phone. It's like having customer service call you, end quote. Apparently, do not pay, which has taken some seed money from Andresen Horowitz, was founded by 22,000. year old Joshua Browder. He comes to this sort of activism naturally. His father, Bill Browder, got the Magnitsky Act passed, which allows the U.S. government to free the assets of human rights

abusers. And the business model is fascinating to me, too. You pay $3 a month for all of do not pay services, which again, at this point covers customer service disputes, contacting companies for refunds, that auto-canceling trial service subscription product, the original traffic and parking ticket appeals, hidden money discovery that includes bank fee refunds, and even notifying you of free stuff that you're entitled to get on your birthday, that government paperwork assistance program, and now skip waiting on hold. One $3 per month subscription, and you get access to all of that whenever you need to use it. Apparently 10,000 subscribers have already signed up. really amazing. Eliminating hassles as a service.

I wanted to do a quick debrief on yesterday's Google event. One of the things that Google has done so successfully to differentiate the pixel devices has been outfitting them with the cameras probably best available in a smartphone. So I want to point you first to this deep dive from CNET about the camera technology. One of the things that super impressed me yesterday was the Zoom, because the event yesterday overlooked this plaza so you could take super zoom shots, and I did so, and it blew me away. Even all the way zoomed in, the fidelity was incredible.

Quote, Google wants you to think of the pixel four's dual cameras as a single unit with a traditional camera's continuous zoom flexibility. The telephoto focal length is 1.85X longer than the main camera, but the pixel four will digitally zoom up to 3x with the same quality as optical zoom. That's because of Google's technology called Super Res Zoom that cleverly transforms shaking hands from a problem into an asset. Small wobbles let the camera collect more detailed scene data so the phone can magnify the photo better. I regularly use it up to 4x, 5x, or 6x, and don't even think about it, Google distinguished engineer Mark Levoy said. The iPhone 11 has an ultra-wide camera that the Pixel 4 lacks, but Levoy said he'd rather zoom in than zoom out.

Quote, wide angle can be fun, but we think telephoto is. is more important, he said, at the Pixel 4 launch, end quote. There's plenty more to dive into in the CNET piece if you're curious, that HDR Plus real-time view on screen so you can see how the pictures will correct for light and dark areas of your scene, the separate camera controls for light and dark, and that really cool astrophotography stuff. If cameras are your thing, please check out that piece. And for analysis on what Google is attempting strategically with this ambient computing push,

Here is Owen Williams from his newsletter, Recharged. Quote, Google never really had a coherent hardware play, let alone a hardware play at all until recently. At a splashy event in New York yesterday, however, it showed off what I would argue was the best interpretation of It Just Works in the industry, beating Apple at its own game. The takeaway is that Google has really started to manufacture a continuous seamless ecosystem that just didn't exist anywhere outside of Apple's bubble until recently. With face unlock on Pixel 4 and new devices like the Nest Hub Max, the company is making our devices ambiently aware of who's using them, making it better able to adjust them for that person. Google Assistant is the glue that holds all of this together, and that story is finally starting to make more sense for the first time. It's the tiny details that Apple is famous for that the company is playing to hear. If you get a Nest Wi-Fi and already use a pixel, it'll magically appear on your screen for setup, as will assistant devices and even third-party smart home gadgets.

It's one ecosystem everywhere, and it's impressive to see the company finally presenting a unified front that I'd argue nobody else can keep up with right now, end quote. And of course, Ben Thompson had a smart take in this morning's Tretecary. He says that Google's vision for ambient computing is compelling. Quote, first, it is a vision for the future that actually seems larger than the smartphone reality we live in. Alternatives like augmented reality or wearables feel smaller. Second, it is a vision that does not compete with the smartphone, but rather leverages it. The smartphone is so useful for so many things that any directly competitive technology would have to cover an impossible number of use cases to displace it. Ambient computing, though,

simply conceives of the smartphone as one of several means to deliver on its promise. Third, it is a vision that Google is uniquely suited to pursue. The company is a services company, incentivized to serve the maximum number of customers no matter the means, i.e. device, and it already has a head start in providing services that contain and accumulate essential information about people's lives. Note how much better Google is placed than Facebook or Amazon, both of which I wrote about recently. The latter two companies are hindered by their lack of a smartphone, and their beachheads in the consumer space, Oculus and Alexa, respectively, are constrained by specialization in the case of Facebook and localization

in the case of Amazon. In the case of ambient computing, integration does not refer to an individual device and its associated software. Rather, the integration that matters is between all of the various devices that exist in every part of your life, home, work, play, and everywhere in between,

and the service that links them together. Thus, all of Google's various hardware offerings. Without question, the best solution for ambient computing by sometime next year will be nest devices in your house, a Google pixel in your pocket, pixel buds in your ears, and a pixel book at work, end quote. Hey, everybody, a couple times a year I have an advertiser fall out on me on short notice, and I come to you all to see if anybody's interested in filling the gap. Next week is one of those weeks.

I've got slots open next week that just fell out on me earlier in the week, and I'll basically give them to whoever wants them on a first-come, first-served basis, at about 50% off the usual going rate. When I've done this in the past, I found some great long-term advertisers. So if you want to try podcast advertising to the mutant podcast army, hit me up at podcast at Techmeme.com, and we can move quickly, and I'll help you come up with the ad copy and all that stuff. Again, about half off the going rate to help me out on short notice.

Talk to you tomorrow.