We also spent some time wandering through the CEDIA conference, compared Kindles, expressed our deep love for remote controls, and perused the r/stadia subreddit. Stadia is dead, but here’s hoping the controller isn’t.
Morning Consult has a new survey of Gen Z’s favorite brands, and they’re both hilarious and on-brand. YouTube, Google, Netflix and Amazon are the top four. (M&M’s coming in at #5!) But the one that jumped out to me most was that TikTok didn’t crack the top 40: Gen Z likes TikTok a lot more than older generations, but they apparently don’t even like it as much as Lunchables or Subway?
Twitter blew it with Periscope. Facebook and Instagram never figured it out. Twitch is great, but only in certain niches. But TikTok seems to be the closest thing going to a truly live social network, as today’s hurricane footage has definitely made clear.
The internet is more visual and more interactive than ever. So how does the world’s biggest search engine change to fit the times? By redefining the whole idea.
Amazon’s event is starting in a few minutes, and somehow I ended up on this 2009 story about the early days of the Kindle, and the reading revolution it promised but didn’t quite deliver:
This was what they were calling e-paper? This four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon? Where was paper white, or paper cream? Forget RGB or CMYK. Where were sharp black letters laid out like lacquered chopsticks on a clean tablecloth?
Amazing how much has changed... and not changed.
[The New Yorker]
Today it’s Amazon and Google, Friday it’s Tesla, next week it’s Google again, then Meta, then Microsoft, some Elon/Twitter stuff, Adobe MAX is happening — the next few weeks are going to be wild in the tech world. We previewed all of it (and went deep on scooters and handheld gaming) on today’s Vergecast, so you can get ready for the craziness to come.
I mean, who wouldn’t want to go to Walmart in the metaverse? What’s that? Oh, you don’t want that at all, no matter what, ever? What if Walmart in the metaverse had a thing called Manicure Challenge and a weird round keyboard and actually has basically nothing to do with Walmart at all? Still no? Okay, cool, got it.
“Android fans, what are the primary reasons why you will never ever switch to an iPhone?” That question led to almost 30,000 comments so far, and was for a while the most popular thing on Reddit. It’s a totally fascinating peek into the platform wars, and I’ve spent way too much time reading through it. I also laughed hard at “I can turn my text bubbles to any color I like.”
Twitter’s edit button is live to a small group of users, Bloomberg says — “a subset of a subset” — and has been for about 24 hours. I haven’t seen any yet, though, and the option’s not in my Twitter Blue settings either. So keep an eye out, and let us know if you come across the mythical edited tweet!
[Bloomberg.com]
