That was the subject of almost all of The Vergecast this week – we talked about how Threads came to be, why it launched so quickly, what to call the things you post on Threads, ActivityPub, and much more. All our numbers are already out of date, because wow is this app growing fast, but the rest I think holds up!
Is Instagram Threads going to become the fastest-growing app of all time? Sure looks like it. Will Meta care about it long-term, will it ever launch in the EU, will Threads ever actually embrace the fediverse? Who knows. Are ads coming to Threads? You betcha.
This week on the show, it’s all Threads all the time.
This joke about the iPhone is old, I think, but the TikTok is new and it made me laugh. Best iPhone analogy ever.
(Also, for my money Gary Gulman has one of the all-time funniest standup bits about abbreviating the states. Trust me.)
I’m not really a go-wild-with-widgets iPhone user, but this ThisisE video has me going all-in on smart stacks and redoing my Focus Modes. Lots of fun stuff in here!
In this (very good!) story about Mattel’s recent history and its plans to become a massive generator of intellectual property is a truly wild number:
Thirteen more [Mattel] films have been publicly announced, including movies about He-Man and Polly Pocket; forty-five are in development.
45 movies! Many of them based on toys you’ve heard of and stars you know. The Mattel Cinematic Universe is going to be epic.
[The New Yorker]
We talked a lot on this episode about what it means when the web is overrun by AI — the news sites, the social networks, the search engines, everything. It’s robots all the way down, y’all. Then we talked Macs, AirPods, Call of Duty, and much more. Alex may have brought up Plex a few times.
Ten years after its untimely death, the team that built the much-beloved feed reader reflects on what went wrong and what could have been.
The FTC’s trial against Microsoft continues to rage, as do the fights in Congress over how best to protect kids online. Meanwhile, is the Pixel Fold the foldable we’ve been waiting for? And can the Razr be the coolest phone on the planet again? All that, and a lot of feelings about IP ratings, on this episode of The Vergecast.
