Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg suggested Tumblr’s unloved Live service wasn’t long for this world last year, and it’s now shutting down January 24th. Users can transfer any in-app currency they bought to the video chat service MeetMe, which uses the same underlying tech. The Tumblr userbase, unsurprisingly, seems pleased.
[Help Center]
The API went down on December 28th, preventing third-party apps like iA Writer or Ulysses from publishing to Medium.
The site’s API status page was updated today, at 12:41PM ET, to say it’s active again.
Update January 9th, 2024, 12:47PM ET: Medium’s site says its API is back up.
[MediumSupport]
As announced last month, today 1 percent of Chrome users will see a notification when they open Chrome on desktop or Android if selected to try Google’s new Tracking Protection feature. The Wall Street Journal has a writeup on what it could mean for advertisers, with some thinking Google’s moving too fast, some relieved it’s finally happening, and everyone waiting to see how it goes.
Instagram boss Adam Mosseri posted a little more about the plan to integrate Threads with the fediverse.
While responding to some skepticism about pushing posts out to other ActivityPub instances, Mosseri said only public accounts will show in the wider fediverse outside of Threads, and — though he said this isn’t fully decided — only after users “explicitly opt in.”
In celebration of Google’s 25th anniversary, the company created an interactive Where’s Waldo-style Doodle that’s filled with images of the most-search topics from 1999 to 2023. There are 25 images to find, and they range from Pikachu to Taylor Swift. It’s a nice way to kill some time!
The Browser Company has been teasing a Windows version for a while now, and the app is apparently almost ready! So far only a few people are testing it — the “Beta Testers Onboarded” count is at a whopping four as I type this — but CEO Josh Miller says he hopes the waitlist will be empty by spring. (If you want to get on said waitlist, here’s the link.)
[www.isarconwindowsyet.com]
As part of Google’s 25th anniversary, the search engine is releasing a “Trends Time Capsule” of the most-searched topics across several different categories — like video games, dog breeds, and TV shows — from 1999 to 2023.
Google says it used internal Google Trends tools, combined with “anonymous and aggregated Google Search data” to calculate the most popular results for each year.
[Google]
A lot of homes are being built, but a lack of understanding of internet infrastructure and a need to cut costs means they kind of suck for internet.
OpenAI didn’t mean to kickstart a generational shift in the technology industry. But it did. Now all we have to decide is where to go from here.
