Microsoft Teams overtakes Slack with 13 million daily users. [Tom Warren/The Verge] We use Teams and I’ve used Slack too. I don’t see any significant difference, other than that Teams is a Microsoft service, which will be a plus for Microsoft shops and a negative for others.
Shoelace is Google's new social network
Thursday, July 11, 2019
Sarah Perez on TechCrunch A new project from Google’s in-house incubator, Area 120, aims to help people find things to do and others who share your same interests. Through a new app called Shoelace — a name designed to make you think of tying things together — users can browse through a set of hand-picked activities, or add their own to a map. For example, someone who wanted to connect with fellow dog owners could start an activity for a doggie playdate at the park, then start a group chat to coordinate the details and make new friends.
I see Google is starting yet another social network.
Thursday, July 11, 2019
Google+, Google Reader, Google Buzz, Google Wave, Orkut, and Dodgeball weren’t enough for them. If this new one seems interesting to you, enjoy it, but don’t expect it to be around in three years. Weirdly, Google is actually one of the two most successful social media companies in the world. But nobody thinks of them that way. And other than that one spectacular hit, Google has been an utter disaster at social media.
Novelist Stephen McCauley explores sexuality and relationships in “My Ex-Life." His novel “is a comedy about a couple whose marriage ended years ago when the husband came out as gay.” The woman contacts her ex-husband decades later when she has family troubles.
McCauley gives a lively interview on the Fresh Air podcast.
Recycling: People should stop thinking of recycling as a virtue, and start considering whether individual recycling programs are actually doing good. On the 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy podcast.
Can You Hear It? Sonic Devices Play High-Pitched Noises To Repel Teens
Philadelphia is putting a gadget in 30 parks and recreation centers that blares a constant, high-pitched ringing noise that only teens and young adults can hear, all night long. Some 20 parks departments around the country are implementing the youth-repellent devices. But the devices are also extremely annoying to some older adults with sensitive ears. And critics say the campaigns are just prejudice, and wrong.
“In a city that is trying to address gun violence and safe spaces for young people,” Philadelphia City Council member Helen Gym tells NPR, “how dare we come up with ideas that are funded by taxpayer dollars to turn young people away from the very places that were created for them?”
Gym is right. Ban behavior, not people.
Anti-“marihuana” ad, 1930s. https://reddit.com/r/vintageads/comments/cbocxh/anti_marihuana_ad_1930s/
I don’t think “dope peddlers” are giving weed away. I don’t think that’s how it works.
Elementary Education Has Gone Terribly Wrong
In the early grades, U.S. schools value reading-comprehension skills over knowledge. The results are devastating, especially for poor kids….
What if the best way to boost reading comprehension is not to drill kids on discrete skills but to teach them, as early as possible, the very things we’ve marginalized—including history, science, and other content that could build the knowledge and vocabulary they need to understand both written texts and the world around them?
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/…
Jibes with my own experiences as a child. Reading comprehension books bored me. I learned to read in school but taught myself to get good at it at home, with books I found interesting, generally science fiction.
They finally built a better ketchup bottle. And soon it’s going to be everywhere. www.washingtonpost.com/business/…
The bottle will be everywhere. Not the ketchup.
I don’t use much ketchup anymore, but it will be a happy day when they start using this for Gulden’s Spicy Brown Mustard and Sriracha sauce.
IBM: We Won’t ‘Bluewash’ Red Hat: IBM executives say they’d be fools to compromise Red Hat’s independence, following the $34 billion acquisition that closed this week. By me on Light Reading. www.lightreading.com/cloud/ibm…
ONAP ‘Dublin’ Lightens Network Orchestration: The latest release of the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) sports enhancements designed to get the software up and running faster, so carriers can get on with sexy innovation. www.lightreading.com/open-sour…
5G Will Be 100x Faster Than LTE? More Like 2.7x Faster www.lightreading.com/mobile/5g… 5G speeds are failing to live up to hype. Is anyone surprised by this?
" … much of the dysfunction of tech regulation — from botched anti-sex-trafficking laws to the EU’s plan to impose mass surveillance and censorship to root out copyright infringement — are the result of trying to jury-rig tools to fix the problems of monopolies, without using anti-monopoly laws, because they have been systematically gutted for 40 years." craphound.com/news/2019…
Built on Sand: “Wherever we go, we’re surrounded by sand. It’s in the floors beneath us, walls around us and ceilings above us, plus the sidewalks and roads we use to get from place to place. Sand is a key ingredient in concrete, asphalt, and glass, not to mention the silicon chips inside our phones and computers. It is an essential component of modern life as we know it, yet, strangely enough, we are starting to run out.” 99percentinvisible.org/episode/b…
RIP Rip Torn: Actor’s actor, political activist, badass boingboing.net/2019/07/0…
IBM Builds Telco Muscle With $34B Red Hat Acquisition: IBM sees its combination with Red Hat as enabling a full virtualization stack for service providers, from infrastructure to OSS and everything in between. My latest on Light Reading. www.lightreading.com/cloud/ibm…
“Draw me like one of your French girls.”
Zuck’s personal head of security resigns after allegations of homophobia, transphobia, “pervasive discriminatory conduct,” and “horrific levels of sexual harassment and battery” [Cory Doctorow/Boing Boing]