Linked List: February 25, 2021

Thursday, 25 February 2021

Twitter Teases Upcoming Features: Paid ‘Super Follows’ and Community Groups 

Jacob Kastrenakes, reporting for The Verge:

The payment feature, called Super Follows, will allow Twitter users to charge followers and give them access to extra content. That could be bonus tweets, access to a community group, subscription to a newsletter, or a badge indicating your support. In a mockup screenshot, Twitter showed an example where a user charges $4.99 per month to receive a series of perks. Twitter sees it as a way to let creators and publishers get paid directly by their fans.

Twitter also announced a new feature called Communities, which appear to be its take on something like Facebook Groups. People can create and join groups around specific interests — like cats or plants, Twitter suggests — allowing them to see more tweets focused on those topics. Groups have been a huge success for Facebook (and a huge moderation problem, too), and they could be a particularly helpful tool on Twitter, since the service’s open-ended nature can make it difficult for new users to get started on the platform.

Both these features sound great. Ben Thompson and I encouraged Twitter to do something like “Super Follows” a few weeks ago on Dithering. Almost certainly, though, all of this will only work in Twitter’s own client, not third-party apps like Tweetbot and Twitterrific.

Twitter hasn’t said how the economics will work — what cut of the money they’re going to take — but last month when they acquired paid-newsletter Substack rival Revue, they cut Revue’s take to just 5 percent. (Substack takes 10.)

‘Steve Jobs Stories’ on Clubhouse 

Computer History Museum:

Chris Fralic, Steven Levy, Esther Dyson, Mike Slade, John Sculley, Seth Godin, Andy Cunningham, Dan’l Lewin, Doug Menuez, Regis McKenna, Andy Hertzfeld, and Steven Rosenblatt share their “Steve Jobs Stories” in honor of what would have been the Apple cofounder’s 66th birthday.

I missed the first half of this show on Clubhouse, but caught the second half live. Easily the best event I’ve heard on Clubhouse. Good stories, well told. Nice job by the Computer History Museum getting this recorded and posted to YouTube for posterity.

El Toro ‘One-to-One IP Targeting’ 

“Ad tech” (read: spyware) company El Toro is just one company in an industry full of competitors, but their description of their capabilities struck me as particularly flagrant in its utter disregard for privacy:

As a marketing organization focused on sales not metrics, El Toro’s ad tech brings the location-specific accuracy of direct mail to digital advertising. Through our patented IP Targeting technology we target digital ads to your customer by matching their IP address with their physical address, bringing a wide variety of banner and display ads to the sites the targeted customer visits on the Internet.

Specifically, El Toro offers: Targeting without having to use cookies, census blocks, or geo-location tools.

They claim the ability not just to match your IP address to a general location, but to your exact home street address, and from there to specific devices within your home. Their pitch to would-be advertisers is that they can target you by IP address the same way marketers send all those print catalogs to your house. From their above-linked IP Targeting website:

The El Toro patented algoirthm [sic] uses 38+ points of data to match an IP to a household with 95% accuracy.

Do I believe they can match IPs to street addresses with 95 percent accuracy? No. I wouldn’t believe a word out of these guys’ mouths, to be honest. But the fact that they can do it with any degree of accuracy is a problem that needs to be solved.

Why doesn’t Apple build a VPN into its OSes? Or as an offering of paid iCloud accounts at least? At this point, if privacy truly is a paramount concern, it might be necessary to do everything over a trusted VPN. IP addresses are inherently not private.