Linked List: July 14, 2021

Wednesday, 14 July 2021

Yours Truly on Rene Ritchie’s Show Talking About iOS 15 Safari ★

Rene Ritchie:

At WWDC 2021, Apple unveiled new interface designs for Safari on Mac, iPad, and iPhone. They’re all radical but none as in-your-face radical as the iOS 15 version for the iPhone, which pulls the address bar to the bottom and hides a ton of controls behind a menu-hamburger button.

We recorded this before today’s release of the third developer betas for iOS 15 and MacOS 12 Monterey, but it all holds up. The good news is that today’s betas show that Apple has taken criticism of the new Safari UI designs seriously — on MacOS, Safari once again defaults to showing the tab bar as a discrete UI element in the window, with one URL address bar. (Similar changes are coming for iPadOS, but didn’t make it for today’s beta.) The iOS changes today aren’t as significant, but, having talked to folks at Apple, there are a lot of changes and refinements still to come as summer progresses. I feel good about what I’ve heard.

(Something I missed in my critique of the Safari 15 betas two weeks ago: you can long-press on the domain name to the left of the “···” button in the floating toolbar to bring up a contextual menu. That contextual menu contains a Share item, and today’s beta 3 adds a Reload item (screenshot). I still say Share and Reload are both important enough that they should be exposed as top-level buttons, but knowing that this long-press menu exists is a great tip if you’re already using the betas.)

If an IBM Leadership Shakeup Falls in a Forest, but No One Is Around to Hear It, Does It Make a Sound? ★

Tom Krazit, reporting for Protocol on July 2:

IBM President Jim Whitehurst is stepping down from the No. 2 leadership position at the company less than three years after IBM acquired his former company, in just one of several leadership changes announced Friday.

Bridget van Kralingen, senior vice president of global markets, will also leave the company, said IBM CEO Arvind Krishna in a press release right before the three-day holiday weekend. Rob Thomas, who has led IBM’s Watson initiative in the past, will become the new senior vice president of global markets.

Did you catch this story 12 days ago? I almost didn’t. IBM is still a very big company — #42 on the current Fortune 500 list — but they’re just not relevant in the way they used to be, or the way today’s big 5 tech companies are.

It wasn’t too long ago — 20, 25 years? — when a leadership story like this at IBM would have been all anyone in tech talked about for weeks to come. They’ve been diminished not because the government broke them up or curbed their behavior through regulations, but simply because they faded away. It is extremely difficult to become dominant in tech, but it’s just as difficult to stay dominant for longer than a short run.

I don’t offer this observation as an argument against any and all regulation and antitrust investigations of big tech companies. I’m simply arguing that regulation and antitrust lawsuits should be wielded with surgical precision, not broad strokes. Competition and progress work.

Facebook’s Right-Wing Outrage Machine, CrowdTangle, and Kevin Roose ★

Facebook owns a data analytics service called CrowdTangle. CrowdTangle allows journalists and researchers to examine and study the “engagement” of link posts on Facebook. NYT columnist Kevin Roose has been using CrowdTangle’s engagement data to publish the excellent @FacebooksTop10 account on Twitter, which lists the 10 top-performing posts on Facebook every day. Unsurprisingly, most days, the list is dominated by right-wing commentators.

Roose today has a long column — incredibly well-sourced — that digs into Facebook’s response to this imbroglio, which, unsurprisingly, has been to treat it as a perception problem rather than a product problem:

Mr. Zuckerberg is right about one thing: Facebook is not a giant right-wing echo chamber.

But it does contain a giant right-wing echo chamber — a kind of AM talk radio built into the heart of Facebook’s news ecosystem, with a hyper-engaged audience of loyal partisans who love liking, sharing and clicking on posts from right-wing pages, many of which have gotten good at serving up Facebook-optimized outrage bait at a consistent clip.

CrowdTangle’s data made this echo chamber easier for outsiders to see and quantify. But it didn’t create it, or give it the tools it needed to grow — Facebook did — and blaming a data tool for these revelations makes no more sense than blaming a thermometer for bad weather.

Fleets, We Hardly Knew Ye ★

Twitter Support:

We had planned for Fleets to help people feel comfortable joining the conversation in a low-pressure way, but it turns out Fleets were mainly used by those Tweeting the most.

So now we’re ready to explore other ways for people to share on Twitter.

The @Twitter account put it better:

we’re removing Fleets on August 3, working on some new stuff

we’re sorry or you’re welcome

I’ll resist dunking on Twitter for this, because I think it’s better for Twitter to try more new ideas — even if many wind up abandoned — than to find itself paralyzed by indecision over how to evolve the platform. Fleets were a fine experiment because, other than taking up a bit of screen real estate at the very top, they didn’t interfere with Twitter’s core features.

(The above encapsulates my thinking on the filibuster in the U.S. Senate. It’d be better to abolish it and let the party in power pass its agenda by a simple majority, even knowing that eventually the other party will be in power, and they’ll do things you don’t like. Let the majority pass its agenda, and if they’re good ideas, they’ll prove popular, and if they’re not, they won’t. Fear of letting the other side achieve its goals when they’re in the majority has resulted in a legislature that can barely pass anything — and that hasn’t worked out well.)

TAG Heuer Connected Super Mario Watch ★

Speaking of Mario:

The TAG Heuer Connected Super Mario Limited Edition brings you a cutting-edge experience with a surprise twist: four exclusive watchfaces focusing on playfulness through Super Mario patterns, an exclusive splash screen as well as a Mario animated watch face which encourages you to get out and step up your physical activity with Mario.

Goes on sale tomorrow for $2,150. Not for me, but it’s cheaper than a $1.5 million unopened Super Mario 64 cartridge.

Unopened Super Mario 64 Cartridge From 1996 Sells for $1.56 Million ★

Makes more sense to me than buying an NFT.