Linked List: January 21, 2022

Friday, 21 January 2022

Twitter Announces NFT Profile Pictures ★

Twitter Blue:

You asked (a lot), so we made it. Now rolling out in Labs: NFT Profile Pictures on iOS.

Such profile pictures will be identifiable by being hexagonal. (Android and web users are still locked out of Twitter Blue.)

Sam Biddle:

I predict a browser extension that auto-blocks people with hexagonal avatars would become very popular very fast.

NFTBlocker:

This is a browser plugin that blocks people who use Twitter’s NFT integration.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt, quoting from a note from analyst Amit Daryanani:

Relay from Tobin Marcus, EVRISI Senior US Policy and Politics Strategist, on the bill: “I think this’ll be a big topic of discussion through Q1 and has a chance of getting done, but it still looks fairly unlikely. The 16-6 committee vote overstates the level of support for the bill. Some Democrats, including the 2 Senators from California, voted the bill out of committee in part as a courtesy to Klobuchar despite expressing significant reservations, and several other Democrats have concerns and changes they want to make. Some of the Republican support looks soft as well, and getting Senate floor time for this bill before Congress largely shuts down for the midterms will be harder than some commentators appreciate.”

In the “all politics is local” front, it strikes me as highly unlikely that either senator from California (Dianne Feinstein and Alex Padilla) are going to vote for a bill that specifically targets Apple and Google. But in a larger sense, the United States Senate has more important matters to address than trying to force Apple to allow sideloading on iPhones.

Netflix Is Why I’d Never Want to Run a Publicly Held Company ★

Frank Pallotta, in a piece for CNN Business headlines “The Sky Is Falling for Netflix”:

It wasn’t that long ago that Netflix was a stock darling, but those days now feel like eons ago. The company’s stock peaked just south of $700 in November, but has since dropped to around $400 on Friday.

Netflix ended 2021 with 221.8 million subscribers. That’s significantly more than others in the streaming marketplace, including Disney, one of its closest competitors. Disney had 118.1 million subscribers as of October, and it grew subscriptions 60% between October 2020 and October 2021. During that same period, Netflix grew just 9%. [...]

Netflix is struggling to find more people to sign up in the markets it has been playing in the longest — particularly the United States — noted Nathanson. The company is going to have to “start aggressively going after growth in developing markets,” such as India and other Asian Pacific countries, to keep moving forward, he added.

220 million subscribers and growing (even if slowly) at $10–20 per subscriber per month is a nice business! That’s about $30 billion in revenue per year. It’s a good company with good content, good software, an iconic brand, and a loyal base of now several hundred million users (way more people use Netflix than there are paid subscribers, with shared account credentials).

I know, I know, investors don’t trade stocks based on what a company is today, they trade on what they expect it to do in the future. Was Netflix overpriced back in November? I don’t know. But is the sky fucking falling? No.

The Case for ‘Mark as Unread’ in Messages ★

Matthew Bischoff:

“Mark as Unread” has been so successful and well-loved in email that it’s been copied by many messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram. And its utility in a casual messaging context is much the same in the slightly more formal email context.

As Tine Welanly put it on Quora:

Let’s say you’re riding the bus and you open a message from a friend, maybe asking you about your plans for the weekend. You have to respond to that but maybe it’s your stop already or you don’t know yet. But if you don’t say anything now, you might forget to respond and then you’ll look like a bad friend. Not to mention you might miss out on some weekend fun.

But the most popular messaging app on iOS, Messages, has never implemented “Mark as Unread” even though users have been clamoring for it for years and it’s been rumored that they tested it. What’s even wilder is that iMessage doesn’t have any other in-app way for the user to signal that they need to return to a message in order to respond to it.

A big +1 from me for this request. I love Messages. I know there are a bunch of ways Apple could and should improve it, but I can’t think any single feature that I want more than “Mark as Unread”.

A situation I run into, somewhat frequently: I get a notification from Messages and tap it. Turns out it’s a message that will require a longer reply, or some sort of action on my part that I can’t or don’t want to do right now — like something I need to do on a Mac, but I’m using my iPhone. But the message has already been marked as read.

The Verge: Google Is Building an AR Headset, Codenamed ‘Iris’ ★

Alex Heath, with a scoop for The Verge:

The search giant has recently begun ramping up work on an AR headset, internally codenamed Project Iris, that it hopes to ship in 2024, according to two people familiar with the project who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission. Like forthcoming headsets from Meta and Apple, Google’s device uses outward-facing cameras to blend computer graphics with a video feed of the real world, creating a more immersive, mixed reality experience than existing AR glasses from the likes of Snap and Magic Leap. Early prototypes being developed at a facility in the San Francisco Bay Area resemble a pair of ski goggles and don’t require a tethered connection to an external power source.

I enjoy how the way Apple’s AR headset works is just stated as fact.