People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Reminder: standard ticket pricing for UX London ends at midnight tomorrow (Friday), so if you haven’t got your ticket yet, get in there now!
Stephen Hackett throwing some cold water on the io products hype:
To be clear, the failure of the Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin does not mean that there’s no room in the market for an AI-powered device with no screen. However, people really like their phones, and creating a product that will compete with the smartphone is a hill no one has successfully climbed to date.
I don’t agree that the Rabbit R1 was a failure. It fell short of expectations, but that team is still churning away. A new kind of AI-first device is still more likely to come from someone new, without the smartphone baggage.
You might’ve noticed there’s a new status line in Micro.blog’s publishing progress, providing a little more context for what the platform is doing. I’ll continue to tweak this so the progress is more useful.
Almost lost in all the OpenAI hype this week was that MCP is now supported in OpenAI’s responses API. MCP was a big part of Microsoft’s keynote and at Google I/O.
Why single-page apps are just not worth it:
Here’s the problem: your team almost certainly doesn’t have what it takes to out-engineer the browser. The browser will continuously improve the experience of plain HTML, at no cost to you, using a rendering engine that is orders of magnitude more efficient than JavaScript.
Meanwhile, the browser marches on, improving the UX of every website that uses basic HTML semantics. For instance: browsers often don’t repaint full pages anymore.
I’m not convinced that the designer of a $10,000 gold watch (now obsolete), who gets driven around in the back of a Bentley, and who spends his spare time in coffee shops ‘inventing the future’ with the likes of Sam Altman, is capable of designing products for the rest of us.
Search has bent in quality towards its earliest days, difficult to navigate and often unhelpful. And the remedy may be the same as it was a quarter century ago.
Om Malik blogging about today’s video of Jony Ive and Sam Altman:
The slick video harkens back to Ive’s glory days at Apple when he would talk about the chips, designs, and aluminum on videos extolling the iPhone, the watch, and the laptops. In a way, what he and Altman are indicating, through words, and subliminal marketing, is that we are building the next Apple.
What stood out to me in the announcement about io is that there will be a “family” of devices. Maybe one without a screen, a couple with small screens? I assume voice will be a big part of this, but also perhaps not. It could truly surprise us.
Wednesday session
