FeedCity

I find that writing about something publicly helps me focus on the idea in a way I can't get by only talking about it privately. That's because I am a Natural Born Blogger. I was born that way.

I am using Bluesky the way I used to use Twitter, to talk openly about product development ideas before they are fully hatched.

How has your week been? My week was ... busy. That includes a new episode of The Talk Show recorded yesterday, dropping in your favorite podcast app soon. Amidst all the writing (and talking) I’ve been doing, I’m also working on filling up open weeks on the sponsorship sched...

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring DF, once again, this last week. This has been WorkOS’s Launch Week, and they’ve got a slew of new features to show. Honestly, though, you should check out their Launch Week page just to look at it — it’s beautiful, fun retro-modern pixel-art goodness. Great typography too. I wish every website looked even half this cool.

New features launched just this week include:

• WorkOS Connect — “Sign in with [Your App]”
• WorkOS Vault — Encryption Key Management (EKM) and Bring-Your-Own-Key (BYOK)
• AuthKit Integrations — Native support for several new identity providers including LinkedIn, Slack, GitLab, BitBucket, Intuit, and more.

Ookla, the company behind the Speedtest download/upload bandwidth testing app: Although it’s early in the adoption curve for the iPhone 16e, we analyzed the performance of the new device from March 1st through March 12th, and compared it to the performance of iPhone 16, ...

It's been exactly one month since WordLand opened to the public.

I keep meaning to write more about Keyboard Maestro, and so I’m just going to start documenting all the little use cases I find for it. Here’s one from today.

Emma Roth, The Verge:

TechCrunch has a new owner, again. Yahoo has sold the tech news site to the private equity firm Regent for an undisclosed sum, according to an announcement on Friday.

Regent is the same company that snapped up Foundry, the firm behind outlets like PCWorld, Macworld, and TechAdvisor on Thursday. Founded in 2005, TechCrunch has experienced many shakeups in ownership after AOL acquired the site in 2010.

A lot of shakeups in a lot of media companies’ ownership lately. Steady as she goes here at The Daring Fireball Company, a subsidiary of Fedora World Media Industries.

Matthew Belloni has a very good take on Apple TV+ at Puck (that’s a gift link that should get you through their paywall — but which requires you creating a free account, sorry): All of which fed into the self-centered fears of my lunch date. What, if anything, does the c...

Jill Goldsmith, Deadline: Apple is losing more than $1 billion a year on streamer Apple TV+, according to a report in the Information that cited two people familiar with the matter. The tech giant has spent over $5 billion a year on content since launching Apple TV+ in 2...

Thanks to Ben Werdmuller and Om Malik for their nice writeups of WordLand on their blogs. They're right. It is a small piece that can be hooked into lots of places, as is WordPress a big place that can host lots of apps many of which haven't been written yet. Products that l...

Juli Clover, writing for MacRumors last week: With new iOS software updates, Apple has been automatically turning Apple Intelligence on again even for users who have disabled it, a decision that has become increasingly frustrating for those that don’t want to use Apple I...

Ina Fried, reporting for Axios: The suit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, seeks class action status and unspecified financial damages on behalf of those who purchased Apple Intelligence-capable iPhones and other devices. “Apple’s advertisements satur...

Mini-spoilers follow. I'm a Severance lover, it's definitely one of the best shows ever, and I feel even more so after the season 2 finale which I watched last night on AppleTV+. I think there are two types of Severance users. One whose focus is on the evil and the other whose focus is on the love. If you think nothing happened in the finale then you're the first type, if you are the second type, this episode was incredible rich. And we learned what the goats were about and that's not nothing.

Here's something that could be very useful. A link to ChatGPT with instructions on how to help a user overcome problems using WordLand. Try clicking the link and see what happens, esp if you're a regular WordLand user. I discovered the feature first by asking if the bot knew what WordLand was, and it said it did, and got it mostly right. I've been using ChatGPT to develop the product, so it's possible it has retained some of the info. And the docs are on the web. This is one of those times when you really want the AI bot to ingest everything they can find. What I'm worried most about are hallucinations. But with a product like WordLand, which could show up problems in the browser or a WordPress theme, a lot of the help requests we get are not problems with WordLand.

This is beautiful and crazy, and no, I’m not going to buy one, but damn I’m tempted and I’d sure like to try one. I’m glad it exists.

Notes

• Terminology: I don't thnk we should use the term social web until there actually is such a thing, so I invented a new term for these twitter-like services.
• Since Ghost is now supporting ActivityPub, I felt we needed to include Substack because the two products compete directly.
• I consider AT Proto a proprietary protocol for now, as proprietary as Mastodon's API.
• I included WordPress because it supports ActivityPub.
• If you want to comment or ask questions I posted this table on Mastodon and Bluesky.

Mark Gurman, with a blockbuster scoop for Bloomberg: Apple Inc. is undergoing a rare shake-up of its executive ranks, aiming to get its artificial intelligence efforts back on track after months of delays and stumbles, according to people familiar with the situation. Ch...

Senator Chris Murphy: "How on earth are we going to ask the American people to take risks for us when there's a 5-alarm constitutional fire and we need them to be out on the streets, with hundreds of thousands of people if we're not willing to show courage and take risks ourselves."