The big picture →

I wrote about Google Photos' plans to make the camera roll obsolete.

In that world, your camera roll will no longer be your default view of the photos you've taken. The standard gallery app will lack so much of the context you have become used to: the names of the people in the photos; information about the photos' contents; a search function that finds objects within them. The gallery isn't organized into events, and it doesn't include your friends' photos. The receipts and whiteboards are mixed in with selfies and photos of your kids. It's a mess — and the messier it gets, the easier it is for Google Photos to win.

Instant recall →

Facebook's fast-loading articles were supposed to transform. Now big publishers are fleeing. What next? 

This month's arrival of Facebook stories, a rolling series of photo and video posts that disappear 24 hours after they're posted, pushed Instant Articles further down in the News Feed. And publishers can't use the Stories format even if they want to — they are currently enabled only for individual users. "The camera is going to be the priority, not news and entertainment content," one former employee told me. "That's just going to keep getting shoved down in the feed." The company has all but confirmed this; “the camera is the new keyboard” is a popular refrain on campus these days.

The case for editing tweets →

Today let us make the case for progress.

Twitter faces bigger problems than this one, of course. But its failure to build a core feature of every other internet text box is so glaring that it demands, nearly 11 years into the company’s history, a response. Good software accommodates its users, rather than ask them to accommodate it. We should be able to edit tweets because we are, in the end, only human. We should be able to edit tweets because the arguments against editing tweets, individually and collectively, are trash.

Mastodon is an open-source Twitter competitor that's growing like crazy →

I wrote about Mastodon, an intriguing pop-up social network built by a single young man in Germany.

Mastodon, a distributed, open-source version of Twitter, is almost identical to the platform it’s based on, but with key differences: posts can run 500 characters rather than 140, and users can make individual posts private. Rochko launched Mastadon with little fanfare six months ago. Then last week, Twitter rolled out an update that changed the way it displays replies; many longtime users complained that the redesign is confusing — in a piece on Motherboard, Sarah Jeong asked, “Why does Twitter hate itself so much?” Overnight, Mastodon added users by the thousands.

Square is in talks to buy the Yik Yak team →

I broke news of talks between Square and Yik Yak — and indeed, Square did wind up acquiring the company's engineers.

Drawn to its rapid growth, Sequoia Capital led a $61 million investment in the company in November 2014. But in retrospect, it’s clear that Yik Yak had already peaked. An effort to get users to adopt persistent usernames drove its base away, and in December the company laid off 60 percent of its team. Most recently, the company was experimenting with a group messaging app called Hive.