Alright, here we go again. Everything important you missed last week, according to me. Strap in, folks.
FACEBOOK HAD A BLUE-LETTER DAY (see what I did there?) with One Billion Unique Logins, a major milestone for the platform -- and all platforms, really. That’s legitimately impressive. I don’t have Facebook, so I’m assuming all billion people logged in to watch that video about the cat burglar.
UBER ENCOUNTERS RESISTANCE IN CHINA as WeChat developer Tencent bans Uber from the platform. At least their business is safe here in the good ol’ US of A--oh wait.
In order to help you understand the nature of this confrontation, we’ve created this dramatic reenactment.
SPEAKING OF UBER, remember that crazy Jeep hack? Well, Uber just hired the guys who did it. They’ll reportedly go straight to work on Uber’s self-driving cars division. So we’re that much closer to living in the plot of I, ROBOT.
At least Will Smith will be there. Love that guy.
THE FAA IS TESTING AN APP to show you where it’s safe to fly your drone. This will help drone pilots avoid things like people and airplanes and buildings and newlyweds and cows.
Also they have named this app “B4UFLY.” Yeah. I emailed the FAA for some insight behind the name, to which they responded “IDK YU ask? btw RU DTH B4 that thing 2nite?”
CITYLAB RAN AN ARTICLE about how to turn your landline into a smartph--WAIT PEOPLE ARE STILL USING LANDLINES?!?!
THE NFL CONTINUES TO TEST SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGIES, and it appears that Twitter is fairly in and Facebook is fairly out. The NFL has been pursuing many new platforms for extending its brands, including Snapchat, YouTube, and these people.
FREE REDDIT CHECK, made during a comedy-themed hackathon, is like a free credit report, only it tells you how much of an unrepentant asshole you are on Reddit. It was awesome. Really awesome. And then it was gone, taken down by its creators because of “a lot of personal threats” from Reddit users. Presumably not the good ones.
So, basically, the story is:
“Tool that tells Redditors they are tools taken down by creators (who, notably, were NOT tools) because tools don’t like to be told they are tools, and they especially don’t like to be told by other non-tool people, even though everyone already knows that tools are tools, and so do they.”
Ugh. It’s like an Escher lithograph made entirely of sadness and empty KFC famous bowls.
ELON MUSK BROKE SOMETHING AGAIN, but this time it was just a rating system. The new Tesla P85D is apparently so mind-bendingly awesome that it scored a 103 out of 100, effectively breaking the scale used by Consumer Reports. That may seem strange, but there is a very logical explanation.
LASTLY, APPLE FILES AN EARBUD PATENT which includes “bone conduction” technology. Which is funny you guys because I’ve been using that technology for years in-- NEVERMIND FINE YOU GUYS WRITE THE JOKES.
Alright! That’s all there is.
Well, there’s probably more, but I’m tired now.
JONATHAN OUT
