They did say Google HQ. I know the place well. Sun used to have facilities there, and the Computer History Museum is there.
I don’t know if I’m on this one, but I’m on something like it, and it is quite effective at warning of wildfire danger. (In my town, not close to me last summer.) And the police send out texts about major traffic incidents and missing people.
Twitter would be useless for this.
Yep, that’s what I was thinking of. Specifically, I knew it from the system warning Hawaiians about “incoming missiles!” a few years back.
Ironically, I knew about the false positive texts from the news at the time, but only just now did I learn that they also sent out the same false warning via cable boxes. The cable box part seems superfluous to me.
Less dramatically, I remember being at work in Tacoma in 2012 on an overcast but dry and temperate autumn day when the EAS on my phone went off with an imminent blizzard warning. Turned out the warning was intended for Mt. Rainier and the vicinity, but was instead sent out to the entire population of Pierce County.
As it currently works today, this is not true. You may view a tweet, and a few responses but you are urged to use the app after about 4 or 5, and are unable to view the full thread.
Trump, Peterson, others reinstated, but not Alex Jones. Why? Probably because Musk is scared off by the $1 billion judgment against Jones. See, civil judgments matter, even if they’re uncollectible.
It is in fact true. I have a twitter account for the purpose of sharing video game screen captures, and I use it exclusively via web browser on both desktop and mobile. I’ve never downloaded the client on any mobile device.
Same for Facebook, back when I still used it. No app: web only. The site would occasionally nag about the app, but otherwise it was the same experience.
This mostly surprises me; I don’t use Twitter so I’ll happily take your word for it.
But in the event e.g. Google did kill the Android app, it would not be difficult (assuming Twitter still had a full team of developers) to move full functionality, not just their current teaser functionality, into the website. It might take a couple weeks to get everything moved over and would probably increase their bandwidth and total server horsepower needs and hence costs, but it certainly could be done. And on a commercially relevant timeline (given a still-functioning IT department).
My town does send emergency texts and makes emergency phone calls. I’m sure they have purchased some commercial system that allows them to do that.
Yeah. I actually installed the app because i was so frustrated trying to see what people were linking to.
If the apps were dropped from the various app stores, I would imagine that Twitter would remove the limitations on viewing it in a browser (assuming there’s any developers left who could make the change).
Actually, I recently discovered how to get around this issue. When you’re asked to log in, use the app, whatever, click okay. It’ll take you to the log-in page, which you exit out of, then continue as you were.
IOW, it’s chicanery all the way down.
I hate that that approach to all things webby is both fully legal and socially acceptable. Just lie (often by omission) to the user and steer them like lambs to slaughter towards your desired goal.
I’ve not had any problems using Twitter on my phone as long as I am logged in. And, if I’m not logged in on my PC, I run into the same prompts requiring me to log in after viewing a few tweets.
I did ultimately create a Twitter account because of the former, though I now use it more to reply to comments of people I follow, and occasionally to call out misinformation. (I let the latter become the bulk of my Twitter usage until I realized that’s what Twitter was funneling me towards, and that it was making me way too angry.)
Ah.
I don’t like my browser to be logged into social media. So i don’t let it stay connected to Twitter, Facebook, etc. That’s presumably my problem with browser-version Twitter.
It wouldn’t surprise me if he re-instated Trump regardless of the actual results of the poll. Making up some numbers here - he could easily declare that for the purpose of free speech, if 40% of the people wanted to hear something, they should be able to, and that a mere 60% of the people stopping that would be classic censorship. I think this could have been theater, instead of meaningful decision making.
In the past Trump has said he’s all-in on Truth Social, and not interested in returning to Twitter. Given that Trump is affiliated with Truth Social, is it possible that Trump has agreed to use it exclusively for Tweet-like activities?
There are two funny/sad things about this Trump reinstatement debacle.
First, Musk had promised to set up a “content moderation council”, essentially an ethics oversight committee, to make such decisions. He was apparently unaware the Twitter already had one, comprised of independent advisors capable of make impartial decisions in the best interest of the company and the public.
Second, Musk not only failed to establish such a council, but apparently dismantled the existing one, probably in the course of his mass firings. It’s clear from his tweets that account bans and reinstatement decisions are being made entirely on his own whim. For instance, when some users asked him to reinstate Alex Jones, his response, rather than any sort of reference to an ethics decision by a moderation council, was just one word: “No”. In this case the right call, of course, but this is typical Musk authoritarianism. In his mind, he paid $44 billion for that right, and by golly, he was going to make the most of it.
There is an agreement:
He won’t be able to resist returning to Twitter. That level of attention is among his many Greek-tragedy-level fatal flaws…