TechCrunch: “Apple Maps launches on the web to challenge Google Maps”

Apple announced on Wednesday that Apple Maps is now available on the web via a public beta, which means you can now access the service directly from your browser. The launch puts Apple Maps in direct competition with Google Maps, which has long been available on the web.

Maps on the web is accessible in English and is compatible with Safari and Chrome on Mac and iPad, as well as Chrome and Edge on Windows PCs. Apple plans to bring support for additional languages, browsers and platforms in the future.

Apple Maps on the web works like it does on the mobile app. You can get driving and walking directions; order food from the Maps place card; browse curated guides and reviews; and more. Apple plans to bring additional functionality, like its 360-degree panoramic views “Look Around” feature, to the web version in the coming months.

Aisha Malik

Seven years on, I guess it’s time for another comparison between Apple and Google where it counts most for me: my hometown. Last time around I found Apple Maps utterly lacking, failing to show a large lake and the surrounding park on the map. This version is far closer to reality: Herăstrău lake is properly outlined, and so are several businesses and landmarks around it. But the park itself is still weirdly truncated: only the southern half is colored green to indicate vegetation, while the rest is tinted the dull dark grey of the offices and housing areas around it. The level of detail in the roads and alleyways in the park is also evidently lower than in Google Maps. On this basic test, Apple falls short of Google Maps one again, despite the praise in (US) tech circles about its massive improvements.

Android Authority: “I’ve already ditched the new Google Home widget and watch tile”

It feels like the Google Home team took forever and a day to gift us with the most basic Android feature of all: a home screen widget to control our smart home devices. And basic it is, even if, at first glance, it looks quite neat with its sexy Material You color scheme.

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So yup, for now, it seems like we get an all-or-nothing approach of favorites. Still better than nothing, eh? Until you add the widget and realize it’s a matter of all or nothing with most controls too. Lights? On or off, there’s no brightness or color wheel. Fan? Robot vacuum? Air purifier? Same. Even the few controls that Google Home is generous enough to give us in its app aren’t available here.

And if, like me, you think, “Eh, no fuss, I’ll just tap and hold to access more options”, then no, that won’t work. Tapping and holding triggers the widget movement and editing mode, not the selected device’s extra options.

Rita El Khoury

Sadly, that was my experience with this experimental Google Home widget as well. I added it to my home screen as soon as it launched last month, but it lacked many basic features and even in this bare-bones state it didn’t work reliably. Sometimes the status of smart lights wouldn’t update, other times the widget would ignore my first tap and send the command only after a second tap, while in other cases a tap would open the full Google Home app instead. At this stage it’s preferable to just open the app than to take your chances with a buggy widget.

r/photography: “Internet is wrong–Instagram portrait resolution isn’t 1080x1350px in 4:5 aspect ratio”

All sites I can find claim Instagram portraits have a 4:5 aspect ratio at 1080x1350px. According to my testing that’s flat-out wrong

This testing was done on a desktop PC and a Samsung A52 smartphone. All Software is up-to-date.

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Mobile messes up the Aspect Ratio by cropping height: When I use my phone to upload a 4:5 photo the top and bottom get cut off. The app crops my portrait posts to 8:9, 1080x1210px resolution, and that resolution is not even entirely consistent. The missing portion doesn’t appear when you look at it on desktop. It’s not hidden. It’s fully hard-cropped out of the image file.

PC uploads do use 4:5 but have higher resolutions: Unlike mobile any desktop uploads actually do tell you the aspect ratio your post will have before you upload, and it actually does stick to the 4:5. However, the common claim that it will be posted in 1080x1350 is wrong here. The resolution is far higher. My photo got cropped to 1440x1800px!

wadsadgs

Interesting find on the r/photography subreddit. Indeed, every article I’ve seen recommends an upload resolution of 1080 for the horizontal edge of the image (1080 × 1080px for square posts, 1080 × 566px for landscape posts, 1080 × 1350px for portrait posts). I’ve always found that choice somewhat odd, as it translates into a smaller resolution for landscape images, but I guess Instagram only cares about the horizontal pixel density, to fill the width of a mobile screen in a consistent manner.

augment: “The Threads Creator Paradox”

Their money flow also speaks the same language. They’ve started various influencer programs that push Instagram creators (read: “celebrity” creators) to post on Threads with a promise of $5K if they get 10,000 views. They’re going for big celebrities like Taylor Swift, who, quite frankly, doesn’t care about the platform whatsoever.

With that, I have two simple questions for Meta:

1. Why are native creators who bet your platform on day one not getting financially incentivized for the labor they put in to make your platform worth visiting?
2. Why do you think that photo and video creators who, as Deirdre Assenza would say, spam and scram, will do well on a microblogging platform?

And herein lies the Threads creator paradox: Meta believes that the grass is greener if they inject creators from one site to another while ignoring that the creators who succeed on Threads are nothing like the ones on their sister site and are certainly not traditional celebrities. In fact, if they want to inject the kind of creators who succeed on Threads from platforms they own, they’re likely to find more ideal users who run Facebook Groups—community builders who engage and give space to their group members.

Anuj Ahooja

Interesting critique of Meta’s approach to Threads from someone who seems to be a lot more engaged with the platform than me. Although the parallel to Facebook Groups, if accurate, makes me even less inclined to give Threads a chance.

On my Om: “Taboola + Apple News? No thanks”

For over a decade, I have been critical of Taboola (and its one time rival, Outbrain), equating them to the internet’s venereal disease that never goes away. In 2017, when the two companies merged, it became clear that what was the herpes of the internet was mutating into a super bug. I said as much on Twitter. Well, that day has come, and even Apple is now infected.

No way I want to pay to let Taboola and its terrible advertising re-enter my information streams. Apple’s decision to strike a deal with Taboola is shocking and off-brand — so much so that I have started to question the company’s long-term commitment to good customer experience, including its commitment to privacy. As it chases more and more revenue to appease Wall Street, it’s clear Apple will become one of those companies that prioritize shareholders over paying customers and their experience.

Om Malik

It never ceases to amaze me how Apple fans maintain such skewed perception of their revered corporation. Apple hasn’t been “committed to good customer experience” at least since they removed the headphone jack from iPhones; they have been caught artificially limiting battery capacity to incentivize people to replace their iPhones; more recently they were dragged kicking and screaming into upgrading to USB-C and RCS by new EU regulations. Their whole App Tracking Transparency initiative was a poorly feigned move to grab advertising revenue from Facebook, while Apple was cashing in billions of dollars from a deal with Google that clearly wasn’t designed for the benefits of consumer privacy. It’s blindingly obvious to anyone with an ounce of objectivity that Apple would do just about anything to increase revenues and please stockholders.

The Wall Street Journal: “AI Work Assistants need a Lot of Handholding”

CIOs interested in moving forward with the technology are now working hard to clean up and manage their data so they can take full advantage.

Bala Krishnapillai, vice president and head of the information technology group at Hitachi Americas, said the organization has encountered instances of inconsistent, duplicated, and incorrect data, leading to contradictory information that confuses AI outputs.

He said the company is regularly updating and refining its data to ensure accurate results from AI tools accessing it. That process includes the organization’s data engineers validating and cleaning up incoming data, and curating it into a “golden record”, with no contradictory or duplicate information.

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Google Cloud Chief Evangelist Richard Seroter said he believes the desire to use tools like Gemini for Google Workspace is pushing organizations to do the type of data management work they might have been sluggish about in the past.

If you don’t have your data house in order, AI is going to be less valuable than it would be if it was, he said. You can’t just buy six units of AI and then magically change your business.

Isabelle Bousquette

An entirely foreseeable obstacle for anyone working in operations, as opposed to top management who get their information about the company’s internal mechanisms neatly delivered to them in a glossy presentation. I have been through enough jobs to know that most large companies are built on a jumble of disconnected legacy systems that rarely communicate seamlessly. Also, most C-level executives are reluctant to invest into upgrading and modernizing the data infrastructure, fearing disruptions to regular operations and sunk costs without tangible benefits. Expecting an AI system to leapfrog these issues and deliver perfect results with no human input was always a rose-tinted proposition – if not downright delusional.

The Washington Post: “Meta’s Threads is struggling to win over content creators”

Threads, a text-centric service launched by Meta last year in a bid to usurp Twitter after its acquisition by Elon Musk, needs people like Dorsey and his clients if it is to succeed. Adam Mosseri, the executive overseeing Threads, recently told The Washington Post he wants it to be a place for real-time discussions of events happening in the world, from sports to TV. But content creators who spoke with The Post said they are struggling to understand the platform.

Threads still seems like a platform in search of a mission, says Lia Haberman, an independent digital strategist and author of the ICYMI newsletter on marketing and the creator economy. The focus isn’t news. It’s not about visual creativity or video, like Instagram or TikTok. So what is it?

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If Threads was a start-up we wouldn’t be questioning whether it had made its mark. They’d burn through their VC money and then quietly fold or be acquired by another player, said Haberman, the digital strategist. I don’t see how Mark Zuckerberg continues to pump money into a platform where the biggest draw so far is that it’s a less toxic alternative to Twitter.

Taylor Lorenz

Harsh, but mostly fair I think. I doubt the people behind Threads have given much thought to what it is meant to be, beyond providing an easy alternative for those shunning Twitter and inching up Meta’s advertising revenues.

CNBC: “Greece becomes first EU country to introduce a six-day working week”

Under the new legislation, which was passed as part of a broader set of labor laws last year, employees of private businesses that provide round-the-clock services will reportedly have the option of working an additional two hours per day or an extra eight-hour shift.

The change means a traditional 40-hour workweek could be extended to 48 hours per week for some businesses. Food service and tourism workers are not included in the six-day working week initiative.

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Giorgos Katsambekis, a lecturer in European and international politics at the U.K.’s Loughborough University, described the Greek government’s introduction of the labor law as “a major step back” for a workforce that is already working the longest hours in the European Union.

Workers in Greece work more than those in the U.S., Japan and others in the 27-member EU, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Greek employees were found to have worked an average of 1,886 hours in 2022, more than the U.S. average of 1,811 and the EU average of 1,571.

Sam Meredith

Feels like just the other day countries were considering lowering working days to four per week, now others are going back to six-day work weeks?!

Platformer: “Adam Mosseri on the first year of Threads”

But my hope is that whether using Threads or Instagram or Twitter or Tik Tok or YouTube, or whatever it is, that reach is not an end, but it is a means to an end. Because ideally, you are clear with yourself about what you’re trying to get out of the platform. Are you trying to sell tickets to your gigs because you’re a musician? Are you trying to advance a cause because you’re an activist? Are you trying to just raise awareness around your art if you’re an artist?

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That said, we do care about reach, we do try to grow reach. My advice is — and I think what a lot of people don’t realize, because a lot of people are coming over from Instagram — they don’t realize how important the reply game is. If you’re really trying to grow your presence, you should reply much more than you post. And the sum of all your replies is about as valuable as the sum of all the value of all your posts.

When people treat it, like, I’m just going to post and then move on with my day and then post again in a couple days and move on with my day — that’s not what it’s designed for. If it was for that, we wouldn’t have built it as a separate app — we would have built it in Instagram. But we built it so that the reply was as important as the original post — so that you could facilitate, when you’re lucky, these great conversations, which by the way helps with discovery.

Casey Newton

So… the secret recipe for reach on Threads is to become a ‘reply guy’?!

Android Police: “Google Maps Timeline now stores your location data on-device”

Right off the bat, it isn’t a Google change unless something is lost or killed off, and unsurprisingly, it’s time for Timeline on the web to bite the dust. Explaining the change, Google says it won’t have any data to display on the web interface after the switch to on-device location data management through the Maps app.

To retain access to your old Timeline data and ensure subsequent collection is localized, you’ll need to update to a recent version of Maps and follow the instructions in a push notification, in-app alert, or email you receive. You just need to specify your data management preferences on a device of your choice. That’s because the new system curates Timeline for each of your devices independently. Alternatively, you can back your Timeline data to Google servers manually or automatically. This can come in handy if you’re planning to switch to a new phone or tablet without losing the Timeline data.

The email we received mentioned that users have until December 1, 2024, to keep their saved visits and routes on the device or back them up. It warns that inaction could result in partial or complete loss of old data. If you miss the deadline, Google will try to move the last 90 days of location history to the first device you sign in to after the cutoff date, and all the older trips will be auto-deleted. We suggest keeping an eye out for this email.

Chandraveer Mathur

I haven’t received this email notification yet, so I’m still holding on to a slim hope that Google might reconsider until December. Needless to say, this news made me suddenly angry at Google for what I can only regard as a self-serving, user-hostile, and plainly stupid decision. Despite privacy concerns by some, Timeline was one of the best features of Google Maps, and I regularly checked that the places I visited were accurately recorded. The whole point of Timeline is to store your travel logs forever, so that you can revisit those years later to remind yourself of past trips and maybe find inspiration for new ones. Erasing this data automatically after some number of days or when you switch devices defeats this purpose entirely and makes Timeline borderline irrelevant.