Chirag Desai


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Steve Straza:

The pricing for Twitter’s new account activity API is ridiculous and doesn’t address how Twitter clients have used the streaming APIs until now. Streaming is effectively dead as of August.

Predictable, but still sad.

The story behind Wildpeeta 🎧

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I attempted a storytelling format on my latest episode on the Wildpeeta brothers & their journey from startup to shut down, and how the lessons they learnt have led to them coming back in partnership with Freedom Pizza.

As always, full show notes & links are here.

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Taking monitoring to a whole new level.

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Micro Monday shoutout to @hartlco, not just a community member but also actively growing the ecosystem with Icro. Excited that the app is now approved!

Bans on Skype & FaceTime could be lifted in the UAE

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Natasha Turak, reporting for CNBC

UAE Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) Director General Hamad Obaid Al Mansouri confirmed the talks this week, according to local news reports, citing Microsoft and Apple’s growing investment plans in the UAE and the desire to forge closer relationships with tech companies as primary reasons.

Let’s hope.

t3chtree #7: Careem breach, password management

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We chat about ride-sharing platform Careem’s security breach notification & some password management tips. Plus, my first @microdotblog outro :)

Detailed show notes are available here.

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Was told today I look like I’m 28. Either I’m doing something right or this person is doing something wrong, but regardless, a happy Saturday :)

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Picked up my @instagram archive, will look into importing it to the current blog hopefully. Not planning to quit the platform just yet but glad I have a copy. If you didn’t know, you can pick it up here.

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It’s been ages since anyone tried to redesign or uplift the usual Twitter experience (little surprise there). Flitter reminds me of @Twittelator Neue in a way, something very clean about it. vimeo.com/266730374

Electricity reached all Indian villages on Saturday

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Utpal Bhaskar, reporting for LiveMint:

All Indian villages now have access to electricity. The last village to be brought on the national power grid was Leisang village in the Senapati district of Manipur at 5.30pm on Saturday.

Finally.

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“Maybe together we can get somewhere”

When life forces you to replace your car tyres, and you’re just sitting there waiting, courtesy @gayamusic. #music #cover

The story behind @FryingPanAdventures 🎧

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The start of a new season of the ‘Coffee & Iced Tea’ podcast, where I speak to the sisters behind Frying Pan Adventures, Dubai’s first tour company & how they got started.

Detailed show notes are available here.

A new season of Coffee & Iced Tea begins April 22!

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Links to subscribe and other fun stuff are here.

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Excited to see our podcast @t3chtree as a friend of @TieDubai & media partner for #TiEConDubai 2018. #entrepreneurship #dubai #podcast

[Podcast] t3chtree 6: Grassroots innovation, mentorship & @TiEDubai Con 2018

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We’re talking grassroots innovation in our region, mentorship & the TiECon 2018. We also have some invite codes to give away if you’re looking to attend the conference.

Detailed show notes are available here.

What Twitter was, and what it is now

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Jean MacDonald:

I have several friends in “real life” who started as Twitter buddies. But over the years, Twitter has become something I don’t recognize anymore, a place where hate and intolerance and crass commercialism have found a welcoming home.

As a side note, a nice insight into understanding micro.blog as a Twitter user—how they’re same in some ways, and how they’re different.

Her Twitter experience though is not far away from mine; some of my closest friendships & collaborations have their origins on the network, but … here we are now.

Jean doesn’t get into this much but a long-standing problem with Twitter is how they’ve stifled third party development, over, over and over again. I mean, even a service like LinkedIn doesn’t—well, can’t—really integrate with Twitter.

The ‘philosophy’ of increasingly closing off the network to the outside world or the open Web at large has been seeping into other aspects of Twitter’s culture as an organization & a platform. The last few real Twitter apps are now bending under this weight.

Considering Facebook isn’t in a particularly great place currently either, hello to an free-er, open-er Web. And hello, Micro.blog.

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What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

Someday, maybe. Not today. #2018

Massaging egos #facebook

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Zeynep Tufekci, writing for WIRED:

“It’s Time to Make Our Privacy Tools Easier to Find”, the company announced without a hint of irony—or any other kind of hint—that Zuckerberg had promised to do just that in the “coming few weeks” eight full years ago. On the company blog, Facebook’s chief privacy editor wrote that instead of being “spread across nearly 20 different screens” (why were they ever spread all over the place?), the controls would now finally be in one place.

It’s a long read but a great piece that highlights the right things. Any other company would have lost trust years ago but Facebook continues to enjoy the advantage of the ‘gravity’ effect of having 2 billion users.

My co-host Partha made a super important point last week:

These products have been made by the same people who lived with the same sort of theory that [our generation] grew up with […] they understand the importance of this privacy and they’ve been building on top of this to try and massage the egos of all the newer generations […] to try and make sure they’re comfortable about it.

The more I think about this, the more spot-on this is. People who watched—ushered in, even—the social media era and understand the privacy implications could have gone about it in two ways: ensure that even those who do not understand this are protected, or help transition the vary ones into being more comfortable about sharing. Facebook has gone the latter way too often that it’s now part of its core, making it impossible to be anything else.

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#always #weekend #birthday #whiskey

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We’re talking #privacy & @facebook on the latest episode of @t3chtree, do check it out! #podcast 🎧

‘Up to 87 million’ #facebook

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David Ingram, writing for Reuters:

Facebook Inc said on Wednesday the personal information of up to 87 million users, mostly in the United States, may have been improperly shared with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, up from a previous news media estimate of more than 50 million.

Yay.

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#Privacy iOS users, Settings → Privacy is your friend. Review & turn things off for apps that don’t need content they have access to. Turn on Advertising → Limit Ad Tracking, which stops providers from targeting ads to you (you can reset this ad ID if the setting was off).

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Micro Monday shoutout to @Macgenie, who’s also a great resource to get started on micro.blog. Plus really enjoying the @monday microcast, do check it out with you haven’t.

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Ep # 4: On the latest episode of @t3chtree talking Blackberry suing Facebook & smartphones: OS', batteries & cameras, with my recommendation for @halidecamera on iOS.

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Foxconn buys Belkin for $866m