The way you use Twitter could soon fundamentally change.

The company is now starting to roll out its latest feature designed to make Twitter a more friendly place to its users: the ability to follow specific topics the same way you might follow individual accounts.

Twitter previously revealed that it was working on the feature earlier this year, though the company has experimented with variations of the concept for much longer. But it’s now ready to start pushing it out to all users, according to The Verge, which reports that the feature will go live for all Twitter users on Nov. 13.

Twitter is starting with about 300 topics, which span sports, entertainment, and gaming (notably, the company is intentionally staying away from politics for now). When you choose to follow a topic, Twitter will then pull tweets from relevant accounts into your timeline in order to give you a more expansive view of a topic, like a specific sports team.  Read more…

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Facebook’s relationship with third-party developers has always had its ups and downs. 

Thousands of pages of newly released internal Facebook documents — obtained by investigative reporter Duncan Campbell and published by NBC News — put a much finer point on it. The included chat logs paint a picture of a company that knew it was screwing over developers, a stance that caused at least some employees to lament how badly Facebook was “fucking with” the companies that relied on access to Facebook APIs and user data. 

The documents originated from a lawsuit brought against Facebook by the startup Six4Three regarding the former’s treatment of third-party apps. While under seal by California courts, UK courts compelled Six4Three’s founder to hand over a laptop containing all the records. They were later leaked to the press.  Read more…

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We’re well on our way to Stranger Things 4, but no reason we can’t reminisce on Stranger Things 2. 

Over two years after the release of the sci-fi series’ second season, Netflix has dropped the Stranger Things 2 blooper reel. It’s full of our favorite kid actors (looking a whole lot younger), Sean Astin (playing a Bob who is way more alive), and a lot of slipping, tripping, falling, fumbling, stumbling, stuttering, and breaking stuff. Lots and lots of breaking stuff. 

Here’s lookin’ at you Stranger Things 4. We’re thinking like 2021, right? Read more…

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Young actress Rachel Zegler just so happens to be a spectacular impressionist. 

Zegler shared a thread of her crazy-good (and admittedly specific) impressions on Twitter earlier this week, including Cat Valentine’s laugh from the Nickelodeon show Victorious and a screaming R2-D2. 

“A thread of impressions that i can do because they’re too obscure for my resume even though no one cares,” she wrote to start things off.

Clearly, lots of people care. The thread racked up thousands of retweets and likes.

1. Yzma from The Emperor’s New Groove

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Launched 42 years ago, the spacecraft has finally passed the heliopause, after journeying past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Read more…

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Currently, Uber claims that its newest cars can sense pedestrians for 88 meters, or 4.5 seconds, before any potential impact. Read more…

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Twitter wants you to know that it’s listening. 

The social media company announced Tuesday that, after an infuriating few days, it has finally fixed an iOS app bug that was driving its users bonkers. For the blissfully unaware, the bug would randomly scroll Twitter feeds — causing people to lose their place while right in the middle of staring into the digital abyss. 

Thankfully, no more. According to a tweet from the Twitter Support account, the brief torture of having our precious feed toyed with before our very eyes has come to an end. 

“A fix for the auto-scrolling bug is rolling out now,” wrote whoever is behind the account. “Thanks for your patience while we worked on this. Please update your iOS app to version 8.1.5 when it becomes available for you.” Read more…

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As many as 100 developers may have had improper access to Facebook user data due to an oversight in the way permissions were revoked, according to a post on the company’s developer blog on Tuesday.

The names and profile pictures of people in certain Groups on the platform, linked with their activity in those Groups, were still accessible to some software developers — despite the company changing access parameters back in April 2018, Facebook’s director of platform’s partnerships Konstantinos Papamiltiadis wrote.

Of the “roughly 100 partners” who had retained user data access through the Groups API over the past 18 months, “at least 11 partners accessed group members’ information in the last 60 days,” the post said. Read more…

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More than a year and a half ago, Elaine Herzberg was struck and killed while walking her bicycle across a Tempe, Arizona road. A self-driving Uber with a safety operator sitting in the driver seat struck her. On Tuesday, a federal agency published detailed findings about the crash, clearly spelling out Uber’s deadly shortcomings.

In the documents, reports include what led up to the crash in the hours before the safety driver got into the vehicle as well as Uber’s testing policies, how the self-driving car system worked, and what happened in the moments before impact. The report also delved into how Uber has changed its autonomous testing program since the first-ever autonomous car fatality in the U.S. Read more…

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Twitter is due for a major shakeup. 

So appears to be the thinking of the company’s vice president of design and research, Dantley Davis, who on Monday announced a series of changes that could come to the platform as early as next year. Well, maybe. 

Davis laid out his ideas on, of course, Twitter — prefacing them all with the disclaimer that they are merely “features that [he’s] looking forward to in 2020.” Still, they represent a possible sweeping change to how users interact with the platform. 

The proposed new features are: “Remove me from this conversation,” “Don’t allow RT of this tweet,” “Don’t allow people to @mention me without my permission,” “Remove this @mention from this conversation,” and “Tweet this only to: hashtag, interest, or these friends.” Read more…

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