More than a week has gone since my previous Links of the Week post, but whateverrrrr. I’ve been busy just trying to live life with a 2 year old kid who is always feeling a bit ill, the drama of some local kids trying to kick our windows in every night, trying to fix everything that keeps breaking in the apartment, keeping up with all the chores or just trying to catch a break.
Anyway, here’s some stuff what I did see with my eyes since the last time I posted. Most of it is on the internet:
Twitterrific: End of an Era
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter there have been a lot of wild things happening and one of those is that they cut off a lot of third-party apps.
From a purely commercial point-of-view, I get it. There are a lot of apps using the API that don’t serve up any of the ads or tracking that Twitter uses to make money. But these third-party apps were what once made Twitter’s community spirit great – and apps like Twitterific have a great part to play in the history and making of Twitter.
Anyway, Big Bad Musk didn’t want this happening anymore, and so they are gone. But on the plus side, a good number of these developers are refocusing their efforts on Mastodon support.
Related: If you live in Oslo, check out my Mastodon instance oslo.town and if you don’t live in Oslo but want to give Mastodon a try, check out this list of Mastodon servers.
Design Conferences List 2023
Whether you do UX, UI, Product Design, Design Research, Interaction Design, or another form of digital design you can attribute to this field, then you might want to check out this big ol’ list of design conferences.
Every year, WhatsApp Product Designer and Twitter user @nunosans collects together all the design conferences that are happening around the world and dumps them in one collaborative spreadsheet, together with dates, links to the official websites, and pricing details.
It’s very useful if you are either looking to go to a conference, looking to speak at a conference, or even just looking to see the recordings of talks they make available live or after-the-event.
The tabs at the bottom of the spreadsheet hop between previous years.
Wonders of Street View
The website of address of Neal Agarwal is appropriate; neal.fun. It has lots of fun little playthings that Neal has coded together. One of the newest additions to the page is a Google Maps mashup.
Launching the site will throw you to random interesting Street View location somewhere around the world. Take a look, drink it up, and then hit the Random button to be whizzed off to the next location.
There’s a lot to look at and I’m sure the more curious-minded amongst us could spend hours clicking away on the site.
neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view
CatGPT
There has been a lot of hype about AI technology recently and much of that has circled around ChatGPT from OpenAI. I even wrote a little thing about it on my blog.
Anyway, some genius has made ChatGPT even better by ditching the robots and replacing them with cats. Now here’s some tech that I can fully get behind.
Diigo to Pocket ?
For years and years and years I’ve used the bookmarking service Diigo to save any web links I find interesting. It’s been reliable and consistent, but the developers have been awol for some time.
I’m trying out Mozilla Pocket. If you want to follow me there, you can follow the user @shit-hot to see any bookmarks that I share publicly.
Yandex source code leaks
If you know of Yandex, you’re probably Russian or very much into technology. They run a lot of different products and services; web search, email, maps, a web browser, alternative DNS, a taxi service, yada-yada-yada. The simplest way to describe Yandex is Google, but for Russia.
Recently a big chunk of their code was leaked and it gives a really good insight into how a modern search engine is run. For most people, going through this would be very boring, tedious, and uninteresting.
For me, it’s a bit interesting. My time in work is spend designing Microsoft 365 search experiences – so it’s right up my street. The breakdown does get a bit technical, but I’m glad someone at Search Engine Land took the time to do this write-up.
C’est magnifique
The dance scene from Pulp Fiction but they’re dancing to the Only Fools and Horses closing theme tune.
@Pandamoanimum@mstdn.social
Bye.
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