★ My Spitball Theory on TikTok’s Current Semi-Reprieve in the U.S.

A Monday report from Reuters, syndicated at The Guardian, “Microsoft Is in Talks to Acquire TikTok, Trump Claims”: Donald Trump has suggested that Microsoft is in talks to acquire TikTok and that he would like to see a bidding war over the app. When asked if Microsoft was in talks to buy the app, the US president said “I would say yes”, adding...

Fascinating thread — and an almost entirely civil discussion of what has become, for obvious reasons, an inflammatory topic. These are mapping and metadata nerds approaching the dilemma in the very nerdiest of ways. I found it rather soothing, and also quite informative — particularly the posts from Minh Nguyễn, who seems to be an OpenStreetMap...

The whole tech world needs more projects that aren’t trying to become billion- (let alone trillion-) dollar ideas, but are happily shooting for success as million-dollar ideas (or less!).

David Pierce, writing at The Verge: Rather than buy another smartwatch, Migicovsky decided to try and get Pebble going again. He sold his most recent startup, a messaging app called Beeper, to Automattic last year and left the company in the fall. Since then, he’d thought about starting a Pebble-like product from scratch, figuring it’d be...

Google, in an announcement on X: We’ve received a few questions about naming within Google Maps. We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources. For geographic features in the U.S., this is when Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) is updated. When that happens, we will...