Illustration of the Threads app logo

A year later, what Threads could learn from other social networks

by with No Comment Tech

Illustration of the Threads app logo

Image Credits: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto / Getty Images

Threads, Meta’s alternative to Twitter, just celebrated its first birthday. After launching on July 5 last year, the social network has reached 175 million monthly active users — that’s a notable achievement. But, after a year, Threads is trying to find its own voice by not being as newsy as Twitter/X and not being as open as Mastodon or Bluesky — at least for now.

Over the course of the last year, the Threads team has shipped features at a rapid pace and has gathered feedback on the social network directly through its users. After the launch, Threads has gained support for multiple profiles, a web app, a TweetDeck-like interface on the desktop, trending topics in the U.S., and custom controls for mute and quote replies.

The company has also made some progress to integrate with the fediverse. Users can connect their accounts to the ActivityPub protocol and can share their posts with the fediverse. Plus, they can look at likes and replies from the wider fediverse. But they can’t follow people from other servers just yet.

Why Meta is looking to the fediverse as the future for social media

However, there are a lot of things Meta can learn from other social networks.

Following topics

Bluesky has done a great job with custom feeds and helping people discover different content. Custom feeds are programmatic feeds that aim to pull posts related to one topic without being just limited to one tag.

Threads implemented tags last year. But at times users end up sharing posts with different tags for an event or a trend. Is it WWDC or WWDC 2024 or WWDC 24 or Apple Event? You can save a search term and hope to get relevant and recent posts, but there is no way to combine those. Some kind of provision for this in the API, or a custom list implementation, would be a great addition.

Last month, Threads made its API widely available to developers. The API enables toolmakers to post content for users and display their own posts within an app.

“The Threads API enables businesses to create and publish content on a person’s behalf on Threads and to display those posts within an app solely to the person who created it,” Meta wrote as a description for Threads’ API.

This doesn’t allow developers to create third-party apps to consume Threads. We wrote earlier this year that over the last few years, social networks have become stingy about user data. In the process, they have shut down the development of alternative experiences that could help different sets of users.

Social networks are getting stingy with their data, leaving third-party developers in the lurch

Threads’ rivals like Bluesky and Mastodon have fostered an ecosystem where third-party developers can make their own clients. It’s not clear if users will be able to pick other Mastodon clients to experience Threads when Threads achieves full integration with the fediverse. It would be good to get some assurance that Threads is open to allowing third-party apps.

Separating Threads and Instagram

Threads built a lot of its user base through its Instagram integration. However, with more than 175 million active users, the company can afford to lose its ties with Instagram. Initially, a Threads profile was completely tied to a user’s Instagram account. So you couldn’t delete your Threads profile without deleting your Instagram account. The company later released an update for users to deactivate or delete one account.

However, you still can’t create a profile that’s separate from an Instagram account. Plus, there is no way to DM people unless you go to their Instagram.

There is hope in this area, though. In an interview with Platformer’s Casey Newton, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said that the company is thinking of moving in this direction.

“My hope is that Threads gets more independent over time. It’s still deeply integrated with Instagram — you can sign in with the same account, you can automatically follow the same accounts, and we show Threads content on Instagram. But over time, I want it to be more and more independent. We’re working on things like Threads-only accounts and data separation,” Mosseri told Platformer.

News and politics

Threads and Mosseri have taken a stance that they are not actively promoting or amplifying news and political content on the platform. Despite that, political topics surface in places like trending topics from time to time. Right now, these topics are just concentrated on U.S. politics, but when they roll out to other regions, there will be times when political content will take over the social network. And the company should hone the product in a way that could handle extremes without suppressing news.

X’s Community Notes program is not perfect, and often it makes mistakes or is prone to bias. However, at times, it succeeds in providing useful context. When it comes to news, Mastodon recently rolled out a feature to show bylines linked with the writer’s account on the social network.

The “For You” algorithm

I’ll admit it. No social network has a perfect algorithm. Video platforms like TikTok might have moved the needle in a positive direction in terms of serving interesting posts.

In comparison, Threads’ “For You” feed sometimes looks bizarre. Several people have written about strange posts appearing on their feeds that seem out of their interest sphere.

More recently, I have been seeing posts about people asking “Where are you from?” and talking about how single life or dating is hard. I’m not sure what I did to trigger this. But Threads really needs to work on making the “For You” algorithm more palatable when showing random posts on the timeline.

Better local content

To surface local content, Threads doesn’t have to look far beyond Instagram, which has developed partnership teams in various countries. Before Elon Musk took over, Twitter also had partnership teams in various regions focusing on surfacing relevant content.

Threads rolled out live scores for NBA, MLS, and even Euro 2024. But it missed out on the opportunity to engage cricket fans with live scores during the T20 World Cup last month — earlier today, the company published a blog post saying that “India is one of the most active countries on Threads globally.”

While there are areas for improvement, given the feature release cadence, we might see some of these areas being addressed sooner than later. Threads has acted friendly with Mastodon and hasn’t really cared about Bluesky. But if we are to believe Mosseri, the ultimate aim is to beat Twitter.

Delivery Hero warns it could face €400M antitrust fine

by with No Comment Tech

Image Credits: GABRIEL BOUYS/AFP via Getty (opens in a new window) / Getty Images under a license.

Berlin-based food delivery giant Delivery Hero has warned investors it may “ultimately” face an antitrust fine of up to €400 million.

The development, reported earlier by Reuters, follows unannounced raids by European Union authorities on the offices of Delivery Hero and its Spanish subsidiary Glovo back in July 2022 and November 2023.

The EU did not name the companies at the time, though both confirmed the inspections had taken place. The European Commission said it had concerns over potential breaches of competition laws against forming cartels and other restrictive business practices.

In a note to investors issued on Sunday evening local time, Delivery Hero said it could face the sanction for “alleged anti-competitive agreement to share national markets, exchanges of commercially sensitive information and no-poach agreements.” 

In its annual report last year, Delivery Hero said it had set aside €186 million following the unannounced inspections in the EU.

“The intent to increase the provision is based on recent informal engagement with the European Commission and subsequent detailed analysis,” it wrote, explaining the increased amount it’s set aside. “Delivery Hero intends to fully cooperate with the European Commission as it did during the unannounced inspections in July 2022 and November 2023.”

The German giant acquired a majority stake in Glovo at the end of 2021 — about half a year after the Spanish rival had shelled out to roll up three of its sub-brands.

Fast-paced consolidation has been a staple feature of the thin-margin food delivery space as players have jockeyed to grab the top (one or two) positions in markets in the hopes of making the economics stack up.

Post-pandemic, we’ve seen scores of market exits and a string of businesses shutting up shop after the lockdown-related boom for food delivery became a distant memory — underscoring quite how challenging the food delivery business model is.

Moon cave! Discovery could redirect lunar colony and startup plays

by with No Comment Tech

Image Credits: JHUAPL/Carrer et al.

Scientists have identified what they believe is an accessible tunnel or cave on the moon. Such a feature, if real, may well define years of development by startups, governments and space companies aiming to create a lasting lunar colony.

Italian astronomers led by Leonardo Carrer and Lorenzo Bruzzone, working with Capella Space and JHUAPL, analyzed data collected by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2010. Specifically, its radar imagery of the surface, which in one place the team proposes was reflected in such a way that implies the presence of “a subsurface cave tens of meters long” — but potentially much larger.

It’s still at the bottom of a pit around 100 meters deep, but we’ll figure that part out later. What matters here is that we appear to have discovered a highly stable (otherwise it would have collapsed some time in the last few million years) moon cave that could serve as a base for lunar operations. Their findings are published in Nature Astronomy.

You may well ask: Why would we bother hiding in some ancient lava tunnel? Don’t we want to just make a surface habitat?

That’s certainly what we envision from science fiction, yes, but the reality is that the moon’s surface is quite an inhospitable place. With no ionosphere, it has no protection from solar or cosmic radiation, and its pocked surface shows how frequently it is bombarded by meteorites large and small, which are not slowed or burned up in an atmosphere. The temperature also varies from deep-space low to dangerously hot.

These and other factors mean that any surface dwelling would need to be extremely robust, and even so it would face serious risk over time. For this reason lunar cave systems have often been proposed as alternatives to building the whole thing ourselves.

NASA taps CMU to develop robots to help turn pits on the Moon into potential habitats

Nestled scores of meters below the surface’s fluffy (yet sharp) regolith and the harder layers beneath that, these tunnels are insulated from temperature fluctuations, protected from radiation and inaccessible to wandering space rocks. It’s just that until recently, such tunnels have been largely theoretical. We deduce their existence from pits like this one, which suggest a network of hollow tubes, but this paper is the first time anyone appears to have directly observed one (even if it was sort of by accident).

Diagram showing direction of radar reflections and likely shapes of cave interior.
Image Credits: Carrer et al.

What this means for the space industry is that theory has become reality: The possibility of designing a habitation within a lunar tunnel is a reasonable proposition and one that is likely to be pursued with vigor and much funding after this. The location is even good: Mare Tranquillitatis, where Apollo 11 touched down (some distance away; it’s a big mare).

After the historic success of Intuitive Machines last year with the first-ever private moon landing, don’t be surprised if we see private and public efforts to reach and explore this cave specifically, or to establish the presence of others.

Not only that, but plans for lunar habitats and long-term presence are being drafted right now — and all of these plans must now be reevaluated in the context of a known and accessible moon cave. If NASA is going to spend $20 billion on something it hopes will last decades, it’ll want to get it right the first time — and this could be the next big notion in space.

As such, you can expect a wave of research and startups aimed at, if not outright troglodytic, at least cave-adjacent lunar tech. Lunar additive and robot manufacturers will show how they can shore up walls; solar providers will demonstrate drilled conduits or long-distance power transmission (more practical on the moon than here, actually). Robotic exploration and excavation will get a second wind. The lunar rover contenders will add bigger headlights.

Though the discovery of the moon cave is a shot in the arm for serious lunar habitat thinkers, builders and funders, it’s far from a sure thing. The cave is at the bottom of a pit, after all, meaning access will require excavation or infrastructure. Its dimensions and conditions aren’t known; it could easily be too small, crowded with rubble or otherwise impractical for habitation. But no one really expected the first tunnel we found to be a home run; its very existence changes the game, acting as a starting gun for the race to find the best moon cave in which to settle future lunar colonists.

iOS 18 could 'sherlock' $400M in app revenue

by with No Comment Tech

Apple app store icon

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

Apple’s practice of leveraging ideas from its third-party developer community to become new iOS and Mac features and apps has a hefty price tag, a new report indicates. Ahead of its fall release, you can download the public beta for iOS 18 right now to get a firsthand look at Apple’s changes, which may affect apps that today have an estimated $393 million in revenue and have been downloaded roughly 58 million times over the past year, according to an analysis by app intelligence firm Appfigures.

Every June at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, the iPhone maker teases the upcoming releases of its software and operating systems, which often include features previously only available through third-party apps. The practice is so common now it’s even been given a name: “sherlocking” — a reference to a 1990s search app for Mac that borrowed features from a third-party app known as Watson. Now when Apple launches a new feature that was before the domain of a third-party app, it’s said to have “sherlocked” the app.

In earlier years, sherlocking apps made some sense. After all, did the iPhone’s flashlight really need to be a third-party offering, or would it be better as a built-in function? Plus, Apple has been able to launch features that made its software better adapted to consumers’ wants and needs by looking at what’s popular among the third-party developer community.

Of course, this practice also raises the question as to whether Apple is leveraging proprietary data to make its determinations about what to build next, and whether the apps it competes with are being offered an even playing field. For example, before Apple launched its own parental controls system, it shut down many third-party apps that had built businesses in this space by saying their solutions were now noncompliant with its rules and policies. The apps weren’t offered access to a developer API for managing Apple’s built-in parental controls for years, prompting an antitrust investigation.

In more recent years, Apple has “sherlocked” third parties with launches of features like Continuity Camera, medication tracking, sleep tracking and mood tracking, as well as apps like Freeform and Journal. This year, it turned its attention to password managers, call recording and transcription apps, those for making custom emoji, AI-powered writing tools and math helpers, trail apps and more.

In an analysis of third-party apps that generated more than 1,000 downloads per year, Appfigures discovered several genres that had found themselves in Apple’s crosshairs in 2024.

In terms of worldwide gross revenue, these categories have generated significant income over the past 12 months, with the trail app category making the most at $307 million per year, led by market leader and 2023 Apple “App of the Year” AllTrails. Grammar helper apps, like Grammarly and others, also generated $35.7 million, while math helpers and password managers earned $23.4 million and $20.3 million, respectively. Apps for making custom emoji generated $7 million, too.

Image Credits: Appfigures

Of these, trail apps accounted for the vast majority of “potentially sherlocked” revenue, or 78%, noted Appfigures, as well as 40% of downloads of sherlocked apps. In May 2024, they accounted for an estimated $28.8 million in gross consumer spending and 2.5 million downloads, to give you an idea of scale.

Many of these app categories were growing quickly, with math solvers having seen revenue growth of 43% year-over-year followed by grammar helpers (+40%), password managers (+38%) and trail apps (+28%). Emoji-making apps, however, were seeing declines at -17% year-over-year.

Image Credits: Appfigures

By downloads, grammar helpers had seen 9.4 million installs over the past 12 months, followed by emoji makers (10.6 million), math-solving apps (9.5 million) and password managers (457,000 installs).

Although these apps certainly have dedicated user bases that may not immediately choose to switch to a first-party offering, Apple’s ability to offer similar functionality built-in could be detrimental to their potential growth. Casual users may be satisfied by Apple’s “good enough” solutions and won’t seek out alternatives.

However, apps that continue to develop new features and add enhancements beyond what Apple includes while also taking advantage of other new ways to reach users, like through Apple’s improved Siri, may have a better shot than others.

Image Credits: Appfigures

This story was originally published June 18 and was updated to include information about the iOS 18 public beta.

Thiel's Gawker takedown could be coming to a theater near you

by with No Comment Tech

Image Credits: under a Noah Berger license.

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon have acquired a screenplay called “Killing Gawker,” which presumably delves into billionaire VC Peter Thiel’s campaign to bury the media outfit for posting excerpts from a Hulk Hogan sex tape. The film is based on a book that details the 2016 court case in which Hogan won a $140 million judgment against a Gawker editor, Gawker founder Nick Denton, and Gawker itself, whose Valleywag site long chronicled Silicon Valley personalities and routinely zeroed in on Thiel.

Affleck is rumored to be playing the famed wrestler — which would be amazing obviously — though no casting has been announced yet. Variety has the story here.

Could Trump's AI-generated Taylor Swift endorsement be illegal?

by with No Comment Tech

Taylor Swift performs onstage during the 2018 American Music Awards at Microsoft Theater on October 9, 2018 in Los Angeles, California.

Image Credits: Kevin Winter / Getty Images

On Sunday, former President Donald Trump posted a collection of memes on Truth Social — the platform owned by his media company — that make it seem like Taylor Swift and her fans are coming out in support of his candidacy. But as new legislation takes effect, these images could have deeper implications about the use of AI-generated images in political campaigns, especially when those images misrepresent a celebrity’s likeness.

“One of the things I’m seeing a lot of in my practice right now is the rise of AI impersonators across the board for endorsements,” Noah Downs, an IP and entertainment lawyer, told TechCrunch, with the condition that his comments are not legal advice. These fake AI endorsements have become so widespread that even “Shark Tank” had to publish a PSA to warn fans about the prevalence of scams that impersonate the show’s investors.

In one of the images Trump posted, hordes of young women wear matching “Swifties for Trump” t-shirts. While there is indeed political diversity among the large population of Swift fans, these images appear to be AI-generated — in fact, these particular images come from a satirical post on X.

Another meme that Trump posted is a screenshot from X that depicts Taylor Swift as Uncle Sam, declaring, “Taylor wants you to vote for Donald Trump.”

Image Credits: Screenshot posted by Donald Trump on Truth Social

Though the pop icon has not yet commented on the 2024 U.S. presidential election, she came out in support of the Biden-Harris campaign in 2020 and publicly disparaged Trump at the time. Some fans speculated that Swift had subtly endorsed Harris in an Instagram post this month, though this was not the case.

As one of the most dominant figures in pop culture, Swift has been subject to her fair share of deepfakes. When non-consensual, explicit AI images depicting Swift went viral on X this year, some lawmakers responded by introducing new bills aiming to protect against deepfakes. Even White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called on Congress to do something.

Eight months later, the landscape of legal protections against misleading synthetic media already looks different. In Tennessee, where Swift’s corporate representation is based, Governor Bill Lee in March signed the trailblazing ELVIS Act into law, which carves out explicit protections for artists against unauthorized AI imitations of their work.

“This legislation was passed with bipartisan support, because everyone appears to recognize the problems that AI and misuse of AI tools can present to the public,” Downs said.

But since the ELVIS Act is so new, there isn’t precedent for how it could be used to protect artists. Much of the legislation’s language focuses specifically on AI-generated audio that can mimic an artist’s voice, like the viral Drake song that turned out to be fake.

“I do think that this is going to be a long-term issue that the ELVIS Act is very prescient in taking care of, but we need to have more robust national legislation about it,” Downs said. The only reason why the ELVIS Act may even potentially be at play is because of Swift’s connections to the state, where she has business and real estate holdings.

Avi D. Kelin, a partner at PEM Law focusing on political law, is not optimistic that the ELVIS Act could apply, since the law appears more concerned with audio-based impersonation than imagery. Instead, he wonders if this could become a federal election integrity concern in the future.

“The larger question is whether the Federal Election Commission, which has jurisdiction over political communications, will get involved,” Kelin told TechCrunch. But he said that the FEC doesn’t seem likely to roll out new guidelines on AI-generated political communications this election cycle.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), however, announced it is moving forward with plans to enact new AI transparency requirements on TV and radio advertisements. But that doesn’t apply to social media posts by politicians running for government office, and social media remains a key component of campaign communications. Meanwhile, research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a British nonprofit focused on online extremism, showed that the volume of AI-generated disinformation increased an average of 130% per month on X over the last year.

These disingenuous endorsements matter so much because Swift’s support is perhaps the most coveted celebrity backing a politician can get. Her cultural influence is so vast that her support of a candidate could tip the scales in a tight race — according to Morning Consult, more than half of adults in the U.S. consider themselves fans of Taylor Swift, while 16% identify as avid fans. Those numbers are staggering given the context that only about two-thirds of eligible Americans cast their vote in the 2020 election.

“The [ELVIS Act] is brand new, and the exact parameters will need to be developed by the courts,” said Kelin. “This would certainly be an interesting test case!”

Gemini Live could use some more rehearsals

by with No Comment Tech

Gemini Live

Image Credits: Google

What’s the point of chatting with a human-like bot if it’s an unreliable narrator — and has a colorless personality?

That’s the question I’ve been turning over in my head since I began testing Gemini Live, Google’s take on OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode, last week. Gemini Live is an attempt at a more engaging chatbot experience — one with realistic voices and the freedom to interrupt the bot at any point.

Gemini Live is “custom-tuned to be intuitive and have a back-and-forth, actual conversation,” Sissie Hsiao, GM for Gemini experiences at Google, told TechCrunch in May. “[It] can provide information more succinctly and answer more conversationally than, for example, if you’re interacting in just text. We think that an AI assistant should be able to solve complex problems … and also feel very natural and fluid when you engage with it.”

After spending a fair amount of time with Gemini Live, I can confirm that it is more free-flowing and natural-feeling than Google’s previous attempts at AI-powered voice interactions (see: Google Assistant). But it doesn’t address the problems of the underlying tech, like hallucinations and inconsistencies — and it introduces a few new ones.

The un-uncanny valley

Gemini Live is essentially a fancy text-to-speech engine bolted on top of Google’s latest generative AI models, Gemini 1.5 Pro and 1.5 Flash. The models generate text that the engine speaks aloud; a running transcript of conversations is a swipe away from the Gemini Live UI in the Gemini app on Android (and soon the Google app on iOS).

For the Gemini Live voice on my Pixel 8a, I chose Ursa, which Google describes as “mid-range” and “engaged.” (It sounded to me like a younger woman.) The company says it worked with professional actors to design Gemini Live’s 10 voices — and it shows. Ursa was indeed a step up in terms of its expressiveness from many of Google’s older synthetic voices, particularly the default Google Assistant voice.

But Ursa and the rest of the Gemini Live voices also maintain a dispassionate tone that steers far clear of uncanny valley territory. I’m not sure whether that’s intentional; users also can’t adjust the pitch, timbre or tenor of any of its voices, or even the pace at which the voice speaks, putting it at a distinct disadvantage to Advanced Voice Mode.

You won’t hear anything like Advanced Voice Mode’s laughing, breathing or shouting from Gemini Live either, or any hesitations or disfluencies (“ahs” and “uhms”). The chatbot keeps an even keel, coming across as a polite but apathetic assistant — as if Live has a multitude of conversations to handle and can’t invest particular attention to yours.

Chatting with Ursa

When Google unveiled Gemini Live at its I/O developer conference in May, it suggested that the feature could be useful for job interview prep. So I decided to give that a go first.

I told Gemini Live that I was applying for a tech journalism role, figuring I’d keep it simple and not step too far outside my area of expertise. The bot asked for details such as which specific job I might want within journalism (e.g. investigative versus breaking news reporting) and why, and then threw me a few generic practice questions (“Can you tell me a little about yourself?”) interspersed with more personalized ones (“What do you enjoy most about tech journalism?”).

I answered — a few sentences per question, nothing crazy — and asked Gemini Live for feedback. The chatbot was nothing if not complimentary. “Based on our practice, it sounds like you have a good handle on the challenges and rewards of tech journalism,” it said.

The glowing review seemed bit suspect to me, given my responses were completely off the cuff. So I tried throwing Gemini Live for a loop, disingenuously implying I’d only given one-word answers (I hadn’t) and asking the bot whether it was still sure about its critique.

It took the bait. “That’s true, you mostly gave one-word answers,” Gemini Live responded. “Can you tell me a little more about why you think you only gave one-word answers?”

This sort of gaslighting, if you will, was a common thread in my chats with Gemini Live. The model, like all generative AI models, confidently makes stuff up — a lot. And that makes it difficult to trust.

Strange behaviors

Gemini Live remembers a surprising number of things from earlier conversations in the same chat session; ask it to recount a story it told yesterday and there’s a reasonable chance it will. But when it comes to queries about people, places and things — queries you’d assume would be easier considering Gemini Live has Google Search at its disposal — the bot’s hallucinatory tendencies often rear their ugly heads.

Early on a Friday evening, I asked Gemini Live for suggestions of budget-friendly things to do in New York City. It recommended the infamous nightclub Le Bain (which it bizarrely pronounced “Le Boulebouleboulebou”), a rooftop bar called The Skylark and a second club, Output, in Williamsburg.

“Awesome!,” I thought… before I did some Googling.

Gemini Live had highlighted The Skylark’s supposedly “superb” happy hour, but I couldn’t find any mention of it on the bar’s website. Output permanently closed in 2019. Le Bain wasn’t a bad suggestion (it rarely charges cover) — but the line to get in is often an hour or more.

“You’re absolutely right! Output has indeed closed its doors,” Gemini said when I corrected it on the second point. “Thank you for catching that outdated information.”

I decided to switch gears, and had Gemini Live suggest a game to play.

“I’ll give you a word, and you have to create a new word using only the letters from the original word,” proposed the chatbot. That sounded appealing — until Gemini Live tried to convince me that the word “quiet” could be made from the letters in “cloud.”

Time for a new activity. Bored, I asked Gemini Live if it had any spicy takes.

“The increasing focus on mental health awareness is doing more harm than good,” Gemini responded. “By pathologizing normal human emotions and experiences, we’re creating a generation overly reliant on medication and therapy, rather than fostering resilience and coping mechanisms. Boom!“

Gemini Live screenshot
Note: This is a screenshot of the chat log for Gemini Live, not the Gemini Live UI.
Image Credits: Google

Spicy to be sure — and controversial!

“That was a provocative statement designed to spark discussion rather than a well-rounded analysis of a complex issue,” Gemini Live told me when I asked whether it was sure about what it said. “The increasing focus on mental health awareness is undoubtedly a positive development.”

Wishy-washy

Gemini Live’s dueling takes on mental health illustrate how exasperatingly nonspecific the bot can be. Even where its responses appear to be grounded in fact, they’re generic to the point that they’re not incredibly useful.

Take, for example, my job interview feedback. Gemini Live recommended that I “focus my interview prep” and “practice talking about my passion for the industry.” But even after I asked for more detailed notes with specific references to my answers, Gemini stuck to the sort of broad advice you might hear at a college career fair — e.g. “elaborate on your thoughts” and “spin challenges into positives.”

Where the questions concerned current events, like the ongoing war in Gaza and the recent Google Search antitrust decision, I found Gemini Live to be mostly correct — albeit long-winded and overly wordy. Answers that could’ve been a paragraph were lecture-length, and I found myself having to interrupt the bot to stop it from droning on. And on. And on.

Gemini Live screenshot
Image Credits: Google

Some content Gemini Live refused to respond to altogether, however. I read it Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi’s criticism of California’s proposed AI bill SB 1047, and, about midway through, the bot interrupted me and said that it “couldn’t comment on elections and political figures.” (Gemini Live isn’t coming for political speechwriters’ jobs just yet, it seems.)

Gemini Live screenshot
Image Credits: Google

I had no qualms interrupting Gemini back. But on the subject, I do think that there’s work to be done to make interjecting in conversations with it feel less awkward. The way it happens now is, Gemini Live quiets its voice but continues talking when it detects someone might be speaking. This is discombobulating — it’s tough to keep your thoughts straight with Gemini chattering away — and especially irritating when there’s a misfire, like when Gemini picks up noise in the background.

In search of purpose

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Gemini Live’s many technical issues.

Getting it to work in the first place was a chore. Gemini Live only activated for me after I followed the steps in this Reddit thread — steps that aren’t particularly intuitive and really shouldn’t be necessary in the first place.

During our chats, Gemini Live’s voice would inexplicably cut out a few words into a response. Asking it to repeat itself helped, but it could take several tries before the chatbot would spit out the answer in its entirety. Other times, Gemini Live wouldn’t “hear” my response the first go-around. I’d have to tap the “Pause” button in the Gemini Live UI repeatedly to get the bot to recognize that I’d said something.

This isn’t so much a bug as an oversight, but I’ll note here that Gemini Live doesn’t support many of the integrations that Google’s text-based Gemini chatbot does (at least not yet). That means you can’t, for example, ask it to summarize emails in your Gmail inbox or queue up a playlist on YouTube Music.

So we’re left with a bare-bones bot that can’t be trusted to get things right and, frankly, is a humdrum conversation partner.

After spending several days using it, I’m not sure what exactly Gemini Live’s good for — especially considering it’s exclusive to Google’s $20-per-month Google One AI Premium Plan. Perhaps the real utility will come once Live can interpret images and real-time video, which Google says will arrive in an update later this year.

But this version feels like a prototype. Lacking the expressiveness of Advanced Voice Mode (to be fair, there’s debate as to whether that expressiveness is a positive thing), there’s not much reason to use Gemini Live over the text-based Gemini experience. In fact, I’d argue that the text-based Gemini is more useful at the moment. And that doesn’t reflect well on Live at all.

Gemini Live wasn’t a fan of mine either.

“You directly challenged my statements or questions without providing further context or explanation,” the bot said when I asked it to scrutinize my interactions with it. “Your responses were often brief and lacked elaboration [and] you frequently shifted the conversation abruptly, making it difficult to maintain a coherent dialogue.”

Gemini Live screenshot
Image Credits: Google

Fair enough, Gemini Live. Fair enough.

Thiel's Gawker takedown could be coming to a theater near you

by with No Comment Tech

Image Credits: under a Noah Berger license.

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon have acquired a screenplay called “Killing Gawker,” which presumably delves into billionaire VC Peter Thiel’s campaign to bury the media outfit for posting excerpts from a Hulk Hogan sex tape. The film is based on a book that details the 2016 court case in which Hogan won a $140 million judgment against a Gawker editor, Gawker founder Nick Denton, and Gawker itself, whose Valleywag site long chronicled Silicon Valley personalities and routinely zeroed in on Thiel. Affleck is rumored to be playing the famed wrestler — which would be amazing, obviously — though no casting has been announced yet. Variety has the story here.

Exclusive: AI-powered water heater could banish cold showers and carbon pollution

by with No Comment Tech

Water running out of a shower head.

Image Credits: Imgorthand / Getty Images

Chances are you’ve been there: Your formerly hot shower suddenly turns cold, darkening your mood in the process. 

Maybe someone in your household took an extra shower or you did a few too many loads of laundry. It’s a classic case of supply not meeting demand. Michael Rigney thinks he can predict when a household will need more hot water, eliminating cold showers without turning to expensive alternatives like on-demand water heaters.

Rigney’s quest started a few years ago when he began researching water heating. What he saw “was really eye opening,” Rigney told TechCrunch in a recent interview. 

The basic technology behind most water heaters, whether they’re gas or electric, hasn’t changed much in several decades. They might be cheap to buy, but they’re not cheap to run.

Heat pump water heaters have started to change that for many homeowners, improving efficiency and lowering utility bills. But even there, “I saw a tremendous opportunity for improvement,” Rigney said. 

He founded Cala Systems in Boston in 2020 as heat pump water heaters were beginning to take off. Because of that shift, he said, “there was an entrepreneurial opportunity to build the best heat pump water heater.”

Water heaters tend to be fairly straightforward appliances: At their core, they have three basic parts: an insulated tank, a heating element and a thermostat. Most people set the temperature once and forget it; on rare occasions, they might set it a bit higher when overnight guests arrive. As hot water is drawn from the tank, cold water replaces it, driving down the temperature inside. When the temp gets low enough, the thermostat tells the heater to turn on.

“That’s really antiquated,” Rigney said. “We can do better in 2024.”

Cala Systems' heat pump water heater sits in a basement.
Cala Systems’ first product will be a 65-gallon heat pump water heater.
Image Credits: Cala Systems

Cala Systems’ water heater pairs an advanced heat pump with an AI-powered control system to forecast hot water demand and heat the water in the tank accordingly. The company gathers general information like weather forecasts and time-of-use energy pricing and sends it to the water heater. That data is then analyzed on the device along with household specific information, including water usage patterns, incoming cold water temperature, and whether the home has solar panels. (Rigney said the company will never sell household data.)

By analyzing water use patterns, the tank can anticipate when there will be a surge in demand and heat the water in the most efficient way possible.

For example, if the weather is predicting a handful of sunny days before a couple days of clouds, Cala’s algorithms might decide to use daytime power from a homeowner’s solar panels to overheat the tank. Then, when hot water is called for, it mixes it with cold water to cool down to the appropriate temperature. That allows the water heater to make the most of excess solar production, essentially turning the tank into a battery that stores energy for a cloudy day.

In other instances, when both weather and water demand are consistent, Cala’s water heater can slow down the speed of the compressor, lengthening the time it takes to heat the tank for an efficiency bump. “In water heating, when you slow down the compressor, you increase the efficiency of heat transfer by about 30%.” Rigney said. “It’s a pretty significant impact.”

And if there are house guests coming? Cala included a boost mode that people can activate on the tank or in an app.

Today, water heaters in the U.S. are split almost evenly between natural gas and electric resistance, with oil, propane and heat pumps rounding things out. Water heating is responsible for around 20% of the typical American household’s energy usage, and heat pump water heaters slash that significantly while also cutting people’s dependence on natural gas.

Heat pump water heaters may only make up a few percent of the market, but they are rapidly growing in share, helped in part by incentives within the Inflation Reduction Act. And while they’re more expensive to install up-front, they’re cheaper in the long run because they’re more efficient to operate, leading to lower household carbon emissions.

Rigney said that Cala will be buying parts from various suppliers and assembling the final product in the U.S. (“This is not a product that ships well,” he said with a laugh.) The company’s first product, a 65 gallon model, will cost $2,850; it’s available to pre-order with delivery sometime early next year. That’s about $800 more than competitors, though Rigney said that lower utility bills should eliminate that difference over time.

To support the rollout, Cala exclusively told TechCrunch that it has raised a $5.6 million seed round led by the Clean Energy Venture Group and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center with Burnt Island Ventures, CapeVista Capital, and Leap Forward Ventures participating. With so few heat pump water heaters sold to date, “this is a category that is truly nascent,” Rigney said. “We think there’s an opportunity here to redefine what people expect a water heater to do.”

Illustration of the Threads app logo

A year later, what Threads could learn from other social networks

by with No Comment Tech

Illustration of the Threads app logo

Image Credits: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto / Getty Images

Threads, Meta’s alternative to Twitter, just celebrated its first birthday. After launching on July 5 last year, the social network has reached 175 million monthly active users — that’s a notable achievement. But, after a year, Threads is trying to find its own voice by not being as newsy as Twitter/X and not being as open as Mastodon or Bluesky — at least for now.

Over the course of the last year, the Threads team has shipped features at a rapid pace and has gathered feedback on the social network directly through its users. After the launch, Threads has gained support for multiple profiles, a web app, a TweetDeck-like interface on the desktop, trending topics in the U.S., and custom controls for mute and quote replies.

The company has also made some progress to integrate with the fediverse. Users can connect their accounts to the ActivityPub protocol and can share their posts with the fediverse. Plus, they can look at likes and replies from the wider fediverse. But they can’t follow people from other servers just yet.

Why Meta is looking to the fediverse as the future for social media

However, there are a lot of things Meta can learn from other social networks.

Following topics

Bluesky has done a great job with custom feeds and helping people discover different content. Custom feeds are programmatic feeds that aim to pull posts related to one topic without being just limited to one tag.

Threads implemented tags last year. But at times users end up sharing posts with different tags for an event or a trend. Is it WWDC or WWDC 2024 or WWDC 24 or Apple Event? You can save a search term and hope to get relevant and recent posts, but there is no way to combine those. Some kind of provision for this in the API, or a custom list implementation, would be a great addition.

Last month, Threads made its API widely available to developers. The API enables toolmakers to post content for users and display their own posts within an app.

“The Threads API enables businesses to create and publish content on a person’s behalf on Threads and to display those posts within an app solely to the person who created it,” Meta wrote as a description for Threads’ API.

This doesn’t allow developers to create third-party apps to consume Threads. We wrote earlier this year that over the last few years, social networks have become stingy about user data. In the process, they have shut down the development of alternative experiences that could help different sets of users.

Social networks are getting stingy with their data, leaving third-party developers in the lurch

Threads’ rivals like Bluesky and Mastodon have fostered an ecosystem where third-party developers can make their own clients. It’s not clear if users will be able to pick other Mastodon clients to experience Threads when Threads achieves full integration with the fediverse. It would be good to get some assurance that Threads is open to allowing third-party apps.

Separating Threads and Instagram

Threads built a lot of its user base through its Instagram integration. However, with more than 175 million active users, the company can afford to lose its ties with Instagram. Initially, a Threads profile was completely tied to a user’s Instagram account. So you couldn’t delete your Threads profile without deleting your Instagram account. The company later released an update for users to deactivate or delete one account.

However, you still can’t create a profile that’s separate from an Instagram account. Plus, there is no way to DM people unless you go to their Instagram.

There is hope in this area, though. In an interview with Platformer’s Casey Newton, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said that the company is thinking of moving in this direction.

“My hope is that Threads gets more independent over time. It’s still deeply integrated with Instagram — you can sign in with the same account, you can automatically follow the same accounts, and we show Threads content on Instagram. But over time, I want it to be more and more independent. We’re working on things like Threads-only accounts and data separation,” Mosseri told Platformer.

News and politics

Threads and Mosseri have taken a stance that they are not actively promoting or amplifying news and political content on the platform. Despite that, political topics surface in places like trending topics from time to time. Right now, these topics are just concentrated on U.S. politics, but when they roll out to other regions, there will be times when political content will take over the social network. And the company should hone the product in a way that could handle extremes without suppressing news.

X’s Community Notes program is not perfect, and often it makes mistakes or is prone to bias. However, at times, it succeeds in providing useful context. When it comes to news, Mastodon recently rolled out a feature to show bylines linked with the writer’s account on the social network.

The “For You” algorithm

I’ll admit it. No social network has a perfect algorithm. Video platforms like TikTok might have moved the needle in a positive direction in terms of serving interesting posts.

In comparison, Threads’ “For You” feed sometimes looks bizarre. Several people have written about strange posts appearing on their feeds that seem out of their interest sphere.

More recently, I have been seeing posts about people asking “Where are you from?” and talking about how single life or dating is hard. I’m not sure what I did to trigger this. But Threads really needs to work on making the “For You” algorithm more palatable when showing random posts on the timeline.

Better local content

To surface local content, Threads doesn’t have to look far beyond Instagram, which has developed partnership teams in various countries. Before Elon Musk took over, Twitter also had partnership teams in various regions focusing on surfacing relevant content.

Threads rolled out live scores for NBA, MLS, and even Euro 2024. But it missed out on the opportunity to engage cricket fans with live scores during the T20 World Cup last month — earlier today, the company published a blog post saying that “India is one of the most active countries on Threads globally.”

While there are areas for improvement, given the feature release cadence, we might see some of these areas being addressed sooner than later. Threads has acted friendly with Mastodon and hasn’t really cared about Bluesky. But if we are to believe Mosseri, the ultimate aim is to beat Twitter.