 Come on YouTube. You can do it. Yes, we are live. Hello, Internet. Hello, YouTube, Internet. YouTube, Internet. So, Sarah, where did you learn French? On podcasts. Oh, nice. My French is very bad, but I, a couple of years ago, I had a friend who lives in Belgium. He doesn't speak English and, you know, it's a long story. But for a variety of reasons, I decided to really learn French. And, you know, I got okay. Like, I could actually get by, you know, having a conversation that was more than, how are you? Are you hungry? Good night. My name is Sarah. Exactly. But, you know, you have to keep up with it. Now it's like, super rusty, but, but I enjoyed it. I enjoyed learning. And you're, you're not like listening to podcasts and stuff to keep it going? Not currently, but I would have a great tech podcast to recommend to you. I bet you would. I bet you would. Maybe we'll talk about it later in the show. Oh, that would be fun. And when is Tom coming back? That lazy bum going on vacation? No, this is the first two weeks that he's out. Yeah. Two weeks. Wow. So he'll be back. Memorial Day is the 28th, which is a Monday in the U.S. And then we start back up on the 29th. Oh, and I'm not there on the 29th. Yeah. Need to store a replacement. That's how easily I'm replaced. Roger goes, oh, I need to, at some point. As someone who's went through four layoffs, like everyone's, I, it's literally hardwired. Everyone's, everyone is replaceable. I feel your pain. I know I've been through four, but I've been through a couple. It's weird. Was I ever laid off? I think I always quit before I was fired. I dodged the first two. And then when Comcast G4 bought us, I was out, but then there was, there were layoffs happening at ZIF when I was working there. And I just kind of like, well, you know what? I'm just going to get ahead of it. You can't fire me. I quit. Oh, hey, guys. I think it's time for the show to start the show. So, kill me in. All right. So, and we'll go in three, two. Daily Tech News show is powered by you. To find out more, head to dailytechnewshow.com slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, May 15, 2018. Tom Meredith out of the country holding it down. It's me, Sarah Lane at Studio Feline. And with me is Patrick Beja straight from Finland. How's it going? Internet. It's going good. Okay. Oh, you're the Internet. Okay. Actually, I'm speaking on the Internet, Sarah. Right. Well, if you can keep doing that, I have a few questions I would like to ask you about because I'm not super happy about some of the things you've been doing. So maybe we can talk about that a little bit later. Well, all right. Let's do that. To bring along is Roger Chang, producer. Roger, how are you? I'm great. I am happy as Oyster not being cooked. Well, that's rather unlike you, but I'm happy to hear you're doing so well. Well, we've got a lot of stuff to talk about a little bit later in the show. We're going to talk about Twitter's new ways to try to bury tweets that are, I don't know, unhelpful to humanity. But first, let's start with a few tech things you should know. Google announced new consumer storage plans under a new name, Google One, including a new $2.99 per month tier for 200 gigabytes of storage. The two terabyte plan drops quite significantly from $20 a month to $10 a month. Users can also share their storage quota now with up to five family members and get 24 seven access to Google experts. Those are basically people on call to help you. The existing free quota of 15 gigabytes per month will remain as an option as well. The rollout starts out in the US over the next few months. Nice. More storage. Google One, the one type of brand sounds a little bit early 2000s though, for some reason. I don't know. I'm not a big fan. It's fine. Monday, the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear the case of personal audio versus EFF. This reaffirms the April 2015 ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that sided with the Patent Trial and Appeals Board, who invalidated the podcast patent. In 2013, personal audio, the podcasting patent holder began sending legal demand letters to numerous podcasters and companies that they enter into a licensing deal or be sued for infringing on their patent. One of their more high-profile targets was Adam Corolla's podcast. When I was working at Twitch, also another podcast network that was targeted. A win for the podcasters, I suppose. Confirmation that personal audio, please stop. You're done. Patent Trolls. We can podcast in peace. Tim Cook tells Bloomberg that Apple Music now has more than 50 million users between paid and trial users, but that's up from 40 million just last month. If we're keeping score, Major Competitor Spotify announced earlier this month that it has 75 million premium subscribers. So obviously, Spotify has a lot more, but I keep hearing, you know, this is a little bit of a bubble effect, I think. Everyone I hear is like, oh, Apple Music, I'm using Spotify. It seems Apple Music is not doing too badly after all. I mean, I'm an Apple Music subscriber. Spotify is public now, things are different. All right. Well, let's talk a little bit more about Mark Zuckerberg. Let's. His favorite topic of ours. Mark Zuckerberg won't appear before the UK Parliamentary Committee that gave him an ultimatum to testify willingly or be sent a summons the next time he stepped foot in the UK. Facebook's head of public policy, Rebecca Stimman, wrote in a letter, sent three days after the deadline that Zuckerberg has quote, no plan, no plans to meet with the committee or travel to the UK at the present time. The committee plans to follow up with Facebook to address significant gaps in the company's answer as it continues to investigate its data privacy practices. You know, I mean, if Mark Zuckerberg really doesn't plan to travel to the UK anytime soon, I can see why they're like, okay, well, I mean, we'll deal when we do, but he's not coming here anytime soon. This is, yeah, it felt like I'm not going to be vulgar, but it felt like a rude gesture a little bit. It was like, well, you have to come. And if you don't come to the committee to appear in front of the committee, well, the next time you come to the UK, we will make you come in front of the committee. And they're like, he has no plans to come. It was like the ultimatum, the least effective ultimatum in the history of ultimatums. It was kind of. And missing that deadline by three days is just like a little bit of a big like, we couldn't be bothered. We were so busy with F8s. I agree. It's a little bit, well, if you're going to start using a threatening tone, make sure you can back it up. But I mean, the bigger story here is, does Mark Zuckerberg not want to personally face what he might be facing if he goes there? I mean, you could avoid it for a while, but probably not forever. And is there more to the story? Facebook has sent spokespeople on his behalf, on Facebook's behalf already. And the UK is not happy with that. So, at this point, it's sort of like, what are we doing here? It felt like a political image move from the UK's perspective. It was like, well, we are going to get Zuckerberg to appear in front of us because he needs to answer to people. And he's like, no, I'm good. Yeah, I'm going to stay in the US for a while, or at least out of the UK. All right, moving on. Microsoft has unveiled details on its Surface Hub 2, which is a 50.5 inch 4k plus display, which can be rotated to a portrait screen, from landscape. You can also tile up to four of them together to create an even larger display, good for conference rooms, I suppose, or spread multiple Hub 2s around a room. Features, rolling cases that mounts, co-developed with Steelcase, which Microsoft partnered with last year, also has a 3 by 2 aspect ratio, which is sort of unique. The standard is 16 by 9. Touchscreen support, of course, and support to share docs from your computer or your mobile device. Microsoft will start testing the Surface Hub 2 with partners later this year with plans who officially released the device in 2019. We have no pricing, but you might recall that their original Surface Hub was $9,000. Might be a little bit cheaper, it's possible. It certainly looks very sexy, and the way they demo it feels like the future. The problem with these devices is always, does it actually work like this in practice? Or is it really just a big computer screen for your PowerPoint presentation to be projected on? Well, I think Microsoft admitted that the original Hub, they sold about 5,000 copies, well, copies of 5,000 models. This is definitely a enterprise fancy conference room type thing that said the ability to have four of them together, at least in pictures that I've seen, is very impressive looking. And of course, if it's working with your existing hardware, that's great too. Feels like something an expensive toy for an expensive board room more than an actual practical business tool, but maybe I'm wrong. I'd be happy to be proven wrong and see the thing that actually they advertise with sending documents from your screen to the thing, and you can manipulate them, and you can see other people in anyway. Well, have to wait and see how it actually works, I guess. AT&T Sprint T-Mobile and Verizon can, surprise, provide your real-time location info to third parties. The story starts with Securus, a service that allows police officers to facilitate calls made to inmates, but also pinpoint the location of a cell phone. Securus gets this location info from the carrier, but appears to use a middleman called Location Smart, which can pinpoint real-time location in about 15 seconds. The Electronics Communication Privacy Act prevents carriers from sharing user location to the United States government, but there aren't any restrictions in place for other companies, which is kind of anyway. The FCC has been asked to investigate the matter by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden. Yeah, it sounds like kind of a crazy loophole in this particular act, right? If AT&T can't just take a bunch of my location information and sell it to a third party, great. I don't want it to. But if there's another company that's in the middle of this, which makes it all legal, well, that's quite a problem. Yeah, and especially the fact that the Electronics Communications Privacy Act, I get that the government is very scary and that they can't provide that information to the government, although I'm quite sure there are other ways there, but not thinking about, well, so what if the government buys the location information from those third parties, for example? It seems like a gigantic loophole that should be looked at very quickly. Yeah, and especially because we're now in an age where everyone is very, very worried about their location, their data, their everything being sold. It's good that we know this. It's good that we know these apps exist. Never heard of Secarus or what's the other one, location smart before today. But in the Android Central article that I read this morning about it, they specified how the two worked in conjunction where a sheriff was able to keep tabs on certain people in his law enforcement area. And yeah, I mean, hey, if the rest of us are getting located as well, we should know about it. Yeah, you're right. I think, I mean, it would always be kind of a concern that story, but I wonder if now that we've had all of these issues with our personal data and the scandals related to Facebook, if it's not more like, wait a second, what's happening there? And people are more aware of it, which is a good thing. Speaking of privacy, Moscow based Kaspersky Lab plans to open a data center in Switzerland by the end of 2019 to alleviate Western government concerns, US included, that Russian intelligence uses this anti-virus software to spy on customers. The facility would be based in Zurich and Kaspersky says it chose Switzerland specifically for its policy of neutrality and strong data protection laws. Reuters first reported that this was happening back in March, looks like they're right. Last year, the US ordered civilian government agencies to remove Kaspersky software from all of their networks, although Kaspersky says we didn't do anything wrong and has filed a lawsuit against the US ban. You know, I mean, pressure works. This is a pretty clear example of that. I wonder how, if they can ever get the stench off, because sure, they can have, you know, data centers in any country they want, there's still going to be the Russian company that had this happen to them. And when you end up having to choose between two anti-virus products, which one are you going to choose? Usually they're all kind of good or acceptably good or there are several that are acceptable. But even if you know that Kaspersky is now working out of Zurich, at least partially, maybe you don't want to take a chance. And that is a very dangerous thing to have happen when you're a company. Maybe they're looking at longer term stuff. Maybe they're thinking, well, if we start doing that, giving those assurances now, maybe in two, three years we can be back in good standing. And obviously it's not going to happen immediately. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned partial. It's like opening a data center and Spitzerlin doesn't fix a problem that, you know, even though Kaspersky denies all of these allegations, if it exists, unless you're out of Russia entirely, that's not really solving the problem. You're just, it's sort of a PR move. Seems like it. Facebook launched a new youth portal for teens, which walks younger users through activating two factor authentication, using strong passwords and tips on how to spot cams. A new section called guiding principles includes advice for users to think for five seconds before they post publicly. A privacy section also explains how Facebook collects user data to improve its service and to figure out which ads to show. Facebook said it spoke with teens from the UK, US, Italy, and Brazil to build the portal. You know, it's funny when I read the story this morning, I was like, great, okay, everybody should know, you know, a little bit more about how Facebook works and some good practices. And I know that teens are being targeted here because they're young, impressionable, right? But this is like great advice for adults too. Wait five seconds. Just wait five seconds. You really want to post that? Yeah, that's probably a really good piece of advice that should be made into some kind of a meme that would spread more easily throughout the internet. But you know, this story is really interesting to me because I'm really starting to feel that however much to their advantage, Facebook is providing everyone with the information they need to make informed decisions about their usage of Facebook. They have tons of options for you to manage your privacy. They have tons of information everywhere. I mean, we've seen what maybe five different initiatives to inform users of how the service works. At one point, and I'm still not, you know, happy with the way Facebook works in many ways. But at one point, we're going to have to accept that, yes, Facebook is a specific type of service and it's not ideal as a business given the business model is based on. But now people know, you know, if by now people don't know and don't understand, I don't know what more we can do short of actually banning Facebook and outlawing it. And of course, this is not something anyone would consider. So maybe we're not quite there yet, but it feels like Facebook is informing people more or less appropriately. I agree. Facebook has taken lots of steps, certainly recently, to better inform everyone of how Facebook works, how your data is being shared, when it is, you know, how you can protect yourself if necessary to factor off all of that stuff. It's great. But it also puts the onus on the user in a way where I'm like, I mean, listen, I'm not a teenager anymore, but when I was, if Facebook was around, which it was not something called a youth portal, I'd be like, eh, whatever, I'm not doing that. Yeah, but what can they do though? What can we reasonably expect them to do other than what they're already doing? Exactly. They could do the same thing more simply. But at some point, even, you know, the kids probably know the teenagers I'm hoping at this point, no more or less how things work. The parents should probably inform or have the talk with the parents, the Facebook talk about, about the dangers and issues. And yeah, we probably have to accept this at some point that this is how it works and people are actually happy with it. Exactly. Well, this is actually going to go into our discussion story. But just a reminder, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes or less, mine was slightly more than five minutes this morning. Sorry, subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. So we were talking about Facebook, privacy, informing users, what's going on, but Twitter arguably would be the social network that has been, I don't know, in the hot seat over the last couple of years as being a hostile place for a lot of folks. There are bot accounts. There are, you know, people who are upsetting other people. So Twitter said back in March, Jack Dorsey, CEO said that Twitter wanted to create an overall healthier conversation. Okay, that's fine and good. But today they actually made some changes. The company will now use thousands of behavioral signals when filtering search or replies and algorithmic recommendations and anybody who seems to be gaming the system or just what Twitter would deem being negative are going to get their tweets buried, not deleted, but buried. Twitter is now looking at whether a few different ways they're doing this, whether you tweet at large numbers of accounts that you don't follow, kind of weird, how often you're blocked by people that you interact with, meaning that, you know, people don't like you, whether you created many accounts from a single IP, again, suspect, whether your account is closely related to others that have violated terms of service and the like. So again, they're not removing tweets, but let's say that Patrick and I are going back and forth about, you know, something on Twitter. And there is, you know, somebody who's being trolly, who's part of the conversation and ad replying. What Twitter wants to do is bury that tweet or those series of tweets in the conversation where you have to click on see more, see more of this conversation, which is not unlike what Facebook does these days. Patrick, what do you think? You know, I mean, I would like to say I'm off two minds because there are certainly pros and cons in this approach. Overall, I think I'm happy with the intent. And it's kind of part of that trend of abandoning the idea, the ideal idea about the Internet, where if you give everyone a voice, everyone will have awesome conversations and hear from people they wouldn't have heard about before. That's certainly true. And we want to keep that part. But what we've discovered over the past few years is that it's not just that people are going to be yelling and are going to be annoying is that it actually sours and ruins the good part of the conversations. So these all seem like almost common sense. I'm sure technically it's a little bit more complicated to put in place and you need a lot of machine learning probably because that's in everything these days. But these all seem like common sense signals. If you're tweeting at a lot of people you don't follow, the one explanation I can see is that you're probably a little bit trolly to an extent. All of those, you went through them. I'm not going to go through them again. So I guess it seems like a good way of doing it especially since they're not removing the tweets. We've seen with Facebook that even things like with the disputed stories when trying to fight fake news, when you signal that the story is disputed, you actually increase controversy around it. So a solution is to make it smaller and to sort of sweep it under the rug. And this is the approach they seem to be going for. And I think we can go into the issues of not freedom of speech but who decides what's okay to say. And that would be, we can talk about it if you want. It's a very important conversation as well. But overall I think this is probably something that sadly we do need. Well, so Twitter says that they've been conducting tests and that they found that the number of abuse reports at least in these tests generated from conversations, these conversations declined by 8%. 8% isn't 90% but hey, it's moving in the right direction. And I will say it's easy for me to block somebody if I see something that they said that I don't like or I'm offended by or whatever. But I still have to do that myself. If I never saw the tweet in the first place, probably a more seamless experience. And you know, I'm a very fortunate Twitter user because I very rarely have bad experiences, very rarely. And you know, I'm white male so I'm probably less white heterosexual male. I'm probably less prone to the kind of messages that some people get on Twitter. But overall, the community I run around is fantastic and it's always cool. Sometimes I see a tweet go by and I respond, a tweet about something controversial from someone that retweeted someone I don't know. And I answer, you know, trying to be reasonable and trying to argue about the topic and present my opinion. Invariably when I do that, I get after a few hours a couple, you know, two, three, four, five people just throwing insults at me. And I ignore them because I know I shouldn't engage, but just like literally just throwing insults at me. Those, I think, have no place on a network where it's just obviously troll toxicity. The societal value of those, I have a hard time seeing. So I mean, that's what Twitter wants to solve, right? If there are enough, you know, if there are enough, you see the same patterns where like, this person is attacking this person that they're not even following. This person is sort of associated with other people who have, you know, engage in bad behavior, right? Terms of service and otherwise. Or the like, I mean, if you never saw those tweets, I mean, maybe you're just a really chill dude and you don't care. But I mean, sometimes those sorts of things can ruin somebody's day, right? It's better if you just don't see them at all. Absolutely. And I guess that's where we get into the question. If you want to play devil's advocate, you can say, well, what we're effectively doing, and I think that's a valid concern, is putting in the hands of those companies, the Facebooks and Twitters of the world, sort of the task of deciding what is valuable to see and what isn't. And I completely get the argument. And it is a concern to me. And I would, I was very vehemently arguing that we shouldn't do that until maybe two or three years ago. But the reality is, it's creating, it's ruining not just products, but conversations and interactions between people. So I think we have to be pragmatic. And yes, that concern is real. But we are also getting to a point where we can't ignore the negative effects and they outweigh the concerns that we have. So at least we should, you know, try and wait and see what happens once they put those things in place. And yes, there are going to be false positives and all of that. But hopefully it will help more than it will hurt. Yeah. I mean, I appreciate what Twitter is doing. I have often thought that Twitter was a very toxic place over the last couple of years. And I don't want to feel that way. I love Twitter. It's a great news source. I catch up with friends. You know, I hope these changes are for the better. Hey, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. You actually help me make my headlines every morning, submit stories and vote on them at Daily Tech News Show dot reddit.com. And then of course, we have a Facebook group, facebook.com slash groups slash Daily Tech News Show. We got an interesting email. This person would like to remain anonymous because they are a certified Apple technician. We had a conversation with Justin Robert Young yesterday about MacBooks and MacBook Pro, keyboards being faulty. Anon says, I have to join the frustrated masses regarding this new MacBook keyboard. I think Apple is misguided in its quest to make computers as impractically thin as possible. What user is asking for this? What they want is what Apple keeps taking away. Ports, battery life, expandability, repairability. Apple has moved from being a joy to repair to a nightmare for me. Besides, batteries evolved from a tool less user replaceable than being glued in. Hard drives evolved from being standard to proprietary, to being soldered on. Memory evolved from being removal to soldered on as well. It's both surprising and disheartening just how user hostile Apple progresses to be towards its own users. It's gotten to the point where I not only cannot recommend Apple products to friends and family, but I've actively migrated many users to different manufacturers. Well, this is a common, I mean, a lot of people complain about the fact that Apple is, they don't make it easy for you to swap out stuff and kind of do your DIY thing. But hearing that from a technician, who's obviously this is his livelihood or her, is that's good feedback. Yeah. I mean, personally, I understand where you are coming from, dear technician. I think reality though, or not reality, sales are proving you and other people that have the same misgivings about Apple's changes are proving you're wrong. There are selling more computers and progressing, you know, more than other manufacturers. Certainly, the keyboard issue is real and it is a problem, but I think they will address it by fixing the keyboards and not by all of a sudden reversing their policies, which are working. And I will also say when I saw the MacBook, how thin it was, I thought the latest model, I really thought I had one of the older ones or the model before, which already was really thin. And I thought, you know, we don't need it to be that thin. And now when I look at my new one and I see an older one, I'm like, yeah, mine is thinner. It's actually cooler. And I really enjoyed, you know, it's the thing where once you have the new thing, and not just because it's new, but because also it's thinner, you like it better once you've tried it. So at least that was my experience. Yeah, I definitely think there are certain people myself included that appreciate thinner and lighter, especially because I travel a lot. But again, you know, usage varies depending on what you want. But thank you for the feedback anonymous and also thank you to Patrick Beja for being with us, especially since it's very late in Finland. What have you been up to over the last week? I guess I will say I have been up to my usual, which is tech podcasts. I do a French language tech podcast at Frenchspin.fr. There are English shows at Frenchspin.com. But if you want to learn about tech or at least practice your French as you're learning about tech, you can check out Laurent Devoutek. And that can probably be a great way to practice the language. I would suggest you check it out. Excellent. Also want to thank our patrons and everybody who supports the show. DailyTechnewshow.com slash support gives you all the information of all the avenues that you can go with. But we love our patrons. Thank you so much to all of our patrons. You make the show possible. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Lots of goodies there. We also have new cool baseball caps. Tom has been wearing his lately. I haven't gotten mine in the mail, but it's coming any day now and I'm going to wear it as soon as I get it. If you want to check out all of our gear, we got hats, we got t-shirts, we got sweatshirts, we got mugs, all of that. DailyTechnewshow.com slash store. Tom is in Australia and he had a meetup yesterday. It sounded like it went very well, but there's going to be another one. Just want to remind you, if you are in Melbourne, Australia next week, Tom will be hosting a meetup Tuesday, May 22nd, 6 p.m. That's local time at Bartronica. So if you can be in the area, you missed the Sydney meetup, make it to Melbourne and say hello. All right, our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We're also live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 2030 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Scott Johnson is here tomorrow. Talk to you then. Yay! Yay! Amazing. That was my French. I don't know what that was. It's made of French. All right, should I stop the recording? Roger Chang, producer extraordinaire. Roger? Sorry. He muted himself. I muted myself on the mixer instead of Google Hangouts because I need to play music. Yes, if you can send it to me, awesome. I will give a heads up to everyone who's listening right now on the live stream. The feed will be a little later today because I will need to call it out. I'll basically need to edit it out. So about 2020, 20, 25 minutes later than it usually posts. But let's get to some headlines. Show titles. I posted the MP3 in the Slack. Yes, perfect place. Excellent. And I will leave to go to sleep because I'm falling asleep. We totally understand. Thank you, Patrick. Thanks, guys. It was great. Always a pleasure. See you next week. Or yeah, see you next week. Yes, next week. All right, cool. All right, let's scratch surface. Why do I keep doing this? Tweeting down the conversation. I'll go ahead and put that one off. Tweeting down the conversation. The least effective ultimatum. Is that an ultimatum? Ultimatum, yeah. It's how you spell it. Okay. Changing the work surface. Microsoft's big ass table has done a big ass bulletin board. Love it. It's too long. Yeah, a little too long. Are you sure you want to post an update with this much angst? Wait a minute. Update, angst. What's so angsty about the update? It was when Facebook is telling them to wait five seconds. You're like, you sure you want to sleep on this? I'm like, if I'm really in a snit, five seconds isn't going to change much. I like the UK unfriends suck, but I don't know if that's really true. I'm wondering if this is something I've been pondering for quite some time. Does Facebook need a frenemy button? Instead of just being able to friend an unfriend, you have a frenemy. Well, what would that be? Well, it's like, yeah, I need to follow you for some reason, because you're my family or you're part of my business or something, but I really don't like you. Well, that's what you can follow somebody without friending them. So that's, you know, you kind of, you know, it's a clandestine way to, you know, keep tabs on your frenemy without them ever finding out that you still talk. That's the thing though, right? Well, it depends. I don't know. I don't really have any frenemies. You're either my friend or I don't really have any enemies either. Thank goodness. But like, you know, if it's like not fun, then we're just not friends. You know, it's weird because oftentimes, and this is just more of an observation of my part, is that people see something, and by the way, we're picking the title of the UK unfriend, Zuck, that people often use the term friend a little, in my opinion, a little too liberally, when you're referring to an acquaintance or a colleague or a co-worker, you know, like someone you see on the bus every day, you see them and you acknowledge them because you see them every day. Doesn't mean you're friends. Well, and it's weird. And this still happens to me on Facebook, especially Twitter, not so much. But a long time ago, I was like, oh, yeah, the whole like 5,000 friend limit, you know, where some people were just like, I'll friend everybody, right? I never subscribed to that. But I would also politely friend people just if I kind of knew them or knew enough of the same, you know, people in general. And then I stopped doing that too, because I'm like, all your updates are just irrelevant. But even just the other day, somebody that I know through work, his wife, friended me on Facebook, if for any reason you're watching or listening, you know, I friended you back, sorry, to use you as an example. But I'm like, I don't know you. I really think your husband's cool, you know, and like kind of a contact for me, but I don't know you. So, okay, I guess we're friends now. And I felt kind of weird about the whole thing, you know, I'm friending somebody that I've never met. I think it's in the same vein as when someone's a little too familiar with you. And it's like, I don't really know you like, there's, there's an awkwardness to that. Right. But there's also this sort of polite thing that I sometimes I get tangled up in where I'm like, I mean, they'll know if I don't say yes. And then I seem rude. And then is it going to be weird the next time I see them or I meet her, you know, down the line somewhere. And see, this is the one thing I've always wondered, because Facebook is up until now conveniently been able to sidestep all those issues by giving you a variety of ways to like, okay, I'll, what is it when you don't want to follow someone's post that you friended? There's a, what like you mute them. Yeah. And you know, it's, it's a nice polite that no one has to know a way of you doing something to say like, not that interested in you. I guess we were friends at one point, or maybe we knew each other through work. Don't need to see, you know, how well you did in your weekend soccer match or, you know, what new beers you're trying to brew from your garage. Not interested. I will say that the whole, you know, our age of algorithms right now, you know, whether or not we sort of like the way that things are stacked on, you know, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, whatever. But it does, you know, every once in a while, someone will like something, you know, let's say on Instagram. And it's like, I've noticed that you haven't liked any of my stuff in like a year. So I assumed you muted me or just unfollowed me or whatever. But like, maybe you can blame the algorithm because I don't really know. I mean, maybe you just haven't seen my stuff in a while. It's weird because when they started doing that, I would be getting things from certain people, but not others. And so I would be liking things that were maybe a month old. That's the first time I've seen it. But like people, like who were just posting stuff, I would never see ever, except my wife also would be their friend. And she would tell me about it. Like, how come I don't see it? In fact, I don't see any of my wife's posts. Fascinating, you know. Well, it's because you don't interact enough, Roger. But it's like, I see her every day. Exactly. Well, yeah, that's the thing is like, the algorithm that just shows you that the algorithm has a lot to learn. Like, obviously, you know each other. That would be like the number one connection that it could glean from your respective data. But I don't know. You know, it's weird because friendships can be weird. I mean, they don't have to be. But there are times where you're like, you were my best friend's ex-wife. Do you say like, hey, what's up? You still talk to them? It's all weird. There are definitely people who, especially like former colleagues, where it's like, at one point, yeah, maybe you sat next to them. You knew them pretty well. You saw them every day. And then five years later, every once in a while, I'll be sort of be, you know, doing my little stalker thing. And it's like, oh, someone so unfollowed on Twitter, like, I do something wrong. But then I think, you know what, no, like, you have to just like choose your own experience. We don't talk anymore. We don't work together anymore. You know, I'm not providing the kind of value I used to you. And I try not to take that stuff personally. Yeah, I made the mistake of, and this is on the advice of a co-worker of mine. It's just, yeah, I just friend everyone who wants to French is like, all right. And I ended up with a lot of people I didn't know anything about and all their stuff. It's not that I hated them or anything. It's just like, I only knew them through Facebook. And so, yeah, it was kind of a odd thing. And I'm wondering if that's just, in some ways, evolution of how friendships are made. Like, you know, in our age group, we made friends through work for people we physically met. And then there was another cohort that was raised on online interaction. So you're playing, like, World of Warcraft or you're in an online gambling, you know, fantasy sports league or something where you meet people that way. I mean, is Facebook just, I don't know, part of it is just, I find it kind of really weird to have people that are so familiar with me and I have no idea who they are. And I see them say, hey, what's up? Sure. Yeah. I mean, I've definitely, yeah, you know, my Facebook experience is checkered for sure. Because there are a lot of updates that I get from people where I'm just like, I like you. I like you. But somehow online, you're more noise than signal to me. So I'm just going to like, you know, mute you for a while. And then I forget and then I, you know, forget that they exist. But those are the tools that we have. I don't know. I'm wondering if, hey, wait a minute. Whose face is that? Oh, haha. It's my face that I did not unleash. Yeah, I'm always wondering what my daughter's experience will be like, right? Because, you know, we grew up in the age of when telephones, like, telephones are cheap and plentiful. And I mean like pre cell phone, like, telephones are attached to the kitchen wall or you had to go next, you had to run to the living room to get the edge of the phone. And TVs, you know, we're everywhere. So you had a, you had kind of a cultural touchstone on those things. But as we move forward, and as friendships can be made, irrespective of distance, I mean, how does that, how does that alter your social con? I still think people need regular physical contact with people to kind of be considered a regular friend, I guess. Well, it's just a different kind of communication, right? I mean, I have friends who I talked to in, I mean, we're barely even speaking English, you know, when we text these days, you know, it's like misspellings and weird acronyms and whatever. It's like, we don't talk like that when we see each other. It's just different, you know, there's a, there's there are many different types of kind of acceptable vernaculars, I guess. And I find the whole thing very fascinating. And we're not going to get rid of social networks, like the whole sort of backlash about Facebook is, you know, making people feel worse about themselves, you know, Instagram is all about filters that are not real. And, you know, all of that stuff is like, there will be apps that rise above, you know, to become the new cream of the crop, because that's what happens by the time your daughter is a teenager, who even knows if any of the stuff we're talking about right now will exist. It'll be like ready player one, you're just like in a virtual reality or 90% of the time. All right. Oh, you know, I'm going to stop the broadcast right now. So I have some time to edit out the audio into the main feed. But thank you so much for joining us today. Tomorrow is Scott Johnson. Don't forget, if you're Melbourne, Australia, May 22nd, there's a hangout hangup. Meet up. Go meet Tom and Melbourne. Yeah. Exciting. Yeah. He said he had a great time in Sydney. So all you Melbourne people, rise up. Melbourneians. I don't know. Melbourneians. See you all tomorrow. Bye. Bye.