The Morning After: The Threads honeymoon may be over
Engagement has dropped off after a blockbuster first week.
How many times have you posted to Threads this week? After becoming the fastest-growing social network of all time, new data from analytics firm SimilarWeb suggests engagement on Threads has substantially declined from initial highs.
Threads saw daily active users decline from 49 million on July 7th to 23.6 million on July 14th, SimilarWeb writes in a new report. That’s still… millions, of course. And in the United States, which reportedly saw the highest engagement, use plummeted from 21 minutes per day to just over six minutes in the same period. To couch these estimates, SimilarWeb’s analysis is based only on Android app use, but it tallies with other companies’ findings – and anecdotally, I’ve seen my close friends and Threads favorites post a lot less.
In a Threads post on Friday, Instagram’s top exec, Adam Mosseri, suggested the company wasn’t particularly focused on engagement metrics at this stage. (Of course he’d say that.)
He wrote, “Our focus right now is not engagement, which has been amazing, but getting past the initial peak and trough we see with every new product and building new features, dialing in performance and improving ranking.”
– Mat Smith
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Xbox Game Pass Core replaces Live Gold on September 14th
You'll get a handful of 'free' games, but monthly additions are going away.
One of the last traces of the early Xbox era is going away. Microsoft is replacing Xbox Live Gold with a Game Pass Core tier on September 14th. The $60 per year (or $10 per month) subscription is necessary to play most online multiplayer games on consoles, but the other benefits will soon be a little more constrained. The company is sunsetting Games with Gold, which offered a steady flow of titles for Live subscribers. Instead, you'll get a base collection of more than 25 games with new entries two to three times per year. Most of them are first-party games, like Doom Eternal, Forza Horizon 4 and Halo 5, but there will be the occasional third-party project, like Among Us and Human Fall Flat.
An email typo has reportedly sent millions of US military messages to Mali
‘This risk is real,’ warned the Dutch whistleblower.
A typo has apparently routed millions of US military emails — some containing highly sensitive information — to Mali. The problem stems from entering .ml instead of .mil for the receiving email address domain. According to the Financial Times, the one-letter mistake has exposed data like “diplomatic documents, tax returns, passwords and the travel details of top officers” — and much more. Although the misdirected emails have (so far) landed with a contractor tasked with managing Mali’s country domain, control of .ml will soon revert to Mali’s government, which has ties to Russia.
Lt. Cmdr Tim Gorman, speaking for the Pentagon, told the FT the Department of Defense “is aware of this issue and takes all unauthorized disclosures of controlled national security information or controlled unclassified information seriously.” He said emails sent from .mil to .ml addresses “are blocked before they leave the .mil domain, and the sender is notified that they must validate the email addresses of the intended recipients,” which suggests the misdirected emails may have come from US military workers’ personal accounts.
The best monitors for 2022
HDR, refresh rates, curved screens? Help!
Computer monitors keep evolving rapidly, with new technology like OLED Flex, QD-OLED and built-in smart platforms in the last year alone. That’s on top of big improvements in things like color accuracy, size and resolution. As there are a lot of products in this market and a lot of features, it can be overwhelming, so we’ve researched the latest models for all kinds of markets, whether you’re a gamer, business user or content creator. Read on to find out which model is the best for you and your budget.
