If you care about a healthy internet, then you know domain names are a key building block for enabling ownership & control over your work. So I'm thrilled to announce @glitch has teamed up with Google Registry to give out great .app & .dev domain names for FREE all October long!
You can read the full details here: blog.glitch.com/post/last-mont… But if you want the highlights, all you have to do is make a great app playlist, showing off apps that amuse, educate or inspire, and then tell us about it! Every week we'll be giving out 50 domains.
Just as important, every Glitch creator can easily add a domain when they make an app, which ensures that your users see your own URL, and also gives you full control over where your stuff lives forever.
We try to be really thoughtful about the incentives and rewards that encourage participation in the Glitch community, and there are no behaviors we want to encourage more than thoughtful creation and curation. And no reward more fitting than a new domain where your work can live.
(If you talk to folks who don't understand why owning and controlling your own domain name is important, maybe just tell them that domain names are rare and unique and non-fungible and see if that wins them over.)
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There’s an undersung, but radical, shift happening very quickly: millions of people are evading large parts of the surveillance-based tracking systems that power today’s ad networks. It’s one of the biggest wins in decades for regular users’ privacy. anildash.com/2021/09/30/pry…
Thanks to @robinberjon for a smart articulation of this context, which was a leaping-off point for my thinking here. (Do read the thoughtful replies there, especially concerns about lock-in to email or password vendors.)
There’s also a connection to @chrislhayes astute observations in the New Yorker on how we’re all famous now; we can learn a lot in the parallels between being always-visible on social media and always-tracked by ad platforms. newyorker.com/news/essay/on-…
This is way more steps than picking an image from your photo album. Also, I could create an actual original work from scratch myself and it wouldn’t get the little badge but a smudge of pixels gets badged if it is verifiably wasting resources on a proof of work blockchain? Hmm.
If the purpose is to prop up the NFT or crypto markets, then just say that. I don’t know what institutional investors are going to believe that’s the best way to increase Twitter’s value, but there must be some I guess. But this is optimized for speculators, not creators.
Here’s the thing — any image can be saved & uploaded to your profile. If your goal is to show off the art, that’s done. But this is a design intended to coerce & reward linking a crypto wallet to a Twitter account. That is in direct tension with Twitter’s platform health efforts.
Oh, this is a good one, even if you're not a coder. Today on @Glitch, we're launching Playlists — for apps! blog.glitch.com/post/introduci… Now creating and curating a list of apps on Glitch is as easy, and rewarding, as making a mixtape for a friend...
What we've seen so far is that it's super handy for things like a teacher giving a playlist of example coding projects to their class, or companies that have an API showing off great demos to their dev communities.
Y'all know I love tweeting about art projects that Glitch users make, and this makes it easy to collect and share a set of apps; there's even a gallery view to let you click through a list of apps — just click the Play button on any app in a playlist. ▶️
I’ll write it up fully later, but I was training people on folders when Windows 95 came out & made the metaphor mainstream. Users absolutely *hated* the idea that you could infinitely nest folders, and that they sat on your desktop (next to a trash can?!) but couldn’t be stacked.
This is absolutely brilliant. @playablequotes lets you reference any moment in a GameBoy game with real, live playable code. It’s like a YouTube video that you can embed or cue it to a particular point, but with a game instead of a video. joel.franusic.com/playable_quote…
The way it was made is fascinating; of course the part that jumped out to me: “@jf started by loading the GitHub repository for GameBoy-Online into @Glitch and directly making some edits. To his surprise, it was actually pretty easy to get one of our … Playable Quotes to work.”
You can check out the app for yourself at glitch.com/~tenmile and because it’s on Glitch, you can remix it or dig into the code to learn how it works.
Financial press is so bought in to crypto scams that they'll just run straight up lies now, and then update with an "ummm, we're still looking into it" message later. One big reason we need stronger regulation is because the journalistic checks & balances are non-existent.
The crypto insider take is "silly mainstream media doesn't realize Walmart would never pick that coin, they'd pick... this other cryptocurrency I own more of!" The issue is that the entire community's norms are broken, scams are rife, and exploitation is assumed.