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  • Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait notes the first time that an exoplanet, HR 8799e, has been directly observed using optical interferometry.

  • Centauri Dreams notes the possibility, demonstrated by the glimpsing of a circumplanetary disc around exoplanet PDS 70b, that we might be seeing a moon system in formation.

  • The Citizen Science Salon looks what observers in Antarctica are contributing to our wealth of scientific knowledge.

  • The Dragon's Tales shares links to articles looking at the latest findings on the Precambrian Earth.

  • The Frailest Thing's L.M. Sacasas writes about his ambivalent response to a Twitter that, by its popularity, undermines the open web.

  • Gizmodo notes that NASA is going to open up the International Space Station to tourists.

  • JSTOR Daily looks at how croquet, upon its introduction in the 19th century United States, was seen as scandalous for the way it allowed men and women to mix freely.

  • Shakezula at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the unaccountable fondness of at least two Maine Republican legislators for the Confederacy.

  • Marginal Revolution suggests that the economic success of Israel in recent decades is a triumph of neoliberalism.

  • Stephen Ellis at the NYR Daily writes about the gymnastics of Willem de Kooning.

  • Drew Rowsome profiles out comic Brendan D'Souza.

  • Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel looks at the still strange galaxy NGC 1052-DF2, apparently devoid of dark matter.

  • John Scalzi at Whatever shares his theory about a fixed quantity of flavor in strawberries of different sizes.

  • Window on Eurasia looks at a contentious plan for a territorial swap between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

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  • The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly writes about the importance of seeing the world from new angles.

  • John Quiggin at Crooked Timber suggests that, worldwide, coal is becoming increasingly closely associated with corruption.

  • D-Brief looks at a study drawing on Twitter that suggests people will quickly get used to changing weather in the era of climate change.

  • Jonathan Wynn at the Everyday Sociology Blog writes about a family trip during which he spent time listening to sociology-related podcasts.

  • Far Outliers notes the life-determining intensity of exam time for young people in Calcutta.

  • io9 notes that, finally, the classic Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Once More, With Feeling" is being released on vinyl.

  • JSTOR Daily looks at how medieval Europe regulated the sex trade.

  • Language Hat looks at how anthropologists have stopped using "hominid" and started using "hominin", and why.

  • Language Log considers the difficulty of talking about "Sinophone" given the unrepresented linguistic diversity included in the umbrella of "Chinese".

  • Marginal Revolution suggests there are conflicts between NIMBYism and supporting open immigration policies.

  • At Out There, Corey S. Powell interviews astronomer Slava Turyshev about the possibility not only of interstellar travel but of exploiting the Solar Gravity Lens, 550 AU away.

  • Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 9 mission.

  • Towleroad notes that Marvel Comics is planning to make its lead character in the Eternals gay.

  • Daniel Little at Understanding Society examines how the human body and its physical capacities are represented in sociology.

  • Window on Eurasia notes the growth of the Volga Tatar population of Moscow, something hidden by the high degree of assimilation of many of its members.

  • Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell notes, in connection to Huawei, the broad powers allotted to the British government under existing security and communications laws.

  • Arnold Zwicky looks at anteaters and antedaters.

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  • CityLab takes a look at Geocities, one of the first online platforms for websites, looking at how it tried to create and maintain online neighbourhoods.

  • Ars Technica looks at the promise--sadly unfulfilled--of pioneering blogging platform Livejournal. It really could have been a contender.

  • Think Progress notes, more than a month after the purge by Tumblr of NSFW blogs, the far right remains active there.

  • This Huffington Post India article looks at the rising presence of pro-Hindutva answers put forth by Indian users on Quora.

  • Ars Technica notes that researchers can now, even if you do not actively participate on social media, predict what your content would likely be.

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  • Robyn Urback writes at CBC Toronto about the, sadly, unsurprising scandal at St. Michael's College School regarding the abuse and sexual assault of students.

  • Many of the tenants displaced by the 650 Parliament Street fire will find themselves homeless very soon, if they cannot find a way to pay for their unwanted hotel stays. CBC reports.

  • The CodeRedTO report on the TTC makes the point that mass transit in Toronto is vulnerable, particularly needing secure funding and more effective governance. CBC reports.

  • blogTO takes a look at what is next for politician and Twitter star Norm Kelly, after he lost his seat in the Toronto elections.

  • Spacing announces its upcoming launch of its first fiction anthology, Toronto 2033, in an event next week in the Junction.

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  • This story about the assault of a photographer for the Toronto Sun by protesters highlights something alarming. The Toronto Star reports.

  • NOW Toronto highlights the role played by the Toronto Sun in putting forth an alt-right-tinged view of the Danforth shooting.

  • Natalia Manzucco at NOW Toronto looks at the continuing issues, economic and otherwise, surrounding "Vegandale".

  • Fentanyl is killing people in Toronto, including teenagers. Toronto Life reports.

  • The Toronto Public Library is inviting people on Twitter to collaborate in writing a book. Global News reports.

  • Will the Silver Dollar Room return, in any form? The Toronto Star reports.

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I have been feeling more than a bit fragmented, more than a bit caught up in a mass of details which need to be attended to but cannot be properly done on account of their sheer number, for some time. My laptop's hard drive malfunction didn't help, although the prospect of having much of my data lost permanently is hardly cherry. (At least my photos, my main work, are in the cloud.) The state of the world, similarly, has done something of a number on me, even before the recent election of Ford as premier here in Ontario. Underlying all that, I suppose, is a state of frustration at the way things are going in--among other things--my creative life.

I have been thinking about my recent essay on the need to cultivate our gardens. I like having my gardens in order, coherent and organized and with some goal. My virtual gardens, similarly, should be nicely ordered. It is just that, the way the online world has evolved, that coherence is hard to find. This blog, for instance, is hardly a full representation of what I do. My Twitter account, perhaps sadly, with its links to my photos on Instagram if not Flickr, is probably the best way to keep track of me. But then, even ignoring the gated gardens of Facebook, there is still so much else there. Over at Quora I have been a prolific writer, with my answers coming up in genera Internet searches but not otherwise, not on a platform that is easy to interact with for people not on that site. Medium promises--ever promises?--to be a place for long form writing, but then, what do I write? There is so much to write about, and there is so so very much about the rest of life that is not writing, that I do not know what to do.

Dune and marram, North Rustico Beach #pei #princeedwardisland #northrustico #rustico #beach #dunes #marramgrass #gulfofstlawrence #latergram


I do not know quite how to go from here. Finding a focus--perhaps several focuses--is key to making any headway, to feel as if I'm not trying to shovel away all the shifting sands of a dune. I want something solid I can build on. I wonder if I'm overthinking this: Is it just a simple matter, I wonder, of picking things and sticking with them?
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  • Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait notes the continuing maps and naming of the Pluto system.

  • Centauri Dreams considers one method to detect photosynthesis on Earth-like worlds of red dwarf stars.

  • D-Brief notes the discovery of Octlantis, a permanent community of octopi located off the coast of Australia.

  • The Dragon's Gaze notes Earth-like world can co-exist with a Jovian in a circumstellar habitable zone.

  • Hornet Stories notes that Morrissey is now in Twitter. (This will not go well.

  • Language Log notes the kanji tattoo of one American neo-Nazi.

  • The LRB Blog notes how the English town of Tewksbury is still recovering from massive flooding a decade later.

  • Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the improbable life of Barry Sadler, he of "The Ballad of the Green Berets".

  • The Map Room Blog shares this terrifying map examining the rain footprint of Hurricane Irma.

  • Spacing reviews a fascinating dual biography of architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson.

  • Window on Eurasia notes an call to restore to maps the old Chinese name for former Chinese Tuva, Uryankhai.

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  • The Atlantic's Ed Yong notes the discovery of dated Homo sapiens fossils 300k years old in Morocco. (!)

  • The Atlantic reports on Twitter-driven science that has highlighted the remarkable visual acuity of the spider.

  • The Economist notes that multilingual societies can encounter more difficulties prospering than unilingual ones.

  • Torontoist notes a Thunder Bay park devoted to the idea of First Nations reconciliation.

  • The Inter Press Service reports on how gardens grown under solar tents in Bolivia can improve nutrition in poor highland villages.

  • The Toronto Star's Christopher Hume trolls Rob Ford's supporters over the new, well-designed, Etobicoke Civic Centre.Metro Toronto calculates just how many avocado toasts would go into a mortgage in the GTA.

  • MacLean's hosts a collection of twenty photos from gritty Niagara Falls, New York.

  • The National Post shows remarkable, heartbreaking photos from the flooded Toronto Islands.

  • Edward Keenan argues that the Toronto Islands' flooding should help prompt a local discussion on climate change.

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  • Bloomberg looks at the recent surge of Chinese investment in Southeast Asia.

  • Culture.pl looks at why Nietzsche falsely claimed Polish ancestry.

  • Foreign Policy suggests that this is a new age of German prominence in the West.

  • The New Yorker finds Amazon's new brick-and-mortar bookstores lacking.

  • The Toronto Star shares claims that learning a second language provides mental benefits.

  • Universe Today notes the discovery of potentially habitable super-Earth Gliese 625 b.

  • Vice's Motherboard notes how the popularization of ayahuasca-driven spirit quests has actually hurt traditional users.

  • Vox notes the latest Russia-Ukraine history fight on Twitter.

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There are many reasons to criticize the government of Ontario's Liberal premier, Kathleen Wynne. There are many ways to criticize her. The personal abuse described in Mike Crawley's CBC News report is not one of these ways.

The replies to Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne on Twitter are not for the faint of heart.

The tweets at Wynne predominantly express anger about her record and most stay within the bounds of fair comment, not crossing the line into personal abuse. Such calls as "Resign!" "You're incompetent!" and "Worst premier ever!" are now simply part of the deal for a politician in the era of social media.

But Wynne also draws a significant number of abusive, sexist and homophobic tweets. [. . .]

The comments on Wynne's Facebook page are equally nasty, but her communications team filters out posts that contain the most abusive words so the public can't view them.

A member of the premier's staff showed CBC News nearly 40 Facebook posts filtered out from just the past week, including ones calling Wynne a "wrinkly bitch" (by a Facebook user named George Onock) a "subhuman, dirty dyke" (Frank Yurkowski) and a "lying cheating c--t."
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  • Bloomberg talks about Poland's problems with economic growth, notes that McMansions are poor investments, considers what to do about the Olympics post-Rio, looks at new Japanese tax incentives for working women, looks at a French war museum that put its stock up for sale, examines the power of the New Zealand dairy, looks at the Yasukuni controversies, and notes Huawei's progress in China.

  • Bloomberg View is hopeful for Brazil, argues demographics are dooming Abenomics, suggests ways for the US to pit Russia versus Iran, looks at Chinese fisheries and the survival of the ocean, notes that high American population growth makes the post-2008 economic recovery relatively less notable, looks at Emperor Akihito's opposition to Japanese remilitarization, and argues that Europe's soft response to terrorism is not a weakness.

  • CBC notes that Russian doping whistleblowers fear for their lives, looks at how New Brunswick farmers are adapting to climate change, and looks at how Neanderthals' lack of facility with tools may have doomed them.

  • The Globe and Mail argues Ontario should imitate Michigan instead of Québec, notes the new Anne of Green Gables series on Netflix, and predicts good things for Tim Horton's in the Philippines.

  • The Guardian notes that Canada's impending deal with the European Union is not any model for the United Kingdom.

  • The Inter Press Service looks at child executions in Iran.

  • MacLean's notes that Great Lakes mayors have joined to challenge a diversion of water from their shared basin.

  • National Geographic looks at the elephant ivory trade, considers the abstract intelligence of birds, considers the Mayan calendar's complexities, and looks at how the young generation treats Pluto's dwarf planet status.

  • The National Post notes that VIA Rail is interested in offering a low-cost bus route along the Highway of Tears in northern British Columbia.

  • Open Democracy notes that the last Russian prisoner in Guantanamo does not want to go home, and wonders why the West ignores the Rwandan dictatorship.

  • TVO considers how rural communities can attract immigrants.

  • Universe Today suggests sending our digital selves to the stars, looks at how cirrus clouds kept early Mars warm and wet, and notes the discovery of an early-forming direct-collapse black hole.

  • Variance Explained looks at how Donald Trump's tweets clearly show two authors at work.

  • The Washignton Post considers what happens when a gay bar becomes a bar with more general appeal.

  • Wired notes that the World Wide Web still is far from achieving its founders' dreams, looks at how news apps are dying off, and reports on the Univision purchase of Gawker.

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  • Al Jazeera looks at the rejection of political Islam by Tunisia's Ennahda party.

  • The Australian Broadcasting Corporation notes the ambition of Zambia to become a major food-exporting country.

  • Bloomberg notes the negative impact of booming immigration on the New Zealand economy, observes Ireland's efforts to attract financial jobs from London-based companies worried by Brxit, reports on the elimination of Brazil's sovereign wealth fund, and notes a lawsuit lodged by Huawei against Samsung over royalties.

  • Bloomberg View notes that Russia can at least find domestic investors, and worries about the politicization of the Israeli military.

  • CBC reports on the Syrian refugee who has become a popular barber in Newfoundland's Corner Brooks, notes the sad news of Gord Downie's cancer, and wonders what will happen to Venezuela.

  • Daily Xtra writes about the need for explicit protection of trans rights in Canadian human rights codes.

  • MacLean's notes Uber's struggles to remain in Québec.

  • National Geographic notes Brazilian efforts to protect an Amazonian tribe.

  • The National Post reports about Trudeau's taking a day off on his Japan trip to spend time with his wife there.

  • Open Democracy wonders what will become of the SNP in a changing Scotland.

  • The Toronto Star looks at payday lenders.

  • Wired examines Twitter's recent changes.

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  • Bloomberg notes Twitter will stop counting photos and links against its 140-character limit, reports on the challenges of the new Taiwanese president, and reports on Japan's efforts to boost its workforce.

  • Bloomberg View argues European banks just aren't good at investment banking, suggests austerity worked for Latvia, and argues an IMF suggestion of a debt holiday for Greece is impolitic.

  • CBC notes J.K. Rowling's defense of Donald Trump.

  • Via The Dragon's Gaze, I found this Eurekalert post noting a search for Earth-like worlds around highly evolved stars, like the red giants that our sun will evolve into.

  • Gizmodo reports on how Sweden is moving the city of Kiruna to safer ground, and describes Amazon's interest in opening more physical bookstores.

  • The Inter Press Service wonders what will happen to Brazil now.

  • The National Post notes the mysteries surrounding a secret American military spaceplane.

  • Open Democracy looks at the human rights consequences of Mexico's long-running drug war.

  • TVO considers the impact of a long NDP leadership campaign on the party.

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  • Bloomberg notes Petrobras' dismissal of rumours it is threatened by the impeachment, observes that many Europeans expect a chain reaction of departures if the United Kingdom leaves, notes that a return to high economic growth in Israel will require including the Palestinian minority, and
    looks at Panamanian efforts to convince the world that the country is not a tax haven.

  • The Globe and Mail remembers Mi'kMaq teacher Elsie Basque, and looks at how Mongolia is trying to adapt to the new economy.

  • Bloomberg View states the obvious, noting that an expected event is not a wild swan.

  • CBC notes Rachel Notley's tour of Fort McMurray.

  • The Inter Press Service notes the denial of everything about the Rohingya.

  • MacLean's looks at further confusion in Brazil.

  • Open Democracy notes a push for land reform in Paraguay and looks at the devastation of Scotland's Labour Party.

  • Wired notes the dependence of intelligence agencies on Twitter, proved by Twitter shutting an intermediary down.

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D-Brief's Nathaniel Scharping blogs about a new computer algorithm that can detect drunken tweeters.

Drunk tweets, long considered an unfortunate, yet ubiquitous, byproduct of the social media age, have finally been put to good use.

With the help of a machine-learning algorithm, researchers from the University of Rochester cross-referenced tweets mentioning alcohol consumption with geo-tagging information to broadly analyze human drinking behavior. They were able to estimate where and when people imbibed, and, to a limited extent, how they behaved under the influence. The experiment is more than a social critique — the algorithm helps researchers spot drinking patterns that could inform public health decisions, and could be applied to a range of other human behaviors.

To begin with, the researchers sorted through a selection of tweets from both New York City and rural New York with the help of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Users identified tweets related to drinking and picked out keywords, such as “drunk,” “vodka” and “get wasted,” to train an algorithm.

They put each relevant tweet through a series of increasingly stringent questions to home in on tweets that not only referenced the author drinking, but indicated that they were doing so while sending the tweet. That way, they could determine whether a person was actually tweeting and drinking, or just sending tweets about drinking. Once they had built up a dependable database of keywords, they were able to fine-tune their algorithm so it could recognize words and locations that likely proved people were drinking.

To get tweeters’ locations, they used only tweets that had been geo-tagged with Twitter’s “check-in” feature. They then approximated users’ home locations by checking where they were when they sent tweets in the evenings, in addition to tweets containing words like “home” or “bed.” This let them know whether users’ preferred to drink at home or out at bars or restaurants.
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The Economist take on Twitter's travails is not encouraging.

Faithful followers of Twitter believe that Jack Dorsey, one of the social network’s founders, is the only person capable of turning around the struggling firm. Mr Dorsey (pictured below, during a recent Old Testament beard experiment) returned as its boss last year, taking over from Dick Costolo, who had led the company during a chaotic round of executive departures and strategic changes. True believers hope Mr Dorsey will be a reincarnation of the late Steve Jobs, who returned from exile to restore Apple to greatness.

So far, however, Mr Dorsey has yet to perform miracles. On February 10th Twitter reported lacklustre earnings for the first full quarter that he has been back in charge. It now has 320m monthly users, no more than it had in the previous quarter, and it is unlikely to turn a profit until 2019.

When Twitter went public in 2013, some believed it could become larger than Facebook, an older rival. Mr Costolo promised to build the “largest daily audience in the world”. Its prospects looked bright. Unlike Facebook, which began as a service on desktop computers, Twitter has always been popular on mobile devices, so it did not have to cope with a difficult transition.

However, it has become clear that Twitter will never become the giant it was supposed to be. The pace at which it is adding users has slowed far sooner than it did at Facebook (see chart). Mark Zuckerberg’s outfit, which now has 1.6 billion monthly users, has grown swiftly by buying potential competitors such as Instagram, a photo-sharing site. One sign of Twitter’s ill health is that its number of users in America has stayed flat, at around 70m, for a full year, suggesting that it is approaching a ceiling in the world’s most important advertising market.
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  • Centauri Dreams notes the study of the atmosphere of super-Earth 55 Cancri e.

  • The Dragon's Tales notes the discovery of a new extremophile living deep within the Earth.

  • Geocurrents notes the nationalist defacement of maps at Stanford University.

  • Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the alliances between indigenous peoples and environentalists.

  • The New APPS Blog notes a global preference for fairness.

  • The Planetary Society Blog has a lovely time-lapse photo of light playing against a Martian cliff.

  • The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer dislikes pop linguistics.

  • Spacing Toronto notes the night Neil Young was conceived.

  • Towleroad considers the sexual orientation of Deadpool.

  • Whatever's John Scalzi talks about what he would like from Twitter.

  • Window on Eurasia notes controversy around the resettlement of Ukrainian refugees in the Russian Far East.

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I came across Joshua Topolsky's article in The New Yorker predicting the fall of Twitter into irrelevance on Facebook, funnily enough. I would say that, as a Twitter user who rarely uses the service, the issues Topolsky identifies speak to me.

It wasn’t that long ago that I—and many other people I know—would have argued that Twitter was more than just another social network. I would have told you that Twitter was more like a utility, a service so fundamental that I could imagine a scenario in which it was literally underwritten. Twitter needed to exist. A stream of those hundred-and-forty-character tweets was how you found the most crucial, critical, and thought-provoking stories of the moment.

[. . .]

But cracks in Twitter’s façade had been showing already. Changes to the product made it hard to follow conversations or narratives. A lack of rigor in verifying reliable sources made information suspect or confusing. More troubling was the growing wave of harassment and abuse that users of the service were dealing with—a quagmire epitomized by the roving flocks of hateful, misogynistic, and well-organized “Gamergate” communities that flooded people’s feeds with hate speech and threats. The company seemed to be wholly unprepared to handle mob violence, with few tools at its disposal to moderate or quell uprisings. Even its beloved celebrity users couldn’t be protected. In August of 2014, Robin Williams’s daughter, Zelda, was driven off the service after a series of vicious attacks.

Of course, getting noisy isn’t the only problem Twitter has today, though it seems to be one of the more pronounced symptoms of a company that has lost its direction, or, more worryingly (and perhaps more accurately), never had much direction to begin with. After a summer of turmoil and indecision—a summer spent largely rudderless after the resignation of the C.E.O., Dick Costolo—the company reappointed its co-founder, the Silicon Valley wunderkind Jack Dorsey, and signalled that, perhaps for the first time in a long time, Twitter could find its focus.

That focus would have to come fast. In the yearlong stretch leading up to Dorsey’s return, the number of active users on Twitter only grew by eleven per cent. Even more troubling was the service’s penetration in the U.S.: it remained completely flat for the first three quarters of 2015. Facebook has surpassed the company by orders of magnitude, but it’s hardly Twitter’s only foe. Instagram, WhatsApp, and even WeChat all now have more individual users than Twitter does. Snapchat has almost caught Twitter, too.

In Facebook’s case, the company has demonstrated its mastery of product focus and long-term commitment to user experience. While Mark Zuckerberg’s empire sent users sloshing to and fro on the seas of privacy invasion in its early years, the past five years have seen the company come to dominate and define the concept of a social conversation. If users get abusive on Facebook, they’re dealt with. If someone wants to wage a campaign of noise and intrusion, the repercussions are varied and plentiful. You may not agree with Zuckerberg’s “one identity” concept, but the fact that people have to register their real names has certainly made Facebook a much safer space in which to engage. That’s to say nothing of its mobile and ad offerings, which the company has finally paired elegantly, allowing Facebook to take an even larger bite of mobile-ad dollars. The company closed its latest quarter with revenue up a whopping fifty-one per cent year over year.

Meanwhile, a series of mediocre product changes at Twitter (such as the much-hyped but ultimately confusing Moments feature), a stagnant user base, and a massive executive brain drain have called into question whether Twitter can survive as a business. In the past week, the company has lost its vice-president of media, V.P. of product (to Instagram, natch), its head of the growing video service Vine (to Google), its V.P. of engineering, and its H.R. head. Unsurprisingly, the company’s stock has lost about fifty per cent of its value over the past three months.

But what should worry Twitter isn’t the value of its stock. (USA Today reported that, given its cash reserves, the service could run for another four hundred and twelve years with current losses.) What should worry Twitter is irrelevance, and there is growing data to suggest that that is where the company is headed. If Twitter’s real-time feed is its most powerful asset (and it is), it’s not difficult to see a future in which Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, or even a newcomer like Peach (yes, I am citing Peach) focus enough on real-time news that they obviate the need for Twitter’s narrow, noisy, and oft-changing ideas about social interaction. Considering the fact that Kevin Weil, the head of product, left the company to join Instagram, it’s easy to imagine that service mutating or bifurcating into a speedier, more social platform for sharing links and having conversations. And, for many users—particularly young users, according to a recent survey—Snapchat is already their most important destination. We live in the Age of the Upgrade, and the generation raised on the Internet is the most fickle of brand champions: it loves something passionately, until it doesn’t. Then it moves on.

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