No surprise here: Facebook to force Oculus account integration.

It seems like Facebook can’t handle a few moments of not being in the limelight. Reporting from The Verge indicates that FB will be deprecating support for standalone Oculus user accounts in the near future. New users will be required to associate their device with a FB account, while existing users will be prompted to merge their Oculus account into a FB account.

Nobody should be surprised by this, given the company‘s history of forcing “external” services to integrate into the umbrella of the main FB service. This is par for the course when it comes to management of user information spread as a corporation grows and wants to either create new systems or persuade users to give another more modern system a shot.

In the case of Oculus, it’s a bit more complicated than simply merging a couple of databases, as the Oculus account method doubled as an entire digital rights management system complete with financial credential holding. If Facebook wasn’t already in possession of your financial details, this change will definitely give them access.

Most users who just want to continue to use their device are either going to pile into the ‘who cares, stop bugging me’ camp or the ‘fuck FB’ camp—and given the recent Epic vs. 30% developments, the latter camp might gather a few more loyalties than it might have at another time.

Another step along the path to Twitter’s self-inflicted end of relevance.

BuzzFeed reports that Twitter will be rolling out a nice, new update next week that will completely upend the reverse-chronological timeline central to the service and replace it with an algorithmic solution that sorts tweets by relevance. The Verge’s rundown of the news is a bit more comprehensive and has a few lines that cause me to question Twitter’s future as the chronological timeline I’ve relied on it to be for the past nine years.

In 2014, CFO Anthony Noto said displaying tweets in reverse chronological order “isn’t the most relevant experience for a user.” And in reference to last year’s tests, a spokesperson said, “We’re continuing to explore ways to surface the best content for people using Twitter.”

I understand that the $TWTR stock has taken a beating on the stock market for perfectly legitimate reasons, lately, but at what point does a corporate financial officer end up being able to point at the product and saying ‘our product is broken, folks’? I would absolutely copy Facebook instead?’

And this gem about the rational behind these changes make me question Dorsey’s stewardship of one of the tent=pole services on the Internet.

CEO Jack Dorsey is determined to make Twitter more user friendly and intuitive for people just starting out with the service. Since a lot of them are probably also using Facebook, they’re already accustomed to seeing friends’ posts out-of-order. If Twitter can nail the execution (that’s a massive if), this could in many ways make the product more valuable for more people.

At least the first reports from users (like @joshsternberg, below) familiar with Twitter’s higher-end advertising system suggest that the anti-chronological timeline will be an opt-in feature, instead of brute-forcing their entire user base to adopt a new standard for tweets on the service.

I still don’t like it for the same reason that I don’t rely on Facebook to keep up with friends’ lives over there: if I can’t keep up a chronological context, I might as well be reading some sort of science fiction story or something pretentious.

Patch notes can be fun, too.



Medium’s iOS development team sure does know what users want to see. I mean, write me a song and I’ll scroll on down to keep reading what you’ve written.

The bigger picture here? Medium’s iOS client now allows its users to do something that most blog services would have included in their app from the get-go: write posts. I’ve been looking forward to thus update, as being able to manage a blog from my iPhone is part of what I’m looking for in a blog platform–something that WordPress has solidly allowed me to do for quite awhile now. This Medium update ticks that box, and promotes it from a “once in a blue moon” option to a legitimate contender for my attention.

I’m all for that. Even if, ultimately, I end up only cross-posting ~serious~ posts in the future, I think the Medium client is a huge step forward for the service. In an age where Twitlonger is still the preferred vector for longer-than-a-tweet posts, Medium should thrive the Twitlonger service eventually becomes disliked for serving ads.