Image: Facebook
Facebook got a makeover. Cue the copycats.

Good morning! This Monday, contact tracing needs both tech and humans, Facebook rolls out a huge redesign, and Microsoft fights back against all-company reply-alls.
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Alameda County won't let Tesla reopen its Fremont plant yet. Elon Musk fought back:
Michelle Phan was a YouTube pioneer, and now she's turning her eye to crypto:
Why did Apple make AirPods, and why did they do so well? Apple's Greg Jozwiak has a simple explanation:
Put aside all the privacy concerns and data-collection worries for a second. Are we sure a purely technological approach to contact tracing is going to work?
There are certainly … problems:
But wait! Some states and cities across the U.S. are hiring thousands of people to do standard contact tracing.
There's a place for tech here, of course. But automated contact tracing alone doesn't seem to be the answer. Instead, tech may help prioritize the list of people for real-life tracers to interview.
It's been a long time since Facebook gave the big blue app a new coat of paint. So it's maybe not surprising that it took the company a full year to roll out the latest version of Facebook.com, after Mark Zuckerberg announced it at last year's F8. (Remember conferences? Those were fun.)
After months of waiting and more months of limited availability, the new Facebook is available to everyone. And, in a bit of a coup, for once it doesn't seem to have sparked too many groups with names like MILLIONS AGAINST THE NEW FACEBOOK!!!
Along with the new design, which promotes groups, video and messaging (and includes dark mode!), two front-end engineers published a blog post with lots of interesting details on the infrastructure behind it. It's a dense read, but an interesting one:
Facebook's one of those companies that others follow: When it decides how the web works and how its site is developed, the results are seen almost as a set of guidelines. So the things you see on the new Facebook.com are likely to be everywhere soon.
What do you make of the new Facebook? What does it tell you about the future of the web? I'd love to hear what you think: david@protocol.com.
Your growing remote workforce comes with an exponential growth of security challenges. Join this live webcast to hear from leading cybersecurity experts on how you can lower your organization's cybersecurity risk and ensure business continuity—plus a chance to have your questions answered in a live Q&A.
After we wrote about the dot-org saga last week, I kept wondering: Who cares about domains anymore? Doesn't everybody just find stuff on Google and social now? Then I got an email from Rob Davis, who runs a domain-name shop called Intelliname, telling me there's a new domain on the market: house.com. Starting bid? $30 million.
A lot of people still care about domain names, he told me. (That $30 million isn't even a crazy price in his world.)
The dot-coms still rule, too. And not for lack of trying: ICANN continues to pump out new suffixes from .software to .pizza to .sucks, but Davis said none have come close to mainstream relevance.
Davis told me his hope for house.com is that Zillow CEO Rich Barton snaps it up.
The next bitcoin halving should happen today or tomorrow, which, depending on who you ask, is either a crucial moment in the mainstreaming of cryptocurrency or a sign of its imminent failure.
Maria Sharapova will talk entrepreneurship tomorrow as part of the WSJ's Future Of series.
RedisConf, a big-data conference, is free, virtual, and kicks off tomorrow.
Pulse conference, for all things customer success, is also free and also virtual, and starts on Wednesday.
The bulk of tech earnings season is behind us, but Cisco and Tencent both report this week.
At some point, it's happened to every company: the reply-all email storm that starts with one person accidentally emailing a huge group and ends with an impossible number of "STOP REPLYING ALL" emails that are, ironically, replying to all. Microsoft (which has had its share of these events) is trying to fix it: Outlook will now sense when 10 reply-all emails have been sent to groups of more than 5,000 in the course of an hour, and will shut it down. It's a good start! But there's only one true answer to reply all: Just don't do it.
Your growing remote workforce comes with an exponential growth of security challenges. Join this live webcast to hear from leading cybersecurity experts on how you can lower your organization's cybersecurity risk and ensure business continuity—plus a chance to have your questions answered in a live Q&A.
Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to me, david@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day, see you tomorrow.
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