But what would be the point?
I swear, people have all these weird conspiracy theories around supposed "EEE" tactics, but Whatsapp already dominates the instant messaging space. It's pretty much a monopoly. The simplest solution to continue to dominate basically the entire market is do nothing.
Somebody explain to me how literally having the entire market to themselves in exclusive is somehow worse than any interoperability at all. You can't tank the use rate lower than zero.
Yeah, but you do realize all that you're describing is still more open than "this is a closed app that interops with nobody and also is permanently tied to your phone number", right?
I mean, I don't like the guys and I avoid their services whenever possible, but... man, as an unwilling Whatsapp user the ability to migrate without having to convince all my social circles to do anything but check a checkbox sounds like a huge step forward. I literally surfaced the idea of migrating to the WhatsApp group I thought would be most willing today and got nothing but crickets.
"Unknown" goes from 3 to 6% in the same time period, so I think technically it's the year of the Unknown desktop. Sounds catchier, if you ask me.
Well, yeah. So much of this conversation has gotten really dumb, with both advocates and detractors misrepresenting the tech and its capabilities and applying it to the wrong uses and applications as a result.
Honestly, early on I did think as a summary service for search queries it'd be more useful than it ended up being. It quickly became obvious that without the search results onscreen you basically have to fact check every piece of info you get, so it's only really useful to find answers you already know but had forgotten or that you need a source for.
But hey, at least I noticed that it kinda isn't before I built it as a key part of Windows. At this point if I was going to build a search app around this tech I'd use it for a short summary to replace Google's little blurb cards and still give you the raw results immediately below. It's only really good at parsing a wonky search prompt into a more accurate query. That's why when I have to use one of these I go to Perplexity instead of raw ChatGPT or Bing or whatever, it's the one that's built the most like that, although you still end up having to argue with it when it insists on being wrong and gets sidetracked by its own mistakes.
It depends. Chatbots are terrible at broad queries or parsing very detailed information, but they're surprisingly good with very fuzzy searches. If I want a link to a specific website I go to a search engine. If I want to ask "hey, what's that 80s horror comedy that's kinda like Gremlins but not Gremlins and it has one of the monsters coming out of the toilet in the poster?" I go to a chatbot.
EDIT: Heh. Just for laughs, I tried that exact query on Perplexity.ai. It got it right:
The movie you are referring to is "Ghoulies." It is a 1984 horror comedy film that features small, impish creatures similar to those in Gremlins. One of the iconic images associated with the movie is a Ghoulie coming out of a toilet, which is also featured on the poster.
Honestly, it should be a public resource.
I mean, public libraries and archives being a mandatory requirement for copyright enforcement and publishing records is a thing, and the Wayback Machine proves it's technologically feasible to approximate it for the Internet, so...
Well, it's not the lawsuit that would trigger it, it's the outcome of it. So yes.
Yes on the other things, too. I can't imagine they would be opposed to working with alternatives to provide Wayback Machine fallbacks.
IA is quickly becoming a massive, risky single point of failure that is one bad lawsuit away from causing a major problem.
I want to hope they have an exit strategy, but I'm thinking we need to start providing alternatives. A single backup is no backup at all, and all that.
Oh, yeah, for sure. The marketing they did for Guardians was also very bad, it really made it seem of a kind with Avengers, which it really wasn't.
There will be a lot to say about why Rocksteady is getting to the looter shooter space so late and why it was the exact wrong move for the studio and the franchise. Unless the game is great and everybody buys it, I suppose.
Oh, big difference there, though. Suicide Squad actually IS a looter shooter driven by a wish to chase a business trend from five years to a decade ago. Guardians is a strictly single player Mass Effect-lite narrative action game (which yeah, given the material that fits).
I'd be with you in the argument that it would have been an even better game without the Marvel license, because then they could have skipped trying to rehash bits from the movies' look and feel, which are consistently the worst parts of the game. But then, without the license it would never have been made, so... make mine Marvel, I guess. Well worth it.
Nah, I'm mostly kidding. About the being my enemy part. The game is, in fact, awesome, and you should fetch it somewhere before the absolute nightmare of licensed music and Disney IP bundled within it makes it unsellable on any digital platform forever.
Seriously, I bought a physical copy of the console version just for preservation, beause if you want to know what will be in the overprized "hidden gem" lists of game collectors in thirty years, it's that.
It's not lip service if I can send messages and other people can receive them.
Again, the status quo is you can't do that. Hell, in the spectrum of being dragged into reasonableness by the EU kicking and screaming, Meta is orders of magnitude below Apple here.
I mean, we can debate the finer points of the implementation once it's live, but for now this is nothing but positive movement. If people got over rejecting cookies they can get over dismissing warnings regarding interoperability, and if they don't, the same regulators have a history of re-spanking unruly malicious compliers.