NEW RESOURCES

Of course there’s an online museum for weird Cheetos shapes. (PRESS RELEASE). Of COURSE there is. “Since its launch, the Cheetos Museum has already had over 15,000 Cheetos fans turned art curators submit the unique shapes they’ve found in their Cheetos bags. The 10 best shapes will be featured in the ultimate official Cheetos art collection and be awarded a total of $150,000 in prize money.”

TechSpot’s got a writeup about a new app that lets you broadcast group chats to the public. “Public could be described as group chats with an audience. Anyone can make their own public chat group and embed them on other websites as well as share them via Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Anyone can follow conversations in real-time or read up on them later, and there are some basic tools for the audience to participate with he option to react, comment, ask questions — these are displayed separately from the main conversation.You can also request to be part of a group, but members of that group must approve.” You named your app Public? Oh boy.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Hey! Wolfram|Alpha now has information about over 200 yoga poses. “If you want to learn about a pose, you can search by either its English or Sanskrit name and find basic instructions, along with an illustration. You can also look at the muscles that the pose stretches and strengthens, get ideas for ways to vary the pose, or learn about preparatory poses that you can use to build up toward more difficult poses. If you are recovering from an injury or ailment, you can check a list of precautions and contraindications to discover if the pose might be aggravating for your condition.”

Interesting: BitTorrent is going to launch a news network. ‘Whereas OTT News was “a test case’ for live streaming, BitTorrent News looks to be a legitimate grassroots competitor to cable news, albeit without the nonstop, 24/7 coverage of CNN or MSNBC. According to the job listing, the network will stay focused on breaking news events like ‘political campaigns, sporting events, tech and cultural events.'”

Hoo boy. Is Tumblr going to get into live video? “Twitter has Periscope. Amazon has Twitch. Google has YouTube’s live streaming. And Facebook has Facebook Live. Now, Tumblr is getting into live video, too. The company is preparing to launch a new live video feature on its service, beginning tomorrow, which will introduce a series of live broadcasts as well as a user-facing feature that could compete with Facebook Live, among other things.” After Periscope, Meerkat, Facebook Live, etc… this just looks sad.

Twitter has purchased Magic Pony. Not a real magic pony, you understand. A company. “The benefits of Magic Pony’s tech are clear for Twitter. Earlier this year, the company unveiled some of its machine learning research, showing how its algorithms can essentially upgrade the resolution of low-res videos using ordinary graphics cards. The Magic Pony team includes 11 PhDs, with their expertise ranging across computer vision, computational neuroscience, and deep learning.”

USEFUL STUFF

From 7Labs: Download Photos and Videos from Instagram and Vine. Several options here.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

I got tickled reading about how the Nova Scotia government accidentally livestreamed a Cure concert. “A Nova Scotian civil servant attending the Cure’s show at Madison Square Garden accidentally Periscoped the show from the government’s official Twitter thinking they were posting to their personal account.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Google is offering more options for 2-factor. “There are multiple ways your end users can approve sign-in requests via 2SV—by tapping a Security Key, by entering a verification code sent to their phone or, starting today, by approving a prompt like the one below that will pop up on their phone.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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