📱✨ Reflections on six months of PHONE TIME ✨📱
Plus, The Browser Company is being acquired, and New Computer is shutting down.
Today’s issue of PHONE TIME includes: A thank you to all my readers thus far and an update on what’s next. Plus: The Internet Phone Book is a yellow pages of websites, The Browser Company is being acquired, and New Computer is “winding down.”
You may have noticed the PHONE TIME cadence has been a bit slower lately. There are two reasons for that: 1) I have a small backlog of bigger stories I’m working on, and 2) I recently started a master’s program at Columbia Journalism School!
I’m so beyond grateful to everyone who’s read, subscribed, and commented thus far. I’m also especially thankful for everyone who has taken the time to speak with me for a story. Since launching PHONE TIME in March, I’ve covered zines about internet forums, fiber arts memes, the art of the personal website, a journal of literature “made to exist on the web,” Instagram grid aesthetics, feeling-forward design, the online fragrance community, a farmer’s market for data, and more.
A question I’ve started asking people I speak with is how much optimism vs. pessimism they have regarding the future of the internet. It’s something I think about a lot, especially working in journalism and digital media. I often read and hear that “social media is dead” or “there’s nothing good on the internet anymore,” and based on just my reporting over these past six months, I could not disagree more. Of course, there is a whole host of reasons for such pessimism: disinformation, algorithms, a lack of infrastructure, enshittification, the list goes on and on. But the internet, broadly speaking, is also shaped by people, and there are so many people working tirelessly and creatively to make it a place worth coming back to, again and again and again.
Although for the next nine months or so I’ll be balancing my work here on PHONE TIME with my J-school obligations, I want to continue to improve the depth of reporting and writing. I also plan to eventually put some of this publication behind a paywall, in order to make it sustainable for me in the long run. Doing original reporting, especially independently, is quite time-consuming, resource-intensive, and doesn’t scale well. (I hate publishing a story later than I’d anticipated or forgetting to get back to a DM or email, but it happens more than I wish.) At the same time, open access to information is really important to me. For now, PHONE TIME remains free, and I’ll update if and when that changes.
As always, you can drop me a line if you have a question, comment, story idea, or just want to chat. Feel free to follow up if I don’t respond within a couple days, I try to get back to everyone but sometimes things can slip through.
For now, see you in the next newsletter!
Kristin
The Internet Phone Book in this meme is a project by Kristoffer Tjalve and Elliott Cost. The book is an “annual publication for exploring the vast poetic web, featuring essays, musings and a directory with the personal websites of hundreds of designers, developers, writers, curators, and educators,” as described on its website.
The first issue launched this past May. Cost, who also started HTML Energy with Laurel Schwulst in 2019, described the book to me as like a “yellow pages of websites” and emphasized the value of physical books and spaces as entry points to the handmade and indie web.
Elsewhere online
The Browser Company is being acquired by Atlassian for $610 million. — David Pierce, The Verge
“The work continues because when I stop by the coffee shop near our office, nobody is using Dia yet. Our ‘internet computer’ vision hasn’t been realized. Dia hasn’t yet changed how you work on a Tuesday morning. This deal is about giving us the resources, distribution, and monetization muscle to get there,” CEO Josh Miller posted on X.
I’ve previously shared my thoughts about Dia, The Browser Company’s AI-focused second browser. The TLDR: I thought that Dia lacked the creativity and ingenuity that the company brought with its first browser product, Arc.
New Computer and its product Dot are shutting down, the company’s co-founders announced today. “Dot will remain operational until October 5,” they wrote.
In the May 14 newsletter linked above, I discussed New Computer’s announcement of Dots, which it described as “the first Social Intelligence.” As I wrote, I’m generally quite skeptical of mixing generative AI and social networks, so I’m not super surprised this didn’t pan out. From the announcement, it looks New Computer’s co-founders Sam Whitmore and Jason Yuan didn’t share the same vision for the product.
“We spent the last year exploring how we could expand from personal intelligence to social intelligence, and ultimately we came to the shared realization that our Northstars as founders had diverged. Rather than compromise either vision, we’ve decided to go our separate ways and wind down operations,” Whitmore and Yuan wrote.
We finally have Instagram for iPad.
Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri said on the platform today that the biggest reason Instagram for iPad took so long was that it wasn’t a priority for a while, but that in retrospect it took too long.
