What’s Facebook doing on TikTok? Scoping out the competition? DM’ing Charli? Recruiting beta testers? Buying ads? We’ll know soon enough because the social networking company has set up its own TikTok account, where it’s already amassed some 15.1K followers, as of the time of writing, despite not having posted any public videos. The account is verified by TikTok and Facebook also confirmed it’s legit.

Facebook’s TikTok (that sounds wrong) was spotted a couple of days ago by social media consultant Matt Navarra.

The account had acquired a blue checkmark indicating its verified status. But its lack of content and somewhat odd bio — “We believe people can do more together, than alone.” — why the comma?! — still made us question whether or not this was really Facebook’s account. In addition, the account’s bio links out to the Facebook app on Google Play, not the Facebook website or some sort of official communication channel.

Also, isn’t it Meta now??

I mean, Facebook already killed its Twitter.com/Facebook account. And there’s no Instagram.com/Facebook, either. It’s Instagram.com/Meta.

But Facebook — err, Meta — told us the TikTok account is real.

“Brands leverage a variety of channels, including some of our social media platforms, to reach and engage with the people using their products and services every day,” a Meta spokesperson said. “Our intent with establishing a brand presence and cultivating community on platforms like TikTok or others is no different.”

Image Credits: Facebook’s TikTok

It’s possible that Facebook wants to juice its Gen Z user base by leveraging TikTok (or its ad platform), after having recently reported flat monthly active user growth in its last quarter and, significantly, its first-ever decline in daily active users.

And while it is true that large brands use a variety of channels for marketing and communications, it’s a little funny to see Facebook pop up on TikTok, given how often the company has cited the short-form video app as its main competitive threat these days.

In Meta’s Q4 2021 earnings, CEO Mark Zuckerberg reiterated this point in a call with investors.

“People have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time, and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly,” Zuckerberg said. He later added that “TikTok is so big as a competitor already and also continues to grow at quite a faster rate off of a very large base.”

The company wouldn’t share any further information on its plans for TikTok, including what sort of content it had in store or whether or not the account would be running ads. (But feel free to DM me if you see them!)

In the meantime…

@angiebhandal #howdoyoudofellowkids #30rock #stevebusemi #meme ♬ original sound – Angie B

In an effort to help Pinterest creators better reach their wider audience across social media, the company today is launching a new feature for its Idea Pins — its video-first new Pin format introduced last year as an attempt to catch up with the social media industry’s shift from static images to video. Now, Pinterest says its creators will be able to download and share their Idea Pins across social channels, including Facebook, Instagram and others.

Idea Pins, while meant to help Pinterest be more competitive with TikTok and other short-form video experiences, aren’t just videos. Instead, they’re more like a mix of Stories and video, each with up to 20 pages of content which you can tap through like a Story. That content can include either a static image or a video, optionally annotated with text and graphics. Users can scroll through the various Idea Pins from creators they follow in a vertical TikTok-like feed.

With the launch of Pin Sharing, creators will first tap the “FB Stories” or “IG Stories” icon in the share menu, which will kick off the Idea Pin’s download. The content will then be saved as a watermarked video that stitches all the Idea Pin pages together, then ends with a card that displays the creator’s name and Pinterest username — a format that mimics TikTok’s download option. When the download finishes, Pinterest will redirect the user to the Facebook or Instagram app with the Story creation flow open and the watermarked Idea Pin video ready to be further edited and posted.

Image Credits: Pinterest

While the integration with Facebook and Instagram is built-in, Pinterest notes the download option will still allow creators to share to other platforms as well, including popular destinations like Snapchat and TikTok.

The sharing feature would allow creators to market their Pinterest presence across social platforms, luring their audience back to Pinterest where they may be using the site’s new tools to monetize their short-form videos. On Pinterest, creators can use Idea Pins to make content shoppable through affiliate links and they can partner on paid brand partnerships, much like they can do on other platforms, like TikTok and Instagram. They can also earn money by participating in challenges issued by Pinterest as part of the company’s $20 million Creator Rewards fund in the U.S.

Watermarked videos could help Pinterest’s creators gain more views for the content originally produced for Pinterest and help them grow their following, but it’s clear that Pinterest also hopes that the videos will serve as a marketing tool for Pinterest itself.

The Pinterest site was established as an image pinboard back in the earlier days of the web, as a place where users would save ideas, like things they want to buy, recipes they want to cook, home décor plans, travel inspiration and more. Pinterest then tried to connect those ideas to commerce, by working with online retailers and merchants to advertise to Pinterest users and integrate their content. But ultimately, video has proven to be a much more impactful shopping tool than static images.

At a recent creator event, for example, TikTok announced that 48% of its users immediately purchased a product they saw on the platform at some point — a phenomenon so prevalent, it’s even become a saying: “TikTok made me buy it.” It also said that 67% of TikTok users were inspired to buy at a time when they weren’t even on the app to shop.

Though Pinterest’s watermarks may help reach the creators’ own audience through Stories, other platforms will likely downrank content in their algorithmic feeds if it contains a watermark. Instagram has outright said it will use this as a signal to downrank content in its Reels tab, in fact.

Pinterest says its new Idea Pin download and sharing features are rolling out today to all users.

Netflix is bringing its short-form video feature, “Fast Laughs,” to the TV’s big screen. Launched a year ago, the TikTok-inspired feed of funny videos had previously been available only on mobile devices, where it serves as a way to introduce Netflix users to new shows, movies, and comedy specials they may want to watch.

The smartphone version of “Fast Laughs” was given a prominent position in the Netflix app, where it’s currently the middle button in the bottom navigation bar — a placement that seems to indicate the streamer is worried about losing users’ time spent on mobile to rival video apps like TikTok, or now, Instagram and Facebook’s Reels.

Similar to TikTok, “Fast Laughs” on mobile had offered a swipeable, vertical video feed where buttons to react, share, or save the content are stacked on the right side of the screen. However, Netflix’s goal is not to develop a social platform; it’s to encourage users to add shows, movies and specials to their Netflix watch list or jump right in to start streaming a title after viewing the short video teaser.

On Netflix’s TV platform, “Fast Laughs” will work a little differently.

The opt-in feature will begin to appear on members’ homepages, somewhere around rows 6 through 12. In this case, the idea is to serve up the short videos at a time when users have been scrolling down looking for something to watch. And instead of navigating through the content vertically, as on the phone, the videos can be clicked through with your remote control via the arrow on the right side of the screen.

At the bottom of the screen, you can see the program’s name, rating and can choose to click a button for “More Info,” to be directed to the title’s landing page.

Image Credits: Netflix

As the feature can sometimes showcase more mature content, it will not appear on kids’ profiles. (Netflix had tested a kid-friendly short-form video feature on mobile, too. But that one is not yet expanding to the TV.) However, “Fast Laughs” will respect users’ maturity settings, if configured, Netflix notes.

At launch, the TV version of “Fast Laughs” will include clips from Netflix movies like “Army of the Dead,” “Fatherhood,” and “The Kissing Booth;” TV shows like “Big Mouth,” “Dead to Me,” and “Never Have I Ever;” plus stand-up comedy from Ali Wong, Jo-Koy, and Jerry Seinfeld, and more.

Netflix says “Fast Laughs” on the TV is still considered a test for the time being and will first start rolling out to English-speaking markets including the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia, among others. These rollouts began on Feb. 22 and will slowly continue in the days and weeks ahead.

“Fast Laughs” isn’t the first time the company has borrowed a concept from social media apps when designing new features. In 2018, Netflix adopted the “Stories” format when introducing its Previews feature. And Netflix is always experimenting with ideas that could help members better discover content from its catalog. Last year, for instance, it tried to introduce more serendipity into the Netflix experience with the launch of its “Play Something” shuffle mode feature, which would play a title the service thinks you may like based on your interests and prior viewing behavior.

Months after TikTok was hauled into its first-ever major congressional hearing over platform safety, the company is today announcing a series of policy updates and plans for new features and technologies aimed at making the video-based social network a safer and more secure environment, particularly for younger users. The changes attempt to address some concerns raised by U.S. senators during their inquiries into TikTok’s business practices, including the prevalence of eating disorder content and dangerous hoaxes on the app, which are particularly harmful to teens and young adults. In addition, TikTok is laying out a roadmap for addressing other serious issues around hateful ideologies with regard to LGBTQ and minor safety — the latter which will involve having creators designate the age-appropriateness of their content.

TikTok also said it’s expanding its policy to protect the “security, integrity, availability, and reliability” of its platform. This change follows recent news that the Biden administration is weighing new rules for Chinese apps to protect U.S. user data from being exploited by foreign adversaries. The company said it will open cyber incident monitoring and investigative response centers in Washington, D.C., Dublin and Singapore this year, as part of this expanded effort to better prohibit unauthorized access to TikTok content, accounts, systems and data.

Another one of the bigger changes ahead for TikTok is a new approach to age-appropriate design — a topic already front of mind for regulators.

In the U.K., digital services aimed at children now have to abide by legislative standards that address children’s privacy, tracking, parental controls, the use of manipulative “dark patterns” and more. In the U.S., meanwhile, legislators are working to update the existing children’s privacy law (COPPA) to add more protection for teens. TikTok already has different product experiences for users of different ages, but it now wants to also identify which content is appropriate for younger and older teens versus adults.

Image Credits: TikTok’s age-appropriate design

TikTok says it’s developing a system to identify and restrict certain types of content from being accessed by teens. Though the company isn’t yet sharing specific details about the new system, it will involve three parts. First, community members will be able to choose which “comfort zones” — or levels of content maturity — they want to see in the app. Parents and guardians will also be able to use TikTok’s existing Family Pairing parental control feature to make decisions on this on behalf of their minor children. Finally, TikTok will ask creators to specify when their content is more appropriate for an adult audience.

Image Credits: TikTok’s Family Pairing feature

“We’ve heard directly from our creators that they sometimes have a desire to only reach a specific older audience. So, as an example, maybe they’re creating a comedy that has adult humor, or offering kind of boring workplace tips that are relevant only to adults. Or maybe they’re talking about very difficult life experiences,” explained Tracy Elizabeth, TikTok’s U.S. head of Issue Policy, who oversees minor safety for the platform, in a briefing with reporters. “So given those varieties of topics, we’re testing ways to help better empower creators to reach the intended audience for their specific content,” she noted.

Elizabeth joined TikTok in early 2020 to focus on minor safety and was promoted into her new position in November 2021, which now sees her overseeing the Trust & Safety Issue Policy teams, including Minor Safety, Integrity & Authenticity, Harassment & Bullying, Content Classification and Applied Research teams. Before TikTok, she spent over three and half years at Netflix, where she helped the company establish its global maturity ratings department. That work will inform her efforts at TikTok.

But, Elizabeth notes, TikTok won’t go as far as having “displayable” ratings or labels on TikTok videos, which would allow people to see the age-appropriate nature of a given piece of content at a glance. Instead, TikTok will rely on categorization on the back end, which will lean on having creators tag their own content in some way. (YouTube takes a similar approach, as it asks creators to designate whether their content is either adult or “made for kids,” for example.)

TikTok says it’s running a small test in this area now, but has nothing yet to share publicly.

“We’re not in the place yet where we’re going to introduce the product with all the bells and whistles. But we will experiment with a very small subset of user experiences to see how this is working in practice, and then we will make adjustments,” Elizabeth noted.

Image Credits: TikTok

TikTok’s updated content policies

In addition to its plans for a content maturity system, TikTok also announced today it’s revising its content policies in three key areas: hateful ideologies, dangerous acts and challenges, and eating disorder content.

While the company had policies addressing each of these subjects already, it’s now clarifying and refining these policies and, in some cases, moving them to their own category within its Community Guidelines in order to provide more detail and specifics as to how they’ll be enforced.

In terms of hateful ideologies, TikTok is adding clarity around prohibited topics. The policy will now specify that practices like deadnaming and misgendering, misogyny or content supporting or promoting conversion therapy programs will not be permitted. The company says these subjects were already prohibited, but it heard from creators and civil society organizations that its written policies should be more explicit. GLAAD, which worked with TikTok on the policy, shared a statement from its CEO Sarah Kate in support of the changes, noting that this “raises the standard for LGBTQ safety online” and “sends a message that other platforms which claim to prioritize LGBTQ safety should follow suit with substantive actions like these,” she said.

Another policy being expanded focuses on dangerous acts and challenges. This is an area the company recently addressed with an update to its Safety Center and other resources in the wake of upsetting, dangerous and even fatal viral trends, including “slap a teacher,” the blackout challenge and another that encouraged students to destroy school property. TikTok denied hosting some of this content on its platform, saying for example, that it found no evidence of any asphyxiation challenges on its app, and claiming “slap a teacher” was not a TikTok trend. However, TikTok still took action to add more information about challenges and hoaxes to its Safety Center and added new warnings when such content was searched for on the app, as advised by safety experts and researchers.

Today, TikTok says dangerous acts and challenges will also be broken out into its own policy, and it will launch a series of creator videos as part of a broader PSA-style campaign aimed at helping TikTok’s younger users better assess online content. These videos will relay the message that users should “Stop, Think, Decide, and Act,” when they come across online challenges — meaning, take a moment to pause, consider whether the challenge is real (or check with an adult, if unsure), decide if it’s risky or harmful, then act by reporting the challenge in the app, and by choosing not share it.

Image Credits: TikTok

On the topic of eating disorder content — a major focus of the congressional hearing not only for TikTok, but also for other social networks like Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat — TikTok is taking more concrete steps. The company says it already removes “eating disorder” content, like content that glorifies bulimia or anorexia, but it will now broaden its policy to restrict the promotion of “disordered eating” content. This term aims to encompass other early-stage signs that can later lead to an eating disorder diagnosis, like extreme calorie counting, short-term fasting and even over-exercise. This is a more difficult area for TikTok to tackle because of the nuance involved in making these calls, however.

The company acknowledges that some of these videos may be fine by themselves, but it needs to examine what sort of “circuit breakers” can be put into place when it sees people becoming trapped in filter bubbles where they’re consuming too much of this sort of content. This follows on news TikTok announced in December, where the company shared how its product team and trust and safety team began collaborating on features to help “pop” users’ filter bubbles in order to lead them, by way of recommendations, into other areas for a more diversified experience.

While this trio of policy updates sounds good on paper, enforcement here is critical — and difficult. TikTok has had guidelines against some of this content, but misogyny and transphobic content have slipped through the cracks, repeatedly. At times, violative content was even promoted by TikTok’s algorithms, according to some tests. This sort of moderation failure is an area where TikTok says it aims to learn from and improve.

“At TikTok, we firmly believe that feeling safe is what enables everybody’s creativity to truly thrive and shine. But well-written, nuanced and user-first policies aren’t the finish line. Rather, the strength of any policy lies in enforceability,” said TikTok’s policy director for the U.S. Trust & Safety team, Tara Wadhwa, about the updates. “We apply our policies across all the features that TikTok offers, and in doing so, we absolutely strive to be consistent and equitable in our enforcement,” she said.

At present, content goes through technology that’s been trained to identify potential policy violations, which results in immediate removal if the technology is confident the content is violative. Otherwise, it’s held for human moderation. But this lag time impacts creators, who don’t understand why their content is held for hours (or days!) as decisions are made, or why non-violative content was removed, forcing them to submit appeals. These mistakes — which are often attributed to algorithmic or human errors — can make the creator feel personally targeted by TikTok.

To address moderation problems, TikTok says it’s invested in specialized moderator training in areas like body positivity, inclusivity, civil rights, counter speech and more. The company claims around 1% of all videos uploaded in the third quarter of last year — or 91 million videos — were removed through moderation policies, many before they ever received views. The company today also employs “thousands” of moderators, both as full-time U.S. employees as well as contract moderators in Southeast Asia, to provide 24/7 coverage. And it runs post-mortems internally when it makes mistakes, it says.

However, problems with moderation and policy enforcement become more difficult with scale as there is simply more content to manage. And TikTok has now grown big enough to be cutting into Facebook’s growth as one of the world’s largest apps. In fact, Meta just reported Facebook saw its first-ever decline in users in the fourth quarter, which it blamed, in part, on TikTok. As more young people turn to TikTok as their preferred social network, it will be pressed upon to not just say the right things, but actually get these things right.

I’ve spent the last few weeks diving into the world of crypto, and lo and behold, there might be something to it. Part of the problem is I rarely sense an innovation that revolves around the inevitability of people making big money. Instead, I become aware of something that might be bubbling up, like a new Apple chip or series of chips that create a new market opportunity. The M1 series was such a development; it provided a palpable layer of horsepower that changed the equation of how I use computing. As with Tesla, market conditions evolve as chip production is brought in house.

The iPhone and iPad were transformative for Apple and the tech industry. The obvious stuff was the touch interface, the app ecosystem, and the decoupling from the late great PC era. Before, computers represented a way to leverage software as a change agent for our daily lives. I learned the interfaces of Office, then the underlying structure of operating system services, then the connection point to the network. In a way, it was like the structure of filmmaking: the skeleton that was the plot, the scaffolding that was the dialogue, the narrative that was the connection between characters and the situation, and the rhythm that was the product of editing and off-screen context. That last one was most furtive in its revelation, but the key to the humor, music, and not just what is seen and heard but what is inferred.

iPhones were famously the way Steve Jobs realized the iPad. The target was personal and business communications, easier to market than a replacement for the PC. There were the entrenched carriers, who propped up the perception that price was guided by physical distance. Today, we don’t think about the concept of local versus long distance. Our friends and family are equidistant from us and each other. Our politics remain governed by historical measurement. The electoral college maintains the upper House’s power distribution regardless of population; the smallest and the largest of the states each get 2 Senators. The power flows through and is metered by the fractured structure of gerrymandering and filibuster.

Before the iPhone, video conferencing was limited to corporate links between hub and satellite offices. After the iPhone, each new entrant to the network was endowed with the effective unlimited bandwidth of the first carrier domino to fall — AT&T. By signing an exclusive deal with one carrier, Apple effectively held a gun to the head of the rest of the industry. The essential disruptive feature of unlimited access was only possible with the one network. Any other carrier lowered the feature set of the groundbreaking hardware. On the iPhone, audio became a first class citizen. With IP calling, the cost limitation of the previous POTS generation was erased. As other networks worked their way into broadband, the iPhone took new ground, with video conferencing and the apps ecosystem.

Even today, third-party apps like Facebook Messenger are often used more frequently than the iPhone’s built-in iMessage. The Facebook app rides on top of audio, video, messaging, screen sharing, and the beginnings of ecommerce — across international borders, proprietary phone systems, video standards, and wirelessly device to device via Apple’s Airplay WiFi grid. The phone became the hub for watches, AirPods, stationary bikes, telemedicine, and iPads. What started as a small form factor iPad has now absorbed the larger sibling as a peripheral replacement for the PC. Cue the M1.

Once the iPhone/iPad iOS operating system could run on M1 Macs, it seemed likely that the apps ecosystem would migrate to the Mac. Notifications seem better supported on the Mac than previously, but there’s no real synchronization between the two platforms. Some video production apps like LumaFusion run across iPad and M1 without modification, but I’ve been happy to use the iPad as a staging machine for editing, and the M1 for transcription of conversations and interviews. The iPad has been upgraded recently to use the M1 chips, but for now I’m so happy with the Mac Book Pro that I’d rather move the majority of my computing off the iPad and split between the iPhone and M1 Mac. I didn’t expect this, but the pandemic and its acceleration of work from anywhere has been the driver.

As video conferencing has become a core service of the new office, the M1 has shifted my consumption of media in important ways. Streaming tools like Restream and the cross-platform ubiquity of Zoom make it trivial to produce a video conversation on multiple platforms. Airpods let us work on multiple streams and editing projects on multiple iPads and M1s, with an elastic subscription model that reduces all-over costs by as much as 10-1 on a monthly basis. Screensharing over Zoom will soon be atomized as APIs open up to allow live editing and audio sweetening to be distributed to iPads while the M1s (a Mac Book Air and Pro) produce text and manage social media releases. Zero fan noise makes the M1s ideal for use in live production. And when travel and events return, the whole studio comes along for the ride. Blur mode retains a consistent visual feel.

Then there’s the live audio trend, which sits atop the same tools plus an emphasis on the iPhone. The two major platforms have distinctive personalities: Twitter Spaces leverage the social graph, while Clubhouse seems more aggressive about adding features to keep pace with larger and more enterprise competitors. Twitter’s tools for downloading recordings are clunky; the 30 day limitation on replays needs to shift to a more producer-centric perspective. Over time, the two feature sets should combine as notifications have done on Apple and Android. The vendor sports horserace aspect of the creator economy may drive media interest, but the more tangible impact will emerge in the iterative wave of what David Weinberger called small pieces, loosely joined.

Clubhouse’s new Shared on Clubhouse tool seems geared to earballs, quantity over influence. You can broadcast a comment to followers, expanding the social graph to welcome not just live participation, but crucially Replay listeners. Those notifications attract more organic groups of shared rooms and interests that exist outside of the more traditional newsmaker interviews and other celebrity-focused events. Sharing statistics promote a kind of interactive guide at the top of shared rooms, and listeners become 1st class citizens with the ability to comment and aggregate their discoveries to the same middle tier that retweets drove Twitter’s viral social graph. Of course, Twitter or LinkedIn adoption of these tools will prove successful in their bigger ponds. If crypto fans prove prescient, decentralized open standards may facilitate an actual use case for an alternative to centralized first- and third-party cookie replacements.

None of this is to suggest these networks will become an important part of our work or social lives. Following the news on a regular basis is a frustrating exercise for those more accustomed to legacy platforms such as newspapers and magazines, or what some are called the new land line — cable.. But informing yourself about issues of the day seems a waste of time when large swaths of the country refuse even the simplest actions like vaccinations as some sort of political conspiracy. The characteristics of a replay economy may turn out to be more significant than the misinformation mills that social networks struggle with.

the latest Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, January 14, 2022.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.

Politics and tech are certainly strange bedfellows. The Gang loves to talk about filibusters and the fall of democracy, but forget it when I try to bring up my fascination with live audio. That is understandable; we never talk about the little stuff until there’s a battling billionaire angle. So it was that Jack Dorsey’s joust with Marc Andreessen over what the meaning of web3 is is brought all the web2 superstars into the thread. Tim O’Reilly, John Battelle, Chris Dixon, Catch 22’s Milo Mindbender (ok, Moxie Marlinspike?) and even web1’s Leo Laporte weighed in.

Since Covid blocked physical events, we’ve reluctantly moved to another buzzword sweepstakes dubbed the Metaverse. I agree with Keith Teare that this dog won’t hunt due to the stylistic reluctance to wear large hardware objects on our forehead, but there’s a lot more to virtual events than meets the eye. Before the pandemic, more and more meetings were moving online as we tried to juggle back-to-back appointments at the office. It was easier to switch from room to room regardless of physical location, travel time or lack of it, and the innate competition with messaging systems like Slack and civilian texts over iMessage, FB Messenger, and whatever Google Chat was renamed this week. With competitive information constantly flowing in in real time, product strategy has morphed into analytic harvesting of that interactive metadata that drives feedback on the network into design, time to market, and distribution.

Replacing large conferences with virtual working groups mostly goes on behind the corporate firewall, but message testing goes on in the clear. The context is the appsphere, and Clubhouse is a living tutorial in gaining scale through the same kind of access model the old conferences deployed. A gated ropeline establishes a kind of green room access where you can renew connections and establish trust with keynoters and technologists. The possibility of being asked up on stage is where the media is conscripted. Newsletter players like Josh Constine and Casey Newton advance from the tech pub ranks to serve as midwives for the startup churn and casting couch for the venture class. The elixir of media savvy and hallway access is what the conference makers charge for.

A few nights ago I sat transfixed as Adam McKay, the director, and two producers told the story of Don’t Look Up as the movie spooled out on Netflix. The Clubhouse room reverberated for over 2 hours as the filmmakers did a deep dive on the production of the funny, dark, and beautiful story of a meteor heading toward a fatal rendeyvous with Earth. Some of the great books of my fascination with the art and technology of making films flashed through my mind: Truffaut’s conversations with Hitchcock, Pauline Kael’s treatise on Citizen Kane, the moment in Annie Hall when Woody Allen drags Marshall McLuhan out from behind a sign to confront a know it all professor — “You know nothing of my work. How you came to be a professor of anything….” Every frame of Kubrick’s lexicon. The great comic minds gathered around the Algonquin rountable.

And to hear in shared real time McKay tell his tale of what the making of the film meant to him and his team, to share the goals and strategies for producing a film which certainly resonates with the pandemic, filmed in the beginnings of the catastrophe when there were NO vaccines yet invented. The nuances of his approach to combining the script he wrote with the magical improvisations of his actors. It went on and on, and you could hear McKay’s delight at being a part of this coming together of technology and the spirit of inspiration. And you can find the link to the replay of the event for your own examination nestledat the top of the Replay list. Virtual yes but tangible in its emotion and flawless execution. I actually liked the Clubhouse a little more than the movie, yet the aftereffect was to like the movie even more for the experience. Maybe this Metaverse is a thing after all.

the latest Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, January 7, 2022.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.

Here we go with the last show of 2021, recorded in mid-December. It was Frank Radice’s last show from New York before he returned to London. It was nice to bid the year goodbye, but we were careful not to say good riddance like we did in 2020. It was nice to feel good about the Zoom-connected friendships we nurtured, and nice to appreciate the flow of working from anywhere and yet still being productive.

For me, the heartbeat of tech and its impact on so many things we struggle with — politics, streaming, and the media business — was and remains palpable. It may be that crypto will find its moment, but I wouldn’t gamble on it. The midterms loom, and social networks are turning topsy-TicTok and live audio, but I wouldn’t bet on the kind of numbers that will turn Wall Street on quite yet if at all. Newsletters are looking more and more like publishers, and publishers are going startup to head it off at the pass, but it will take talent not venture money to make it stick.

Not since Bill Gates and the Google twins ruled the world have we seen such a shift in the stars that define the nighttime skies. Dorsey, who invented Twitter as a side project, and Andreessen, who sped up thinking from 1X to at least 2X, are skating ahead of the curve now, more aligned than the media wants them to be. Television is gone, replaced by a hybrid of computer, mobile, and small movies that will survive the machine movie behemoths of the fifties. The Beatles are now the old guard, struggling with the transition from children to parents to divorce and rebirth. The more footage we resuscitate, the more we realize what an incredible courageous process they opened to the doors of our perception. Only they were too big to fail and did anyway, and even then let us see how far collaboration can go. As James Taylor echoed:

Just shower the people you love with love
Show them the way that you feel
Things are gonna work out fine
If you only will
Do as I say

the latest Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, December 10, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

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This argument over Web3 is really exciting. How does one call out either of the two main protagonists? Jack Dorsey has an unlimited hall pass now that he’s free of Wall Street’s hound dogging adult supervision of Twitter, and he’s using it for some subtle purpose. I don’t know the guy well, but I’ve always appreciated his counter-conventional attitude toward great truths he has no time for. Marc Andreessen I don’t know so well either, but I’m desperate not to be blocked by him. I listened to a Kara Swisher Twitter Space today, where she has already been blocked for some reason. She’s becoming my favorite media personality for asking all the questions I might have in a format (live audio) where I will never be invited on stage. As a consequence I find her spaces to be a fantastic validation of the new format because when she’s there, the distinctions between host and speaker and listener are irrelevant.

As Doc Searls reminds me, people in our age bracket are dropping like flies. A few weeks ago we talked about Kim Cameron of the Identity Gang; this week it’s Chris Locke, of Cluetrain fame. We recorded on Clubhouse and the link is in the newsletter below. As you’ll hear, he was nicknamed Rageboy for all the right reasons, an original voice who came along as the Internet gave voice to anyone who showed up. According to Doc, he pretty much invented Cluetrain on the wings of the previous generation of rageboys, with names like Vonnegut and most definitional Hunter S. Thompson. Like John Lennon, who brought Paul in, and Paul, who brought George in, and George, who brought Ringo in, Locke connected Doc, David Weinberger, and a technologist, Rick Levine, who built the website that morphed into the business book. The last add reminds me of the guy in Monty Python who did all the surreal animations that connected the tissues of the group together.

Markets are conversations, Doc and the Cluetrain said, and at the time many felt they understood the fundamental note, what Doc now calls the promise of independence. Today’s conversation about Web3 feels important and epoch-changing, but the last years of Trumpism and the pandemic leave us more cautious about the impact of technology. My semi-literate guess is that both Jack and Marc represent a conversation that depends on both being right, yet the media wants an argument and an afterparty rope line. I don’t hear agreement so much as the John and Paul dialogue: Getting better all the time, Can’t get much worse.

As the warriors of the early Internet begin to pass from the scene, I remember the flush of optimism of that earlier time. The battles were over things like owning our own data, being able to transport it from platform to platform, and forging the social media moment into something we could run with in the broader media world. The influencer role was an outgrowth of that surge, the endorsement model its economic driver. It always felt akin to a record deal in the 70’s and 80’s; you pulled enough of a base to fund a recording session, then shopped it to a label. Success was radio airplay, and the hope of a contract for more recording and support for touring.

At its inception, podcasting offered a bootstrap past the record companies and their marketing departments to a more elastic audience development environment. You no longer needed access to the radio funnel with its strictures of expensive recoupable recording time, loss leader showcase performances, and a scratch-my-back, I’ll-scratch-yours quid pro quo insider angle. All those things were still there, but the scale was compressed.

Recordings could be assembled with low-cost prosumer equipment, synthesizers and MIDI bridged the gap between home and studio settings, and sometimes hit records emerged that used a hybrid between the two domains. The Stones in particular worked up riffs on cassettes and moved the actual tracks over to multitracks for sweetening. On the other end of the pipeline, Stevie Wonder used the same overdubbing and multi-track building of home recording to take complete control of the studio as he went from the Motown music factory to music he wrote, played most if not all of the instruments, and partnered with engineers and technologists to spawn a generation of tools that worked fairly transparently across the industry.

Today’s smart phones, cloud services, and app stores provide much the same transfer of power from the labels to the creators. Newletters and live audio networks make it possible to write, record, and distribute material at little or no additional expense. You can effectively create an audience one post at a time, using social media to promote and engage with a growing network of hosts, speakers, and listeners that float between roles in a social and aspirational way. On Clubhouse, record/replay tools produce what are reminiscent of Top Ten lists of most popular replays. Next up will be most popular with certain groups and mining of metadata about how the members of those groups behave with related shows and artists. This evolution of what used to be called liner notes until the CD format and streaming crushed it drove the market from Top Forty radio to deep cut album-oriented FM, and from there to Netflix analytics that determine renewals based on shows’ impact on retention of valuable subscribers.

As I read this, word choice feels forced and arbitrary. I’m failing at communicating why I like this new platform. Perhaps it’s the excessive noise about the creator economy. Is it an economy when the money to be made is at best an after thought to attracting the same media system ostensibly being reformed? Perhaps it’s the melancholy feeling of viewing the present through the prism of the fading past. I can’t remember the details of that earlier time, just the energy that seemed to pulse out of the electric realtime global moment. A live streaming show captures some of that, but not the shared excitement of the possibilities of the era. I got a glimpse of it the first time I launched a Clubhouse room; the random architecture of the notification and follow system drew a very few people, but more than enough to see how this will supersede full production podcasting as it absorbs it.

As with a similar Twitter Space conversation, you could watch listeners drop in, leave, and over time drop back in. My assumption is that the discussion was marginally more interesting or potentially so than other long tail alternatives. Backing the recording up is a 24 hour-plus crapshoot to enable transcription services, so Clubhouse wins for the moment. And the history of the early days of Twitter v. Facebook shows most early adopters will join both to drive improvements in production automation and analytics extraction. This is not the economy at work but more the environment of early film schools like NYU and USC that spawned a community of directors and producers like Lucas, Coppola, and Scorsese that dominated the New Wave of Hollywood filmmaking.

It’s a fragile thing, market-forming, and not at all clear the commitment of these players to anything other than a winner-take-all strategy. Even though the viral attractions of Twitter are seductive, its past history of bailing on third-party developers and acquisitions like Vine and Periscope helps keep Clubhouse in the game as Twitter wrestles with a post-Dorsey resource battle at the parent company. And it’s not just a Field of Dreams story. Sure, if they build it, they will come. But that’s not what “they” will stay for.

Take the cable networks. Please. How much longer will we stare openmouthed at the dismantling of democracy. Or the war with the virus. We long for answers, not growth opportunities. I read a review of the new Don’t Look Up asteroid movie that described it as good but not great. It’s often characterized as a climate change allegory, but for me it was only about Trump winning reelection. Half the country wouldn’t believe the asteroid was coming until they could see it in the nightime sky, but what really hurt was how many didn’t believe it when they could see it.

The review was on Medium, another Field of Dreams startup. Another post concerned the trope that we’re seeing Omicron turn the pandemic into the common cold. Wishful thinking, but not backed up with the data, which the author says suggests the result could be milder or just as possible more severe. Not comforting, but ever more consequential if we act on the science not our hopes. Technology serves us when we follow the data and take sides. The story of the Beatles is not why they broke up but rather how they got together for so long in the first place.

the latest Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, December 10, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

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Well, it turns out the Beatles didn’t get broken up by Yoko after all. But Peter Jackson may have gotten closer. His Get Back movie seemed to be so far over the top that even Beatlemaniacs like myself had had enough. But no. On this edition of the Gang, we still can’t stop talking about it. Random reviews by every third person on the street exonerate Yoko, complain about the weak material, and generally agree that they still want to see the director’s 15 hour cut. It’s like that Groundhog Day with the four fabs endlessly repeating the same mistakes that led to the end of the greatest show on earth. It’s easy to believe George Harrison when he later said the Beatles weren’t that good, but where does that leave us?

The portions weren’t big enough. Paul was too bossy. John was checked out. Yeah, so what. Have you ever read the first draft of the Gettysburg Address? Actually, I bet that is the first draft.

I think I’ve finally got Twitter Spaces to work, or at least the Record part. Then Jack Dorsey leaves and sets off massive speculation about the Blockverse or whatever. What started as a retirement plan for Sergei and Larry (Alphabet) brought Facebook’s reboot to Meta to preserve Mort Zuckerberg’s hammerlock on social media forward. I’ve renamed Marc to Mort as part of the new branding. The Beatles did this first with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They keep moving in and out of style.

Media speculation is that Dorsey is realigning the Twitter stack under Square/Block’s crypto wallet super-app. Look, he quits. Look, he’s still there. But tellingly, Square has been much more successful with the Wall Street crowd than Twitter, and this identity shuffle could turn out to be significant as Twitter builds out its software stack under Dorsey’s successor. It’s in many ways reminiscent of that earlier time when XML and the Web Services stack spawned RSS, blogging, podcasting, and then the Cloud. Today, it’s newsletters, live streaming, and live conferencing a la Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces. Scratch reminiscent; it’s what some are trying to namejack as Web3.

Last week, one of the founders of the Identity movement died, the wonderful Kim Cameron. Doc Searls, one of the founders of the long-running Internet Identity Workshop conference, recalled the group grew out of a special edition of the Gillmor Gang on the last day of 2004 and a subsequent in-person gathering at Esther Dyson’s PC Forum conference. Kim brought a gentle sense of humor, deep knowledge in the potential of identity mixed with open standards cooperation, and the leverage of his role at Microsoft. As the Identity Gang morphed into IIW, Kim brought his personal and big tech identities to the table.

Doc and I went looking for the Identity Gang show and eventually, with the help of Phil Windley and Doug Kaye of IT Conversations, got the link to work. In the meantime, Doc and I recorded a Clubhouse room conversation. We’re early in the live recorded audio rollout, but the tracks are laid and the conversation is underway once more.

Kim drew up what he called the Seven Laws of Identity. Then crucially, he got Microsoft to agree to many of them. “One of his laws said: A plurality of operators,” Doc remembers. “That was huge. And for Microsoft at the time, well, they all but ran the world, to sign off on a plurality of operators, which Kim got them to do. It was a big deal. It was a huge deal, even though there was no formal way that it happened. But it was clear.

“He won a whole bunch of — I wouldn’t call them political battles — but certainly skirmishes inside the company to make sure that they didn’t try to do with whatever they would do next with identity that they did with Passport. It was a hugely influential thing and it still is. It’s informing the development going on today with what’s called SSI for self-sovereign identity, which is basically exactly what his laws say: minimum disclosure for constrained users and user control and consent. It basically puts you as an individual back in charge of the way your identity is used or identifying things about yourself can be done online.”

Whether it’s individual or corporate identity, the lesson of the Beatles is the fierce battle to be the greater sum of its parts. These four men in their late twenties had conquered the world by submerging themselves in a collaborative harness they knew couldn’t last. Harrison openly debated breaking away to do his own record, but he rationalized it as a way of coming back to the hive for more Beatles. McCartney, in a private 1 on 1 with his songwriting partner, told Lennon he was the real boss, Paul the second boss. John pushed back, “Not always.” Paul wasn’t having any of it. “No, always.”

History seems to live in the cracks between what a few people agree is the way forward. I’ve always been interested in the creative space that emerges from the tension of collaboration. As Keith Teare says on this session of the Gillmor Gang, the elevation of Bret Taylor to Chairman of the Twitter board and co-CEO of Salesforce represents not the bad but the good side of Silicon Valley, “which is people have each other’s backs and care about outcomes for companies they don’t work for. And one of the best things about the Valley is it’s incredibly collaborative, and problems are discussed openly and fairly transparently, and people know each other because it’s such a small place.”

Two of us going nowhere, sang John and Paul. Not likely.

the latest Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, November 19, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

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SoftBank-based digital creation platform Picsart, which recently hit uniciorn status, announced today it’s acquiring the research and development company DeepCraft. The deal is a combination of both cash and stock and is in the seven-figure range, but the exact terms aren’t being disclosed.

Picsart today offers a range of digital creation and editing tools aimed at both consumers and professionals alike that make photo and video editing more fun and approachable. The company believes DeepCraft’s A.I. technical talent and its breakthroughs in computer vision and machine learning will enhance Picsart’s own A.I. technology and help the company better support the recent growth of video creation on its service. The team will also help to complement Picsart’s A.I. research and development arm, PAIR (Picsart AI Research) with additional senior resources, the company says.

Founded in 2017, Armenia-based DeepCraft specialized in video and image processing and was the country’s first unicorn. Its co-founders, Armen Abroyan (CEO) and Vardges Hovhannisyan (CTO) have spent more than 20 years in A.I. and machine learning, and are well-known in their local community for their expertise. Abroyan previously held positions as the Deputy Minister for the Ministry of High Tech Industry Republic of Armenia, Lead AI Architect at RedKite, and Senior Software Developer at Synopsys. Meanwhile, Hovhannisyan spent 13 years as a senior R&D engineer at Synopsys.

At DeepCraft, the team worked with a number of clients on a contract basis, including Krisp, PatriotOne, and even the Armenian Government. This work has wrapped up and the team will now begin working from Picsart’s offices in Yerevan. In total, the full DeepCraft team of eight senior machine learning and video engineers will be joining Picsart as full-time employees, as a result of the deal.

Picsart had first entered the video market in 2018 with the acquisition of EFEKT (previously D’efekt), and has seen usage surge in recent years — particularly as its app has been adopted by social media creators and e-commerce shops which use video. So far in 2021, PicsArt has seen more than 180 million videos edited in its app — a 70% increase year-over-year. It now offers thousands of effects and dozens of video editing tools, and plans to grow this lineup as A.I. and cloud technology evolves, it says.

With DeepCraft, Picsart is particularly interested in how the team’s skillset and technology expertise can help it move forward with its support of video, which the company says will be a significant focus in 2022.

However, Picsart is not acquiring specific IP from DeepCraft as part of this deal, the company told TechCrunch.

PicsArt already had a relationship with DeepCraft ahead of the deal as the two had been collaborating on various technology developments.

“DeepCraft is a unique team of deep technology engineers, and we’ve already been working with them to build our core technologies for over a year,” said Picsart co-founder and CTO Artavazd Mehrabyan. “As we invest even further into advancing our video capabilities, we are confident the DeepCraft team will play a significant role in building the future of video,” he added.

The DeepCraft deal is the first acquisition from Picsart since raising its $130 million Series C round in August led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2. The round lifted the company to unicorn status, up from its prior valuation of around $600 million in 2019.

TikTok has seen its short-form video feed copied by a host of competitors, from Instagram to Snap to YouTube and even Netflix. Now it looks like you can add Spotify to that list. The company has confirmed it’s currently testing a new feature in its app, Discover, which presents a vertical feed of music videos that users can scroll through and optionally like or skip. For those who have access to the feature, it appears as a fourth tab in the navigation bar at the bottom of the Spotify app, in between Home and Search.

The new addition was first spotted by Chris Messina, who tweeted out a video of the Discover feature in action. He described it as a “pared-down version” of a TikTok-style feed of music videos.

Messina told us he found the feature in Spotify’s TestFlight build (a beta version for iOS), where a new icon in the navigation toolbar brings you immediately to the video feed when tapped. You can then swipe up and down to move through the feed, much like you would on TikTok. In addition to tapping the heart to like songs, you can also tap the three-dot menu to bring up the standard song information sheet, he notes.

Messina also speculated the feature may be taking advantage of Spotify’s existing Canvas format.

Introduced broadly in 2019, Canvas allows artists to create videos that accompany their music on the Spotify app. The feature had mixed reviews from users, as some reported they preferred to see just the static album art when listening to music and found the video and its looping imagery distracting. But others had said they liked it. Canvas, however, appears to drive the engagement metrics that Spotify wants — the company reports that users are more likely to keep streaming, share tracks, or save tracks, when they see a Canvas.

From the video Messina shared and others we viewed, we can confirm that the videos playing in the vertical feed are the artists’ existing Canvas videos. But Spotify would not confirm this to us directly.

TechCrunch asked Spotify for further information on the feature, including whether it had plans to roll this out further, whether it was available on both iOS and Android, which markets had access to the feature and more. The company declined to share any details about the feature but did confirm, via a statement, it was exploring the idea of a vertical video feed.

“At Spotify, we routinely conduct a number of tests in an effort to improve our user experience,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Some of those tests end up paving the way for our broader user experience and others serve only as an important learning. We don’t have any further news to share at this time,” they added.

In other words, the test is still very early and may not make its way to the public. But if it did, it wouldn’t be a surprising move on Spotify’s part. The company has before looked to popular social media formats to engage its users. In the past, Spotify tested a Stories feature that allowed influencers to post Stories to introduce their own, curated playlists. But that option never became available to all Spotify users.

While the TikTok format has been adopted by top social platforms, including Instagram (Reels), Snapchat (Spotlight), and YouTube (Shorts), and Pinterest (Idea Pins), it’s also proving to be an ideal format for content discovery. Netflix, for instance, recently adopted the short-form vertical video feed in its own app with the launch of its “Fast Laughs” feature which offers clips from its content library and tools to save the programs to a watch list or just start streaming them. Similarly, Spotify’s video-based Discover feature could help introduce users to new music and offer a way to signal their interests to Spotify in a familiar format.

Nowhere is the mess we’re in more volatile than the media war on its rationale for economic survival. As broadcast television gives way to cable and now subscription television, the news networks are caught in a market crash. Trump’s loss in the election and social excommunication has made it super hard for the 3 main cable news channels to make a living. In turn that has rippled through the news economy and put pressure on the difference between the old nightly news hosts and the new landscape.

Mobile phones have made it easier to wait for notifications of breaking news than climb on the hourly analysis model that endlessly recycles the same talking heads we’ve already abandoned. Many of those experts have morphed into the Trump bookstakes, where old breaking news about January 6th and the 2020 election is carved up into soundbites and graphics, and then debated by the roundtables. Fox remains the ratings leader as MSNBC passes CNN, but overall viewership is down massively. MSNBC’s star Rachel Maddow made news recently by negotiating with the network to cut her daily show back to a weekly show and focus more on long-form programming with podcasts and books or even events. While her new deal seems to continue her daily shows for at least the next year, the handwriting is on the wall for the entire structure of hosts and anchors.

It was therefore not coincidental when Brian Williams announced he’s leaving NBC for greener or perhaps techier pastures. We’ve talked about the news restructuring on the Gillmor Gang, so Frank Radice and I took the opportunity to record a Clubhouse conversation about Williams and his move. Frank has known and worked with Brian for some thirty years, first at WCBS and then at NBC, where Williams was the anchor of the NBC Nightly News half hour broadcast. After a scandal involving his description of being under fire in a helicopter that turned out to be at best an exaggeration, he was removed from the show for a six month unpaid leave.

Eventually, he resuscitated his career as a breaking news anchor on MSNBC and started a nightly 11th hour show just outside prime time that drew good ratings and a highly paid grandfathering of his multimillion network salary.“At 11:00 East Coast and and obviously 8:00 right in the middle of dinner on the West Coast,” observes Radice, “there was a huge financial problem for MSNBC, especially under a new sort of tight fisted leader.” Something had to give. The Maddow negotiations took some considerable money off the table, and Williams’ ratings seemed to be less of a huge priority for the network. My guess is that Williams was not given much of a choice; he thought he might be able to do better in the news climate of streaming and tech replatforming Maddow is exploring.

“What I would do if I were Brian,” says Radice, “because he’s not old, but he is in terms of what people are buying online and on television and on the air these days. It seems like they’re not buying experience, they’re buying some kind of cultural thing. He has to remain culturally relevant. I would go to CNN Plus and go back to work with Jeff Zucker and and actually own news online.

“The fact is that when you lose in the news business, certainly in the sort of old boy’s club, which Brian may be the last vestige of, is gone. And you’re in that sort of atmosphere. The idea that somebody would be your godfather is what would be a strong mentor today. And both of the people that were there for him are gone—the chairman of the company, Andy Lack and the president of MSNBC, Phil Griffin,” Frank continues. “And his contract is up at the end of the year. And he’s got a high salary. And there’s a move afoot to change the on air, if not the appearance and look and vibe of, but the structure and content of primetime through late night. So all of those factors added up at the same time. From my perspective, if you’re going to go out, you’ve gone from being on top to being on the bottom to being back sort of on top again, go out sort of on top instead of not the other. The other argument, by the way, against going to CNN is why would he go from the No. two network to the No. three network? I don’t believe that. That’s just looking at the numbers and not really looking at the viable importance of CNN globally.”

We ponder Williams’ ability to add a wry sense of humor to the mix, the blend of news and late night talk show storytelling he got in trouble with. Frank pushes back and runs the CBS job up the flagpole one more time: “I can see that he makes a deal with a CBS to replace Norah O’Donnell and get 4 1-hour specials a year to do that. And that could be valuable to CBS. He comes with a built in audience, it’s over a million people, so you know that that’s valuable. Tom Snyder? He can do that, but I don’t think that anything like that will work in today. Look, it could be… it’s kind of like what we’re doing right now, except one of us is famous and maybe smarter.”

I suggest the only thing I’ve seen in the press about a CBS move is that he’s not interested in that. Frank: When you hear from someone that they’re not inclined to want to do something, that’s probably exactly what they’re inclined to do.

the latest Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, November 12, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

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