Links and Notes - May 13th 2021

Eid Mubarak

It's that time of the year again for us Muslims. Sri Lanka celebrates Eid festival tomorrow. Despite my gripings yesteday, today turned out to be a good one. Sri Lanka is slowly coming under lock down again, and from 11 PM tonight till 4 AM Monday, only essential services are allowed to operate. This means no movement for general public between houses or workplaces. Even if you need food, your only option is to order it online^[1].

Thus, we are having celebrations purely at home. This isn't unique to us either. Most places around the world are undergoing new covid waves and have restricted movements between homes. I think that's why I'm seeing a lot more posts pop up on Instagram this year with homes being decorated far more than usual. Nothing extravagant. Just a lot more effort. And that's what it's like for us. We've hung up little pieces of decoration to give a feeling of festivity to the house. We the spent a good chunk of the day working on Eid treats together as a family (I took leave today). Our Eid clothes are ironed and kept out. And I've got various video calls lined up to take.

We might not be able to go out tomorrow, but we are certainly going to do our best to celebrate every little bit we've got.

And now that fasting is done, it's time to get back to working with full mental energy. It's also time to get back to exercising. Lockdowns or not, I'm going to be working super hard to get myself back in shape for skating.

Clubhouse launched on Android??

I got a great news letter from Indiehackers today detailing a piece of news I can't believe I missed. The title says it all. I can't believe I missed the launch of Clubhouse on Android. It apparently launched 4 days ago and somehow I haven't seen a single word about it anywhere! This is despite me keeping tabs on the kind of people on Twitter who live and breathe this kind of news. These are the people who were constantly hosting events on Clubhouse when it launched.

And that got me thinking... It's been a while since I've seen any of them say "Come join me on Clubhouse". To be fair, I haven't seen many of them use an alternative product like Twitter spaces either. It's almost like the idea of conversing with a friend alongside a silent audience has kind of fizzled out. Or maybe I'm not looking hard enough.

Anyways, the point is that Clubhouse has been having declining sign ups and their Android launch has just been a complete and utter flop by VC unicorn standards. The article does mention that every social media platform is also competing to have a Clubhouse style audio feature shoved into it so as to keep users on their platforms. One of the particularly big competitors to this is of course, Twitter Spaces. Twitter is where Clubhouse's biggest users hang out by default so it would seem to be Clubhouse's biggest threat. Yet despite being on mobile everywhere, Twitter spaces seems invisible to me. Maybe it's because I follow everyone via lists instead of the standard follow mechanism. But I don't see anyone really tweeting about their spaces either. Even more importantly, I don't see a single central space to locate any Twitter Spaces I might be interested in which in my opinion, is a damn shame.

One thing the newsletter makes a great point about is how similar this whole thing feels to the livestreaming app battles of ye olde days. The time when Meerkat came out and was a hit and then Twitter and Periscope just destroyed it. Interestingly though, the newsletter stops short of mentioning that Periscope also shut down this year. I can't help but wonder if that's the fate that awaits this entire space. Company comes out with a novel concept that gets cloned hard. Original company fails and then some years later, the competition that killed it simply burns itself out too.

Update to hey mail organizer

Technically, I already made my blog post for the day. It was this post updating on the progress I've been making on my hey inspired mail organizer. All the details are there, but let's just say that I'm super excited to have actually gotten a tiny tool working for me. My email inbox is organized and now I'm tempted to go apply this to any email I've had in the past. Definitely going to be thinking about an "onboarding" experience as I go along here even if that's not part of my June 6th delivery goals

Support Palestine

Fuck the language of "conflicts". Support Palestine. Recognize the ethnic cleansing. Spread the word. Even though this is a topic that some of us, myself included, knew and discussed since childhood, it's always a better day when more people can awaken to what's going on there.

Support Palestine.

That's it. That's really all I have to say on the topic.

Oh wait. One more thing. It's pretty funny and sad at the same time to see people looking at liberal media outlets with disgust at their sneaky "both sides" language they use to describe the ethnic cleansing going on. Like I've said before, this isn't anything new. But it's nice, and sad, to see people get a reminder every now and then that big media outlets are at their core, grifters. Liberal or otherwise.

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Previous links and notes (May 12th)

Posted on May 13 2021 by Adnan Issadeen