Owner of WeChat.

SnapChat is back in the news alongside AliBaba, which is investing $200 million as part of a new $500 million finding round... One notable point is that Alibaba missed the Instant Messaging-app race in China. That’s its single-greatest failure as a business. With money to burn, it is making another small bet (comparative to its wealth) on a messaging app — don’t forget that it invested $215 million in TanGo last year... Critical to understanding Alibaba’s interest in messaging is that rival TenCent’s WeChat app utterly dominates China to the point that it can be considered the de facto mobile intranet for the country... We Chat may be the common interface for how most Chinese use the Internet, but it hasn’t impacted Alibaba’s dominant E Commerce business. Yet. (more)

system for IPC communication (more)

The Newseum was a grand tribute to the power of journalism. Here’s how it failed. April 2008 as the Newseum celebrated the unveiling of its sumptuous building with the soaring facade just steps from the U.S. Capitol. 10 years later, the Newseum is shrinking into an uncertain future, the distress sale of its building to Johns Hopkins University marking the end of a troubled tenure that has become a cautionary tale of bloated budgets and unrealized ambition (more)

Apple’s new Safari privacy settings threaten web-based VR and AR. With iOS 12.2, the company is introducing a new privacy setting called “Motion and Orientation Access” into version 12.1 of its browser, which will be disabled by default. (more)

John Cutler: 15 Things You Should Know About Product Managers (more)

Tiago Forte: A Vision for Escola Pura (more)

Private Messages Are the New (Old) Social Network. ...tiring habit of posting regular updates to Facebook and Instagram. Over the past year I’ve found myself thinking not about quitting social networks, but about redefining them. For me, that process has involved a lot more private messaging. (GroupMessaging) (more)

A special case of Quarterly Review?

Venkatesh Rao: How to Ride Your Brain Bicycle (more)

Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality guru (more)

Facebook's WhatsApp limits users to five text forwards to curb rumors. Previously, a WhatsApp user could forward a message to 20 individuals or groups. The limit of five is in expansion of a measure WhatsApp put in place in India in July after the spread of rumors on social media led to killings and lynching attempts.

On Sandbox VR. Billions of people around the world watch movies and television (more)

Condé Nast Rolling Out Paywall for Remaining Brands. In a memo to staff, Sauerberg called the move the “next phase” of a strategy that started in 2014, with a paywall for The New Yorker, only adding WiredMag and Vanity Fair since. (more)

The Death of a Dreamer. At school, back in North Carolina, Austen Heinz had been bullied, sometimes badly—the combination of his physical slightness and social illiteracy had seen to that. (more)

aka Free Market, aka Capitalism (not State Capitalism, Corporate Capitalism, Corporate Welfare) (more)

A rule in a game. Most Human Systems can be thought of as games. Ergo most "laws" we run across should at least on occasion be thought of as game-rules as arbitrary as any in a fun-game like Monopoly, tic-tac-toe, dodge-ball, or Mutually Assured Destruction. (more)

Venkatesh Rao: Elderblog Sutra: 1. An elder game tends to be more open-ended than the nominal game. In the ideal case, it is a mature infinite game that can go on indefinitely. (more)

aka Single-Sign-On

A state university system in the United States is a group of public universities supported by an individual state, or a similar entity such as the District of Columbia. These systems constitute the majority of public-funded universities in the country. Each state supports at least one such system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_university_system (more)