Month: March 2023

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Thomas Trutschel )

When Elon Musk blamed Twitter's outage yesterday on code that "is extremely brittle for no good reason," he ignored the effect his massive layoffs had on Twitter's ability to keep the site running.

Twitter said the outage, which broke links and other functionality for about an hour, was caused by "an internal change that had some unintended consequences." That change, according to a Platformer article, "was part of a project to shut down free access to the Twitter API."

"The company has been building a new, paid API for developers to work with," Platformer wrote, continuing:

Enlarge / A YouTube overlay ad. (credit: YouTube / Summit Entertainment)

Here's something you don't see everyday: fewer ads on YouTube. Well, fewer ad formats, at least. YouTube's latest forum post says the company will be doing away with "Overlay ads" on YouTube videos. These are the old-school banner ads that pop up over the video player, obstructing the view of whatever you were trying to watch.

YouTube says the ads are going away on April 6, calling them a "legacy ad format." The ads only worked on desktop, the company said, and they "are disruptive for viewers." Now the only ads in the video player will be video ads that can play before, in the middle of, or after a video. The "view product" pop-up ad is also allowed, and there will still be banner ads in the recommended video list.

The company says it expects to see "limited impact for most Creators as engagement shifts to other ad formats." Ads are annoying for viewers, but creators often only get paid if certain ad thresholds are met. Seeing the overlay ad wasn't necessarily enough for a creator to earn money—advertisers could choose to only pay if a user clicked on the ad, so there was a high chance nobody was actually getting paid from these pop-ups. Video ads with a "skip" button also don't pay out if users click the skip button.

Enlarge / The current Outlook for Mac email client. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is making the Outlook for Mac app free to use, the company announced this week. Previously available with a Microsoft 365 account or as part of the Office for Mac app suite, the Outlook app is downloadable from the Mac App Store and works with Outlook.com, Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, and plain old IMAP and POP email accounts.

Microsoft already offers a free version of the Outlook client for iOS and Android, and it's currently testing a preview of a redesigned Outlook app that will replace the built-in Mail and Calendar apps that ship with Windows 11.

The Mac version of the app doesn't use that new design—it's the same Outlook for Mac app that Microsoft rolled out back in late 2020—but the company's blog post says the company is working on "rebuilding Outlook for Mac from the ground up." This will presumably be the same client that Microsoft is testing in Windows, part of the company's "One Outlook" project (also called Project Monarch) that aims to offer a single unified mail client that looks and works the same way across all supported platforms.

Enlarge / The current Outlook for Mac email client. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is making the Outlook for Mac app free to use, the company announced this week. Previously available with a Microsoft 365 account or as part of the Office for Mac app suite, the Outlook app is downloadable from the Mac App Store and works with Outlook.com, Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, and plain old IMAP and POP email accounts.

Microsoft already offers a free version of the Outlook client for iOS and Android, and it's currently testing a preview of a redesigned Outlook app that will replace the built-in Mail and Calendar apps that ship with Windows 11.

The Mac version of the app doesn't use that new design—it's the same Outlook for Mac app that Microsoft rolled out back in late 2020—but the company's blog post says the company is working on "rebuilding Outlook for Mac from the ground up." This will presumably be the same client that Microsoft is testing in Windows, part of the company's "One Outlook" project (also called Project Monarch) that aims to offer a single unified mail client that looks and works the same way across all supported platforms.