Ashwin Nanjappa 🦋

Don’t be pusillanimous, take a look at this great project

Mildly interesting. Book from 1917. Note the apostrophe before phone!

A perfect parasite doesn't destroy the host. It kees the host functional enough to keep itslef alive indefinitely.

Talk about The Wire, Sopranos, Game of Thrones all you want, but the greatest US television program ever made is Sesame Street. It's not even close. 50+ years of treating kids across class, ethnicity, religion not as mini-consumers...but as citizens with a stake in this world.

When you get an Amazon Echo and start using it after you already use Amazon for commerce, you feel like Amazon is getting more relevant in your life. However, when you get Instagram and start using that in addition to Facebook, you feel like Facebook as a company is getting less relevant in your life. This is because we haven't effectively linked Instagram and WhatsApp to our corporate Facebook brand. The majority of people don't even know we own those services, and many of those who do know that still see them as sufficiently independent acquisitions that they do not reflect on the person's relationship with Facebook. I believe this contributes significantly to our brand issues. We have data that many people see Facebook as getting less relevant and believe our best days are behind us. Many think our services are getting worse -- which makes sense since our service is really about the network and we're

actively fragmenting our network. This all means people will be less likely to try our new products or any other features we build. Long term this is likely a bigger brand issue for our products than our recent privacy issues because it gets to the heart of whether we are a company that can even build useful things and remain relevant in people's lives. Tech companies can withstand crises, but once you're Yahoo -- large but irrelevant -- it's tough to get people to even consider your products and it's difficult to succeed. Unfortunately, this brand dynamic is accelerating for us. I do not believe our current corporate brand strategy is sustainable. From a relevance perspective, we need to find a way to make it so that when a person uses more of our apps, they feel like we're serving them better and becoming more relevant in their life, not less. I only see two solutions to this: we either need

to aggressively brand all of our services with Facebook as our corporate brand, or we need to create a new corporate brand and aggressively brand all of our services with that. We are not a holding company, so Alphabet is not the right analogy for us. People have a relationship with us, and they do not with Alphabet. Most people don't know what Alphabet is, and Alphabet isn't relevant in their lives. In that case, Google remains the corporate brand people have a relationship with. If we want to consider rebranding, a better model is Apple, Microsoft, or Samsung -- companies with strong consumer-facing corporate brands that are distinct from any specific product, but aggressively attached to all of their products. That said, an impulse to consider rebranding feels largely motivated by fear that the Facebook brand is irreparably tarnished. I disagree with this and believe it would be difficult to execute

such a rebrand without it coming off like an Altria moment. The only way I could see this working is if we find a name so symbolic of our mission that it feels like we're running towards our core rather than away, and so inspiring that we'd proudly stamp it on every service we provide. That seems difficult, so it's likely the strongest move is doubling down on the Facebook brand -- like Amazon has with their lead product -- and aggressively branding Instagram and WhatsApp with it. When you open those apps, it would say "Instagram by Facebook" and "WhatsApp by Facebook". We may even need to put Facebook branding in the chrome of those apps where the app names and logos are today to cement this relationship in people's minds. We don't have to execute a change this month while the Facebook brand is at a global minimum, but this is such a big shift, it seems critical to have a coherent corporate brand moving forward, and it will take time to execute, so we should start now.

Mark Zuckerberg on rebranding Facebook

May 3, 2018

Man NYC is dangerous.

I thought I was looking pretty intellectual reading obscure Wodehouse on the subway from Penn Station to Brooklyn, and then I swear to God I look down and there's a middle-aged woman making notes in a copy of Notes from a Dead House by Dostoevsky.

People didn’t “used to be fine” without air conditioning during heat waves in the U.S. - a lot more people *just died*.

According to this study, air conditioning has cut heat deaths in the U.S. by around 80% since 1960.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Peanuts are an underrated nut. If they were more expensive, they'd be in the deluxe mixed nuts jar.

Boise School District, once again showing why they are one of the best. 👏👏

#cartoon #vadodarabridgecollapse #PhotoOp linktr.ee/MANJULtoons

Hearts of Darkness: A Film-Maker’s Apocalypse review – Francis Ford Coppola and the mother of all meltdowns Coppola said his masterpiece Apocalypse Now ‘is not about Vietnam; it is Vietnam’ – this superb film shows how little he was exaggerating

My review of Hearts Of Darkness: A Film-maker’s Apocalypse (dirs. Eleanor Coppola et al) is up here: www.theguardian.com/film/2025/ju...

Comic. SALESMAN [pointing at dehumidifier on sale]: This dehumidifier model features built-in WiFi for remote updates. PERSON 2: Great! That will be really useful if they discover a new kind of water.

Dehumidifier

xkcd.com/3109/

Delete Apple Account > Throw away iPhone > Sell house > Live in woods > Find bottle in nearby stream > Has note inside > F1® The Movie tickets available now!!1

#Tagorespotting in Monsoon Wedding (2001)

I used to run with a pretty tough gang when I was younger.

We still don’t appreciate the extent of his genius.

Poster for M3GAN 2.0 that presents the titular robot in the foreground, dressed like a Japanese superhero, while the other robot looks in the background. Japanese text is all over the poster and lightning is coming off of M3gan.

This tokusatsu-inspired M3GAN 2.0 poster rules so hard.

bloody-disgusting.com/movie/388495...

Bit bigger than I have wall space for at the moment, though.

By the time you’ve reached your forties you will have lived to see the newspapers that insisted that the country you grew up in was on the verge of social collapse portray those very same years of your youth as a period of blissful social cohesion.

we're living through one of the greatest technological revolutions in the history of mankind and it's not AI

Strive to always be the person you are when you're wearing sunglasses.

Two large thin pretzels in a wicker basket. The pretzels are wrapped in clear plastic and are stacked somewhat vertically. Yellow sticker on package with black text: 50%

#History of #pretzel, probably:

1. Let's tie breadstick in a knot and call it pretzel.
2. Let's make pretzels tiny and sell them in bags as snack.
3. Let's enlarge the pretzel snack and sell them in pairs.

(picture taken at an Austrian supermarket)

#speculation #joke #sarcasm #cynicism

the level of misinformation sparked because of this bananas EEG preprint is just really tragic.

By the way if you think that a researcher caused cognitive decline to happen to participants in a study you should probably be freaked out by that

Packages of food containers on a store shelf called “unix ware”.

Can I interest you in some Unix containers?

We've been conditioned to think forests should be neat and tidy, but that's parkland: a domesticated version.

REAL forest ecosystems are wild, tangled, and unruly.

Found outside a temple.

Entire Discworld series turned into a rotating book wheel - Yanko Design https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAdnN0TDZ5w To say that the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett has a cult following is one of the biggest understatements in book world. It's a pretty long series but ...

You can keep your Kindles. I'll take one of these please.

Concurrently terrifying and erotic

Goodnight

By the 1900s, the movie industry had a problem: supply could not meet demand. DAVY JONES' LOCKER (1900) is a Biograph release that printed footage of a skeleton marionette over an actuality shot of a shipwreck, creating a surreal scene, and stretching existing material into new entertainment.

We need to bring more clarity to our speech.