Posts Tagged: moving

Flipboard is moving to the fediverse

Flipboard is the latest mainstream app to officially join the fediverse, the collection of decentralized services that run on the ActivityPub protocol. The news reading app, which has been experimenting with Mastodon for nearly a year, now plans to become fully interoperable with Mastodon and the rest of the fediverse.

The news reading app is starting with the accounts of about two dozen publishers, including Polygon, Medium, Semafor, Kotaku and Mental Floss, whose Flipboard content will be discoverable across the fediverse. By next month, the company expects all public Flipboard accounts will be federated, meaning anyone on an ActivityPub-powered app will be able to view their posts and interact with them.

And beginning in April, according to Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, all fediverse content will also be readily available within the Flipboard app itself. This means users will be able to use Flipboard browse content shared to Mastodon, Pixelfed (a photo sharing app kind of like Instagram), PeerTube (a decentralized video platform) and the rest of the apps that make up the fediverse.

Flipboard’s official entrance into the fediverse comes at a moment where there is increasing enthusiasm for ActivityPub within the social media industry. Last week, Meta announced that it was taking its first steps toward making Threads compatible with Mastodon and the rest of the fediverse. “I think you’ll probably have more than 150 million people in the fediverse by the end of the next year,” McCue tells Engadget, “You have millions of Flipboard users, millions of Threads users all joining this network … it’s not going to take very long before this becomes the largest social network.”

McCue’s enthusiasm for Mastodon and the fediverse is especially notable given his once close ties to Twitter. The Flipboard CEO was a member of Twitter’s board between 2010 and 2012, and reportedly considered selling Flipboard to the company in 2015. But Elon Musk’s takeover of the company, and the disintegration of its API, prompted him to begin experimenting with Mastodon and Bluesky integrations earlier this year.

He now believes that momentum for the fediverse is so strong, Twitter may ultimately end up supporting ActivityPub too. “More and more companies will have to look at ActivityPub,” he predicts. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter ultimately decides they’re going to have to do this.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/flipboard-is-moving-to-the-fediverse-170426320.html?src=rss
Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics

Recent ‘realityOS’ trademarks hint at Apple moving closer to AR/VR headset announcement

At the start of the year, a handful of developers, including Steve Troughton-Smith, found references to “realityOS,” the operating system for Apple’s long-rumored virtual and augmented reality headset. Now, a little more than a week before the start of WWDC 2022, the name has resurfaced in trademark filings seemingly linked to the company.

On Friday, Vox Media product manager Parker Ortolani took to Twitter to share two United States Patent and Trademark Office filings he found registered by a company called Realityo Systems LLC. As Parker and others have pointed out, there’s evidence to suggest Realityo Systems is a shell company created by Apple to obscure its tracks.

First, there’s the June 8th foreign filing deadline for both trademarks, which falls just two days after the start of WWDC 2022. Additionally, as noted by 9to5Mac, Realityo Systems LLC shares the same address as Yosemite Research LLC, the shell company Apple used to secure trademarks for past versions of its macOS operating system, including macOS Monterey. One more interesting tidbit of evidence is that in some countries Realityo Systems submitted trademark filings that include a realityOS logo written in Apple’s signature San Francisco typeface.

The timing of the filings suggests Apple is getting closer to the day it will feel comfortable sharing details about its augmented and virtual reality ambitions. However, we would caution against expecting an announcement as early as next week. In his latest Power On newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman predicts the company won’t hold “a full-blown presentation” on its mixed-reality headset at WWDC. In fact, he says he would be “wary of expecting” such an announcement from the company. Gurman previously reported that Apple was considering pushing the device's debut back to 2023 due to ongoing development problems. Still, the company is clearly moving forward with the project.

Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics

Strava is moving some free features behind a subscription

Strava, the social fitness network that tracks cycling and running, is putting some of its previously free features behind a subscription paywall. In a press release, the company said that it’s not yet a profitable company, and that its “commitment t…
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Fitbit teams up with Target to get employees moving, thanks to HIPAA compliance

Fitbit wants to make a jump into the corporate work, receiving HIPAA compliance to view employee’s health information. Target plans to implement a fitness program for its 335,000 employees using Fitbit technology.

The post Fitbit teams up with Target to get employees moving, thanks to HIPAA compliance appeared first on Digital Trends.

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