Reading list

• Attention to sustainability in digital services has hit a sort of peak as of late, and it's about time to point our attention to good old privacy concerns again. NRK has an investigative article that reveals how a national anonymous help line have let personal information flow towards Meta. While this is important to get right, we hope this won't discourage or hinder the important work the help line does. The good news is that it's been fixed.
• The Las Vegas Orb can't possibly have escaped your attentive eyes, and The Verge has a pondering piece diving right in. We foresee the Orb 2.0, which can fly to outer space and entertain the people on board while tiny cute robots clean up the earth.

Design of the week

• A heartfelt thank you to whomever posted this. It can be tricky to distill exactly what we're looking at in the usual suspects we post here. Here's simply a well designed site that does its job perfectly to explain itself. Softrock makes nice things that look like rocks, but they're soft.
• Cute AI powered toys.
• Great news! Adobe won't be purchasing Figma after all. The good news is that Figma get a termination fee of $1B. Well played indeed.

Tech of the week

• Google keeps talking about loading speed thresholds that supposedly influence the SEO algorithms. SpeedCurve kind of debunks this, claiming speed has little or no consequence.
• On the topic of SEO, Google is struggling with a new scheme known as "SEO heists", a method for cloning sites entirely in order to steal it's SEO deliciousness (paid).
• Meta has an interesting deep dive in the infrastructural engineering behind Threads. Just the shear volume this service garnered over such a short time naturally posed some challenges.