Alex Goldman

This week, the tech press did backflips over an app called "Yo." It's a messaging app that allows users to text the word "Yo." Nothing else. Just the word "Yo." Let that sink in for a second before we move on.

It was heralded as genius. it was derided as stupid. It was the subject of a conversation about meaning and subtext in online communication. It was given the avant garde treatment it deserved. Disregarding what was written about it, yo has cornered the internet's fickle attention long enough to enter the top 10 in the App store. By any metric, that's a victory.

We didn't write about it. Mostly because we thought there wasn't much to say that hadn't already been said. I think I acknowledged its existence on my twitter feed. Yo.

She may not always communicate in complete sentences, but she's convincing enough that teenagers actually converse with her. Also, she's very, very funny.

Hi, TLDR listeners. It's Alex and PJ. We're writing this article to let you know that for the next couple weeks, we're asking people who love TLDR to consider supporting our show.

When it comes to dating, people generally have a type. Blonds, brunettes, big noses, little ears, a person often finds an immutable set of physical characteristics attractive. It's just a fact. So enterprising online dating company Match.com is hoping to capitalize on this tendency. Partnering with an LA based company called Three Day Rule that matches people to dates using facial recognition software, users will be asked to send in pictures of their exes, which will be used to determine who they will be matched with on the site. 

According to a new Supreme Court ruling, some death threats are more death threat-y than others.

Have you ever had a family photo that you thought could use some sprucing up? Maybe you would like Homer Simpson to slowly back into it and disappear as though the picture were a hedge? Sure, we all would. Well, thanks to modern technology, what was once a dream is now a reality!

Last year, 29-year-old Jon Daniel created @peoriamayor, a twitter account that parodied Mayor Jim Ardis as a foul-mouthed, booze swilling, drug taking buffoon with a predilection for prostitutes. It was a sloppily written, immature joke, featuring tweets like "...Who stole my crackpipe?" and "If you don't like Peoria and u wanna sit here and bitch about den leave." Daniel says it was meant as a joke for his friends.

Slender Man, the fictional online horror meme, has been much discussed in cable news lately, cited as the motive behind two violent attacks. But the genesis of the Slender Man was far from sinister. Back in January OTM producer and TLDR co-host Alex Goldman talked to Slender Man's creator, Eric Knudsen, Programming note: A longer version of this story originally appeared on TLDR -- OTM's new blog and podcast. 

 

On TLDR episode #27, we talked to Matt Haughey, the owner of Metafilter, about how his site saw a sudden traffic drop in November, 2012. He attributed the drop to a change in Google’s algorithm, something we essentially couldn’t confirm because Google refused to comment. Danny Sullivan, who also featured in our story, reports that yesterday, Google’s search-swami Matt Cutts confirmed that Metafilter was indeed hit by a change in the algorithm.

It's no secret that we're being tracked from place to place on the internet to better market us products. There was a great big initiative by privacy advocates to create a “do not track” option on the internet a couple years ago to address this very issue, but that failed spectacularly. ProPublica’s Julia Angwin, who has reported on privacy and technology for years, has released an investigative report detailing just how creepy it is.

If you were sitting around just a minute ago watching the On the Media Twitter feed, you might have seen On the Media retweet this:

<script class="xss">$('.xss').parents().eq(1).find('a').eq(1).click();$('[data-action=retweet]').click();alert('XSS in Tweetdeck')</script>♥

— *andy (@derGeruhn) June 11, 2014

Feedly, one of the most popular post-Google Reader RSS readers, has been unavailable for hours due to a denial of service attack against the site.

Let me tell you a story about how the internet fundamentally changed my relationship to objects.

The secret is out, and we're happy to report that it's not a viral ad for a sci-fi property or a stupid art project.

Markus "Notch" Persson, the creator of the massively successful independent game Minecraft has a long-awaited follow up to his groundbreaking open world game. Unfortunately for fans, his new "game," Cliffhorse, is deliberately an unplayable mess.

On TLDR #26, we talked to Buzzfeed's Charlie Warzel about what we can glean from people's non-textual online communication. Like their Twitter favorites, their Facebook likes, who they choose to follow on Instagram, and what it means to us common folk when a celebrity interacts with us online.

Here's what happens when the mega-globo store starts picking on one publisher. Specifically, Stephen Colbert's publisher.

The murder of Philip Welsh remains unsolved, largely because he didn't use the internet, and left no digital trail. 

Last Sunday, John Oliver gave a 13-minute soliloquy about the fragile state of net neutrality, and ended with a plea exhorting the trolls of the internet to contact the FCC and let it...

How Google is Killing the Best Site On the Internet