Twitter seems to have handled adding an edit button about as well as possible. The edit button biases toward transparency, adding an edit history for every tweet and a big notice saying a tweet has been edited. Users will only have 30 minutes to edit their tweet, and will only be able to do so “a few times.” Twitter’s surely going to be looking closely at those numbers in its testing to see exactly how editable tweets should really be. It’s only coming to paying subscribers of Twitter Blue, and the test is going to start out small. Twitter is being as careful as can be on this one, and seems to have landed in the right place.

Whether Twitter should have an edit button is still a fun and controversial debate. Will some users abuse the feature, creating (or manufacturing) viral tweets and then changing them to something problematic that lots of users see? You betcha. Do most people want an edit button to do totally valid, normal, platform-improving things? Yep. Can Twitter do enough to track and mitigate the abuse, so that the vast majority of users — who just want to correct typos, re-phrase things that are being misinterpreted, and update their tweets as things change — can use it for its intended purpose? That’s the real question.

The Twitter edit button was a big topic of conversation on the most recent Vergecast, which you can listen to above or wherever you get podcasts.

Over the last couple of years, Twitter has picked up the pace of its product development in a big way. The company made, and fulfilled, a promise to be more open about what it was thinking about and testing. Fleets were going to be huge, until they weren’t. Spaces are the future of Twitter, which apparently now includes podcasts. Twitter seemed all-in on newsletters for about an hour and a half. Super Follows! Twitter Shops! Now there’s Circle, Twitter’s feature for sharing with only your closest friends and followers. It’s a lot of stuff, and it’s hard to tell how much Twitter actually cares about any of it.

This is in many ways a good thing: Twitter moved too slowly for more than a decade, and finally started shipping software at impressive speed. But the thing about Twitter is it’s not like other social networks. It’s more distributed. Many people encounter tweets as embeds on websites; many use third-party Twitter accounts; many see tweets just as screenshots on cable news. You can embed Facebook posts and TikToks, sure, but Twitter’s status as the sort of informational nerve center of the internet makes the stakes higher for how tweets move through the world.

Part of Twitter’s recent product push has been to make its own app better so that more people use it, look at ads inside it, and drop $5 a month on Twitter Blue. Cramming more ancillary features into its app is a classic platform strategy. But Twitter’s cultural impact still vastly exceeds the actual popularity of the app. With a presidential election coming up in the US, too, Twitter’s reach is likely to spike again over the next couple of years. That means that for Twitter to actually make a feature stick, it has to make it stick outside the confines of its own app.

Twitter’s track record on that front is, in a word, terrible. The company has made noise about being a better partner to third-party developers, but many developers are so jaded by Twitter’s behavior over the years that they’re not likely to immediately jump on board with Twitter’s new ideas. And most of the things the company has been building and shipping aren’t even available in Tweetdeck, the power-user app Twitter itself owns.

It’s one thing for apps and platforms to not support certain features or add-ons, but the edit button amounts to a fundamental change to the core unit of Twitter: the tweet. If a single tweet can be different things in different places, depending on where you’re seeing it, Twitter suddenly starts to feel like an unreliable narrator.

And if Twitter’s future is as a protocol rather than a platform, this will only become more important. (The usual Elon Musk-related caveats apply here, of course — nobody knows the future of Twitter, everything is chaos, and who knows where all this nets out.) Twitter has been saying for a couple of years that it wants developers to “drive the future of innovation on Twitter,” and re-think everything from how the community operates to how the algorithms work. Project Bluesky was created within Twitter to build an “open and decentralized standard for social media,” and is already working on tools that would make it easier to move posts or engagement between platforms.

Twitter is trying to engage developers on the edit button, which is encouraging. “We know how important it will be for you to have visibility into edited Tweets,” its Twitter Dev account tweeted on Thursday, “and we’re ready to offer read-support for edited Tweet metadata via the Twitter APIs.” This is good news, both for developers and for researchers who will definitely be curious about how the edit button is used. But Twitter also continues to say this is just a test, and chasing every Twitter test is a dangerous use of any developer’s time.

It seems likely that Twitter will follow through and eventually ship the edit button widely. As the company likes to remind us, it’s been the most-requested feature among Twitter users for years, and surely most of those requestors don’t want the feature for chaos-inducing or bitcoin-scamming reasons. If and when it does come, it will change Twitter, because it changes the tweet. And it will change things far outside the Twitter app, whether the company is ready or not.

So the thing about Elon Musk is that he’s cliqued up — specifically with the so-called PayPal Mafia. If you haven’t heard of it before, it’s a group of influential men in Silicon Valley who all used to work at PayPal.

Today, I’d like to focus our attention on a member of the PayPal Mafia: David O. Sacks, the former COO of PayPal and current venture capitalist. Sacks’ battle with Twitter over a subpoena the company issued in its lawsuit against Musk is a direct demonstration of the downside of being a made man.

If you’re in a group with Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, and the literal co-founders of YouTube and Yelp, you know, you’re in pretty rarified air. In fact, for a long time, it seemed the PayPal Mafia was one of the clearest examples of how networking benefits the ambitious.

These guys sometimes invest together or in each other’s ventures. Sacks is, for instance, an investor in Musk’s tunnel endeavor, The Boring Company. And even though Sacks, Thiel, and Levchin ran Musk out of PayPal in 2000, they all went in together as executive producers on Thank You For Smoking (2005), a darkly funny Aaron Eckhart vehicle about a disgraced tobacco lobbyist. The movie, based on a book by Christopher Buckley, is a libertarian-friendly fable about how, if you’re glib enough, you can get away with anything.

Here in reality, Sacks’ motion to quash Twitter’s subpoena is a bonanza for billable hours, and Twitter’s lawyers are, hilariously, alleging that he’s doing it for clout.

Sacks was subpoenaed by Twitter — as was everyone who’s anyone in Silicon Valley — because, according to Twitter, Sack was “a potential investor in the merger Musk seeks to escape.” In response, Sacks posted a Mad Magazine cover displaying a middle finger and a video of someone pissing on a subpoena.

This clip is from The Wolf of Wall Street, and the character pissing is based on a real-life guy who really went to jail for money laundering and securities fraud. A Freudian would have a field day!

In both Sacks’ and Twitter’s filings, there’s a petty back-and-forth about whether an August 10th phone call was a “meet and confer” or not. This kind of thing, funny as it is, does run up the billable hours. Twitter is asking Sacks to pay for their lawyers, and Sacks is asking Twitter to pay for his. Congratulations to the lawyers, who are the real winners here.

Twitter also says Sacks was lying about not being involved in the Twitter deal and that Sacks even signed a non-disclosure agreement with Musk to evaluate whether he should invest in Twitter. And then it gets to the matter of subpoenas in two states, California and Delaware.

Sacks’ lawyers complain he’s being served with duplicate subpoenas. Twitter says that’s only because Sacks is trying to give the company the runaround in California. What’s more, Twitter says the motion to quash is just saving face: Sacks announced on his podcast, All-In, that he was going to quash — and now he had to follow through. Savage stuff and pretty fun to read. I can’t speak to the legal merits of this dispute, but in terms of writing quality, Twitter wins by a wide mile.

Sacks’ objection to the subpoenas is that, essentially, complying is too onerous. Here’s what Sacks says on the podcast:

I have no involvement in this thing, but they sent me the broadest ever subpoena. It’s like, 30 pages of requests. And now I gotta hire a lawyer to go quash this thing. Because they basically want any of my communications with any of my friends over the last six months. It’s insane.

If I thought Sacks spent a lot of quality time hanging out with, let’s say, high school teachers, mechanics, poets, or social workers, I would agree it would be insane to subpoena all his friends. But it seems like Sacks’ nearest and dearest are serious Silicon Valley players.

Like: The All-In Summit got subpoenaed. That event was the site of some of Musk’s remarks about spam and bots in May. And part of the conceit of All-In is that the hosts are IRL friends. These “besties,” besides Sacks, include: Chamath Palihapitiya, the SPAC King of Silicon Valley; Jason Calacanis, a Silicon Valley fixture; and David Friedberg, a literal CEO at a holding company for startups.

In his motion to quash, Sacks admits he sent some emails to investment bankers but didn’t get involved in the Twitter deal. That doesn’t especially surprise me? Sacks should have looked at the deal! Signing an NDA makes sense, even if he’s only looking at the deal to make his pal Musk happy because that’s an important relationship!

One of the things that I hear ad nauseam about being successful in business is that it’s who you know. That’s part of why the PayPal Mafia is so famous. They are all rich and important, and they have an in on each other’s new investment opportunities, which can make them even richer.

The subpoenas are the downside to being mobbed up. Being close to Musk can be lucrative, but it also makes you vulnerable to getting dragged into his chaos. Twitter says Musk discussed the deal with just four people, and Sacks was one of them. Sacks says Twitter is misinterpreting Musk, which is weird — he doesn’t want to be known as one of Musk’s close confidants? Bit late for that, bestie.

Mark Zuckerberg is betting his company’s future on the metaverse — a virtual space in which people interact with each other using avatars and developing AR / VR technology — investing tens of billions of dollars in an attempt to build the platforms and hardware that capture a new generation of users. Now, the question is: will Zuckerberg’s gamble on the metaverse being the future of the internet — and his company — actually succeed?

One of the biggest parts of that bet is Horizon, Meta’s software for people to socialize, work, and play in the metaverse. Think of Horizon as a blend of The Sims, Minecraft, and Roblox, with users interacting through their avatars in virtual worlds they build.

“We are seeing the youngest generation spend an awful lot of time in virtual reality worlds today,” says Meta’s CMO and head of analytics, Alex Schultz.

Right now, Horizon is only available in Meta’s Quest VR headset, though the company is planning to soon bring it to mobile phones and the web. Meanwhile, there are some major hurdles to Horizon still: awkward-looking avatars, unwanted interactions with strangers, and the discomfort of a VR headset weighing on your face.

The Verge’s Alex Heath and Recode’s Shirin Ghaffary strap on headsets and enter Horizon in the finale episode of the latest season of Land of the Giants, Vox Media’s award-winning narrative podcast series about the most influential tech companies of our time. This season has been all about Facebook’s transformation into Meta, featuring interviews with senior executives, former employees, and other experts.

Horizon is a key step in Zuckerberg’s push to develop the metaverse. But it’s not his end vision. His company’s main goal is releasing what he has called the “holy grail” device: lightweight augmented reality glasses that seamlessly overlay the digital world on the real world around you. With Apple planning its own AR headset, we also examine how these two tech giants are gearing up to battle over what they both think will be the next major computing platform.

Will Meta be able to maintain its head start in the race to make popular headsets if Apple — a company with a better reputation on privacy and more experience building hardware — also enters the race, as widely expected? Our finale episode includes never-before-heard audio of Zuckerberg addressing employees internally about the coming battle with Apple and what it means for the future of the internet.

Listen to the finale episode of Land of the Giants: The Facebook / Meta Disruption, a co-production between Recode and The Verge, and catch the first six episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Every Wednesday and Friday, The Verge publishes our flagship podcast, The Vergecast, where our editors make sense of the week’s most important technology news. On Fridays, Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel, editor-at-large David Pierce, and managing editor Alex Cranz discuss the week in tech news with the reporters and editors covering the biggest stories.

Today’s show starts with Apple announcing the date for its annual iPhone event, slated for September 7th. Apple is also expected to announce new Apple Watches at the event, so the crew discusses the various rumors of redesigns the next watches may have.

Later in the show, the topic shifts to the latest news in streaming: Warner Bros. Discovery’s new streaming service may be called HBO Discovery, YouTube TV will let you watch four channels at once, and House of the Dragon had the biggest HBO premiere ever.

Here’s a sneak peek of today’s show from our own listeners:

If you live in the US, chances are you’ve at least heard of WhatsApp, the messaging app that Meta acquired in 2014.

But if you live in other parts of the world, like India, the service is more than just an app for communicating with friends and family.

“WhatsApp in India is a way of life,” said Rajeev Khera, founder of food tech business Chakki Peesing, which operates outside of New Delhi.

Khera is one of the millions of Indians who run businesses mainly through WhatsApp. And it’s not just businesses: roughly 400 million people in India use WhatsApp to keep in touch with relatives overseas, send money, access critical medical information, and more.

WhatsApp’s simple design helped make it a hit internationally, especially in countries where most people don’t have iPhones to use iMessage or affordable cell phone plans to send SMS messages. When Meta bought WhatsApp eight years ago in a record $19 billion cash and stock deal, it was considered a risky bet. Today, even though it doesn’t contribute much to Meta’s bottom line, WhatsApp is arguably the company’s most essential international product.

At the same time, WhatsApp has struggled with some of the same misinformation problems that have plagued Facebook. But unlike Facebook, WhatsApp uses private, encrypted communication software that makes it harder for the company to moderate content. That problem is especially acute in India, where baseless rumors spread on the app have led to grave consequences. Recently, the Indian government has threatened to crack down on one of WhatsApp’s most core values: user privacy, with regulators demanding a way for authorities to access people’s messages when needed. Will Meta continue to keep WhatsApp messages private even as pressure ramps up?

“You have to think about what it means to offer a service where people communicate their most private thoughts, most private messages, most private calls to the people they care about the most all around the world,” said Will Cathcart, the current head of WhatsApp.

We examine how WhatsApp became so powerful and the consequences of that power for the rest of Meta’s apps in our sixth episode of the new season of Land of the Giants, Vox Media Podcast Network’s award-winning narrative podcast series about the most influential tech companies of our time. This season, Recode and The Verge have teamed up over the course of seven episodes to tell the story of Facebook’s journey to becoming Meta, featuring interviews with current and former executives.

Listen to the sixth episode of Land of the Giants: The Facebook / Meta Disruption, and catch the first five episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Facebook was once, believe it or not, cool.

But a lot has changed since the early days of News Feed, when it was full of status updates and photos from friends. Facebook has gotten crowded with brands and pages vying for eyeballs. It has become a place where people, especially teenagers and young adults, don’t feel as comfortable sharing their lives.

Now, after spending the past four years trying to fix the News Feed by making it more about friends and family, Facebook is going in the other direction: toward showing you more entertaining content from people you don’t know. This new “Discovery Engine” push is all about becoming more like TikTok, which has captured the attention of the young generation Facebook so desperately wants to win back.

The result is an “updated vision for how the Facebook app is going to respond to the next generation of people who are going to use it,” says Tom Alison, the head of the Facebook app at Meta, in what marks his first in-depth podcast interview since he assumed the role in July 2021.

We examine the past, present, and future of Facebook’s Feed for our fifth episode of the new season of Land of the Giants, Vox Media Podcast Network’s award-winning narrative podcast series about the most influential tech companies of our time. This season, Recode and The Verge have teamed up over the course of seven episodes to tell the story of Facebook’s journey to becoming Meta, featuring interviews with current and former executives.

This episode also features commentary from Nick Clegg, Meta’s top policy executive, about the implications of the company taking more control over what billions of users see every day in their Facebook and Instagram feeds.

“In a strange kind of way, in the future, we’re going to be doing what we have been alleged to do for a long time,” said Clegg. “If you listen to the [former Facebook employee and whistleblower] Frances Haugen kind of narrative… it’s, ‘oh my gosh, they’re just spoon-feeding people hate speech…’ Of course it was nonsense… Because the vast majority of content that people saw on Facebook was driven, of course, by our systems, but also by their own choices, who their friends are, which groups they’re part of, what content they engage with, and so on.”

But that is changing with the new Discovery Engine strategy. To make Facebook and Instagram more like TikTok, Meta will serve users more content from strangers using AI. What will this push mean for the future of Facebook and how we use it?

Listen to the fifth episode of Land of the Giants: The Facebook / Meta Disruption below, and catch the first four episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

A couple of months ago on The Vergecast, we wanted to answer a question: which wireless earbuds should you buy to use for phone calls, Zoom meetings, or chatting with your voice assistant? So The Verge’s Chris Welch went to a noisy coffee shop in Brooklyn and hopped on a call with Vergecast co-host David Pierce to test out a bunch of wireless earbuds in a tough noise environment.

The pretty clear winners of that test were the Apple AirPods Pro and the Sony LinkBuds, which had the clearest detail in the voice and took out a fair amount of background noise.

But since that test, two new pairs of flagship earbuds have launched: the Samsung Galaxy Buds 2 Pro and the Google Pixel Buds Pro. So, obviously, we had to put them to the test, along with the winners of the last round.

This time, we wanted to up the ante, so we put Chris on a boat. The New York City Ferry, to be exact — a very noisy environment, with engines, waves, chatter, helicopters, and wind. It’s not a fun place to take a phone call.

You can listen to that full segment around 24 minutes into this Wednesday’s Vergecast, but I wanted to share some of the results we found here.

The first part of the test was at the dock waiting for the ferry, with bustling city noise paired with nearby boat engines, a helicopter pad, PA speaker announcements, and all the unpredictable sounds of downtown Manhattan. Here is an unedited audio sample of the dock, recorded with a stereo microphone:

Here’s how the Apple AirPods Pro handled the dock:

Here’s how the Sony LinkBuds handled the dock:

Here’s how the Samsung Galaxy Buds 2 Pro handled the dock:

Photo by JEWEL SAMAD / AFP via Getty Images

We then had to board the ferry. We sat down at a table inside the boat, pretty close to the engine, which is quite loud if you’re not wearing noise-canceling earbuds. Here’s an audio sample of inside the ferry, recorded with a stereo microphone:

Here’s how the Samsung Galaxy Buds 2 Pro handled inside the ferry:

Here’s how the Google Pixel Buds Pro handled inside the ferry:

Here’s how the Apple AirPods Pro handled inside the ferry:

Here’s how the Sony LinkBuds handled inside the ferry:

After that test, we eliminated the Sony LinkBuds and the Samsung Galaxy Buds 2 Pro, as they did not pass David’s stress test. Chris then went to an even worse location — the top of the ferry, in the open air — to compare the call quality of the AirPods Pro and the Pixel Buds Pro.

There was heavy wind on top of the boat — not an ideal situation for chatting on the phone with earbuds, though a blustery day phone call is sure to be a scenario you may come across while wearing these. Here’s an audio sample of the top of the ferry, recorded with a stereo microphone:

We heard a big difference between the two models. Here’s how the Apple AirPods Pro handled the top of the ferry:

And here’s how the Google Pixel Buds Pro handled the top of the ferry:

Let’s be clear: neither sound great, and nobody on the other end of your call will be psyched to talk to you in this situation. But you can hear how the AirPods cut out a lot of the speech and struggled with the wind and other elements on top of the boat. The Pixel Buds Pro held onto Chris’ voice surprisingly well and would actually be able to take a phone call without much problem.

Sure, the New York City Ferry is not a common place a majority of the population would be using their earbuds to make calls or join a Zoom meeting. But this scenario groups together multiple elements you might face while out in the world communicating: windy days, an active city, public transportation, and all sorts of machines surrounding you. So if microphone quality and isolating noise are what you factor in your purchase, the Pixel Buds Pro seem to be a cut above the rest.

We’ll be sure to test out more earbuds, headphones, and other microphones in future episodes of The Vergecast, so let us know what you want to hear!

Every Wednesday and Friday, The Verge publishes our flagship podcast, The Vergecast, where our editors make sense of the week’s most important technology news. On Fridays, Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel, editor-at-large David Pierce, and managing editor Alex Cranz discuss the week in tech news with the reporters and editors covering the biggest stories.

On today’s show, Nilay, David, and Alex are joined by Verge senior news editor Richard Lawler to discuss the foldable phones announced at Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked event this week: the Z Fold 4 and the Z Flip 4. Samsung basically owns the foldable category in the US, and the devices are getting better with each generation. But do people actually hold on to them? The crew shares their thoughts.

Later on, the topic shifts to the rising cost of Disney’s streaming services. Disney Plus, Hulu, and ESPN Plus will increase $3 per month later this year. With HBO Max on the chopping block and Netflix subscribers dropping, where is the future of streaming headed for consumers?

The Vergecast gets into that and a whole lot more — including Gmail spam-proofing politicians’ emails, Ethereum’s proof-of-stake blockchain, and Google trying to publicly shame Apple into adopting RCS — so listen here or in your preferred podcast player for the full discussion.

Every Wednesday and Friday, The Verge publishes our flagship podcast, The Vergecast, where our editors make sense of the week’s most important technology news. On Wednesdays, editor-at-large David Pierce leads a selection of The Verge’s expert staffers in an exploration of how gadgets and software affect our lives — and which ones you should bring into your home.

This week, David taps into The Verge’s reviews team to explore where we’re headed with smart home gadgets, wearables, and midrange phones.

At the top of the show, Verge smart home reviewer Jennifer Pattison Tuohy returns to discuss Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot, maker of the ever-popular Roomba robot vacuum. What does Amazon want with Roomba? Jennifer explains.

Later in the show, Verge wearable tech reviewer Victoria Song joins David to explore the fascinating world of non-watch wearables: rings, earbuds, sports bras, and sleep trackers. Afterward, we hear from Whoop CEO Will Ahmed about his approach to wearable technology.

In the final segment, Verge mobile reviewer Allison Johnson and David get together to discuss their ideal version of a midrange smartphone and what the best tradeoffs are for the price.

You can listen to the full show here or in your preferred podcast player. We have lots of ideas about how to do this show, and we’re going to do a lot of experimenting with it, so we hope you’ll tell us what you like and don’t like. Either way, we’ll see you again on Friday!

Every Wednesday and Friday, The Verge publishes our flagship podcast, The Vergecast, where our editors make sense of the week’s most important technology news. On Wednesdays, editor-at-large David Pierce leads a selection of The Verge’s expert staffers in an exploration of how gadgets and software affect our lives — and which ones you should bring into your home.

Today’s show focuses on a singular theme: working from home. Or working from anywhere! David hosts The Vergecast from Miami, and talks to a bunch of experts about what it takes to successfully work away from a normal office, with tips on working from a sailboat, powering your gadgets with a solar generator, and getting internet in hard-to-reach places with Starlink.

David starts the show with a story about the work-from-home gear showing up in the travel world. The CEO of Rove, Jonah Hanig, talks about Rove’s approach to renovating rental houses for work-friendly travel. Then, Reflect’s Alex MacCaw shares his experience working from a sailboat in the middle of the ocean and the gear he needs to do it.

Later in the show, David talks with Verge deputy editor Thomas Ricker about his review of the Jackery Solar Generator 2000 Pro, as well as his experience working remotely in Europe and reviewing the most outdoorsy gadgets we put on the site.

In the final segment of the show, Verge policy editor Russell Brandom and senior reporter Loren Grush discuss the state of using satellites like Starlink to access the internet in rural areas. The satellite internet race is much bigger than Starlink, and potentially much bigger than people who want to live on boats and in RVs.

You can listen to the full show here or in your preferred podcast player.