It’s everywhere, it’s everywhere…kind of like Chickenman in the old radio serial. Unlike the ‘Wonderful White-Winged Warrior’ though, AI is real and now some AI capabilities have dropped in a Google Maps update. One new feature is an ‘Immersive View’ for route planning. Another is deep Lens integration for local navigation and more accurate real-time information. With the Immersive View, if you are on foot, bike, or public transit…or of course, driving, you can now scrub back and forth through street level, seeing turn-by-turn visuals of the path you’r taking. The feature initially is available in 15 international cities…including  Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle in the US. the app will now determine your precise location, and can direct you to nearby locations like ATMs, transit stations, restaurants, coffee shops, and stores. 

The state of California may have banned GM-owned Cruise self-driving vehicles from San Francisco streets for now due to accidents, Alphabet-owned Waymo is now seeing their self-driving cars coming online as robot taxis though Uber in Phoenix. 9to5google.com notes that Waymo has been running self-driving cars in Phoenix since late 2020 with its own Waymo One ride-hailing service. Waymo’s driverless cars, which are all-electric Jaguar I-Pace vehicles, will be amiable to Uber customers in Metro Phoenix, including Sky Harbor international Airport’s 24th and 44th Street SkyTrain locations. Making the cars available through Uber opens up a much bigger customer base. Waymo One is also available in San Francisco, with public testing ongoing in Los Angeles. 

While Threads, the Meta owned Instagram Twitter clone app made a big initial splash, it looked for a while like it might be flash in the pan. Now, according to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the app is showing staying power…Zuck says it has “just under” 100 million monthly users since it was released in early July. Zuckerberg made the announcement during a quarterly earnings call. He commented “We’re three months in now, and I’m very happy with the trajectory.” Theverge.com reports that the Meta CEO thinks there is room for a billion person public conversations app, and he said he believes it could be Threads in a few more years. X is reported to have some 666 million users at this point….so Threads has a ways to go to catch and pass the former Twitter that has become something of a train wreck…people are all whining about it but continue to use it. 

The catastrophic drop in use at X hasn’t happened, despite all the prognostication since Elon Musk acquired it last year, and in spite of the disruptive changes to the platform. Techcrunch.com reports that X lost 16% of active users in September, citing info from Sensor Tower. Average time spent per daily user also dipped 2% year over year in the third quarter. Similarweb found that power users have been sticking with the site even as daily users have fallen off. Apparently only about 10% of X users have tried out Threads, and at present only about 5% of X users are still active on Threads. The X power users account for some 72.4% of total time spent on the platform…almost the same level from before Musk bought Twitter and renamed it. Some analysts note that while other competitors may fail at cutting into X, Threads has the resources of Meta behind it, and it may succeed in the long haul. Other X rivals like Spill, Spoutible, Bluesky, Mastodon, and others may find it hard to convince X users to fully disengage to join their app instead.

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.