| Cult of Mac

See where Tim Cook sits on list of employees’ fave CEOs

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A survey ranked Tim Cook fourth most-popular CEO, according to employees.
A survey ranked Tim Cook fourth most-popular CEO, according to employees.
Image: Canva

Apple CEO Tim Cook place fourth on a list ranking CEOs by popularity according to employees. Blind Workplace Insights released it this week.

Tech, e-commerce and finance leaders dominated the high end of the Blind professional social network’s list. But tech firms were no stranger to the low end, either.

Today in Apple history: Ping social network fails to strike a chord

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Ping iTunes
Apple's music social network starts strong but fails fast.
Photo: Apple

September 1: Today in Apple history: Apple's Ping social network fails to strike a chord September 1, 2010: Apple’s new music-focused social network, Ping, ships as part of iTunes 10. Apple says the service will let users discover new music and more easily follow their favorite artists.

Ping racks up 1 million signups in the first 48 hours. Nevertheless, Apple’s social network is doomed from the start.

4 tips for making life easier on Mastodon

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Quit Twitter in style
Moving to Mastodon is made easier with these top tips.
Image: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac

I have four top tips for Mastodon users after spending a few months on the hot new social media platform. There’s a healthy community of Apple writers, developers, creators and fans — even Phil Schiller — who have all jumped ship from Twitter.

I’ve previously written a detailed guide to getting started. I’ll start with some brief advice on picking an instance and move on to the pro tips I’ve picked up.

Micro.blog now lets you post videos

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This video is going to look great on your Micro.blog.
This video is going to look great on your Micro.blog.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

If you’re sick of YouTube’s ever-shifting terms, or you don’t like how lame Instagram has become, and you just want somewhere to post your videos without interference, then why not post them on your own microblog? Thanks to an update to Micro.blog, you can now do just that, as easily as posting a photo.

Riffr is like getting voicemails from strangers

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Riffr has some good audio tools built in.V
Riffr has some good audio tools built in.
Photo: Cult of Mac

Riffr is yet another social network, this one based around audio snippets. And maybe it’ll actually take off, despite its awful design. It’s as if the makers took the confusion that is late-stage Instagram as a starting point, and then made things worse from there.

That said, Riffr could be quite useful.

How to delete all your tweets

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Even this little birdy is deleting his tweets.
Even this little birdy is deleting his tweets.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Twitter is like that part of town where City Hall just lets anyone open up a bar or a restaurant. It’s lively, and it’s where everyone hangs out, but you certainly don’t want to take the wrong side street late at night. Maybe you’re ready to leave Twitter, thanks to its continued censorship of unknown individuals and simultaneous encouragement of hate speech and lies by more famous people and organizations.

If you’re serious about ditching Twitter, then you probably want to delete your tweets. Twitter feeds off “engagement.” If you delete your tweets, you leave nothing to engage with (although their “content” has probably been mined clean already). If you delete your tweets, and change your Twitter bio to say you’ve quit, this sends a stronger message than just slipping out the side door. It also helps stop someone else from pretending to be you.

Facebook videos are about to get extremely intelligent

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Facebook
Automatic tagging is coming to video.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

Facebook is upping its game with video. Soon, Facebook will be able to automatically identify friends in videos and tag them. Better yet, it’ll store this information so when you want to find that moment again, you could find the video by searching for your friend’s name and then jump straight to when they appear in frame.

Now On iPhone, Material Wants To Be The App You Replace Flipboard With

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Lookout, Flipboard, Material is coming for you.
Lookout, Flipboard. Material is coming for you.

Developer Inq Mobile has just announced a new version of a content discovery app, Material, now available for iOS users as well as those on Android. It’s a free app that aims to sort through millions of sites to find stuff you’ve already showed an interest in, via Twitter and Facebook.

Material grabs all of the sites you’ve linked to, shared, and re-tweeted to deliver a personalized, magazine-style collection of the online ephemera that you’re already checking out, but all in one place.

The app has been on Android for a while now, and has just come to iOS with a newly re-designed app for the iPhone, dropping updates twice a day to your chosen device.

Celly Brings DIY Social Networking to iOS With Free App

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Celly for DIY Social Networks

The more and more we all use social network tools like Facebook and Twitter, the more we can see the benefit of using them in smaller, more unique groups. How great would it be to have a social network that is only open to members of a school project, a church group, or a hot rod club? Instead of going through the hassle of building a Facebook group, figuring out privacy and membership, you could just connect folks together easily and quickly and be done with it.

Well, the folks at Celly seem to have thought of that already, offering a build your own social network that you can create and manage while you’re on the go.