Happy Saturday from a rainy morning in Texas.

A few links and notes from the week that was:

• The Grammy Awards show was on Sunday, and it sure was fun for a change! My kids were interested for only one reason (Taylor) and it didn’t disappoint.

  My highlight: a great new single and performance from Billy Joel. It’s not technically his first new song in 30+ years, but it feels like it. The song is great. The chord structures and vocal lines are vintage Joel and sound like they were written decades ago in his songwriting prime. So much fun.

• The Apple Vision Pro is in the hands of customers and it’s been a fun week watching videos and reviews from the early adopters. Casey Neistat’s video of wearing the device skateboarding around New York is brilliant. Love seeing the reactions of people around the city.

  Nick Bilton had a solid interview with Tim Cook in Vanity Fair. Ben Thompson was underwhelmed by the productivity solution for work.¹

  I saw a few people wearing the Vision Pro around town this week. They all looked ridiculous and so nerdy, but I suspect this will be more normalized in the coming years.

• As with most years, I’ve spent a ton of time in the early part of this year planning features, projects, and other timelines for my teams. In years past I’ve just used Google Sheets as a visual means to display this information.

  This year I set everything up in Notion and it’s been such an easier process. Dragging project entries and creating a database of our yearly plans has been a significant improvement over a spreadsheet!

  It’s been a few years since I switched all of my ventures to use Notion, and I’m really glad I did.

• This week Bluesky opened up officially for all new users, no invite codes necessary.

  I signed up for Bluesky a while back but never stuck with it. I don’t have a particularly good reason why, but it just never clicked with me yet. Mastodon and Threads have completely replaced Twitter for me, and I’m not sure I need a third service to check. But I do love the idea of the AT Protocol and the ideas behind Bluesky.

  The developer documentation they’ve produced thus far has been very good. I love the spirit behind the protocol and how the company is pushing it. It may be time to give Bluesky another look.

• Disney has made a major investment in Epic Games, creator of Fortnite. This is a very interesting deal to me. It’s been a few years since the metaverse craze and things have mostly been quiet on that front for me.

  Fortnite is a massive deal. My son and almost all of his friends play the game every chance they get. When they’re not playing it, they’re watching YouTube videos about it. There’s a giant community of gamers that are very into this ecosystem.

  It makes a ton of sense to me for the Disney brand to invest in this space and reach this audience. Can’t wait to see how this ends up taking shape.

• In a book that was released what seems like a few years too late, Chris Dixon’s Read Write Own is out. Although after reading Molly White’s detailed review it doesn’t seem like it’s worth the time.

  Dixon had some really interesting ideas that resonated with me a few years ago. But after so many cases of fraud, deception, and unethical behavior it’s hard for me to take anything crypto seriously anymore. Probably a shame, because there’s some very interesting tech in the space, but it hasn’t resulted in any life changing products for me.

• Lastly, in today’s issue of Air Mail, Brian Stelter writes about the rise and fall of the Messenger. A great read about a very weird story. I really like Stetler and his work over the years. It’s so great to having him writing for us.

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