Good morning! While most EVs are adding software products to boost the attractiveness of their offering, Fiat’s going rogue with its new Topolino EV by adding a small shower to the $10.7k car 💦

🌶 Daily highlight 🌶

Instagram shipped Threads, a fairly bare-bones text-based Twitter competitor. IMO its most noteworthy feature is the Instagram integration – users can log-in through IG, auto-import their profile and bio, and instantly follow friends from Instagram ☄

Leveraging Instagram in this way drastically reduces signup friction, while also delivering a world-leading social graph and friend-finder system. These levers can be make or break in the social world, and give Threads a small-but-real shot at overcoming the cold-start problem to reach critical mass.

Regardless of how this ends, it’s going to be a great case study on the power of network effects 🌎

♨️ Latest launches

Big tech

• Spotify cuts off its Apple in-app payment option for subscribers

• TikTok launches an “Open TikTok on mute” feature

• Twitter ships a ‘highlights’ view on user profiles

• Tesla is working on third-party app support

• Google Photos launches a new ‘Effects’ tab on Android

General and early-stage

• Bluesky announces a paid service for custom domains

• JIO unveils a 4G phone with digital pay and streaming

• 0Pass ships a password management service for the enterprise

• Major League Baseball unveils a virtual ballpark experience

• Vizio overhauls the UI of its TV software

🔍 Other good finds

• Quality bar. The art of building minimum lovable products 

• Central. The impact of WhatsApp voice notes on farming in Senegal

• Mouse trap. How Ubisoft reduced cheating by over 70%

🧈 Twitter nugget

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- Amol