Welcome to the Tech Mem Ride Home for Friday, September 21st, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough.

Today, more fallout from that Monster Alexa event yesterday.

Facebook is going to take another swing at portal.

Instagram is looking to cut down on hashtag overload.

Gmail was too willing to say I love you, and the weekend long reads suggestions.

Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. So I don't know if you got the sense yesterday, but that Amazon event really kind of took us all by surprise a bit.

It was like yesterday morning.

Okay, uh, Amazon event.

They'll probably announce refreshed echo speakers, no big deal,

but then, I mean, that was an event.

So many products, like five product launch events all in one so essentially yesterday I was giving you the hardware announcements

But there are lots of little details here still trickling out especially on the software side, so let's round up a few of them and see if we can see what it all means. First, Amazon introduced Alexa Presentation Language, or APL, a design language for building Alexa skills for devices

with screens.

So, Devs, you can now get busy not only with the Echo Show, but other Alexa-enabled screen devices like Fire TV, Fire tablet, etc.

And not only that, any third party devices with screens can use APL through the Alexa Smart

Screen and TV device SDK, which is apparently coming in a few months.

This is also potentially a big deal, but we'll have to wait and see because in practice, you know,

when Apple or somebody announces something like this, it tends not to work

out in real life the way they demo it.

But Amazon also announced what it is calling Wi-Fi simple setup to automatically share your home wireless network

credentials with compatible smart home devices.

See Amazon is smart enough to know that if it really does want you to fill your home up with dozens of smart gadgets,

...