Welcome to the Tech Mem Ride Home for Thursday, June 16th, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today.

Google says YouTube Shorts is keeping pace with Tik-Tok.

Meta plans to make Facebook more like Tik-Tok

in order to keep pace themselves.

That new Sonos voice control assistant

sounds pretty good to me,

why a bunch of folks are going to string internet cables under the shrinking

polar ice, and why the Japanese are freaked out about Internet Explorer going away.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Google says more than 1.5 billion people watch YouTube shorts every month.

Tic-Toc had more than 1 billion monthly active users in September 2021 and third parties estimated

almost 1.6 billion mouths in March 2022.

So I guess Google wants you to know they can do what Tik-Tok does.

You'll see why I'm leading with this story in a second, quoting the journal.

YouTube Shorts was first released in India in late 2020 and made available in the U.S. the next year.

YouTube officials pitched the product to creators as part of a multi-format approach that includes

longer videos, the service is bread and butter, and newer outlets such as live streaming.

Shorts are up to 60 seconds long.

Our creators want fame or fortune or creative expression or ideally all three, said Tara

Walpert Levy, Vice President of America's at YouTube, this is the best

way to deliver against that, end quote.

Although apples to apples data aren't publicly available, YouTube's newly published

viewership number would give shorts a similar audience to

...