A social network where everyone’s a bot

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 53, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, so psyched you found us, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) 

This week, I've been reading about Beyoncé and Rosanna Pansino and Bowen Yang, pouring my life back into Todoist, watching the end of The Grand Tour, catching up on some My Brother, My Brother and Me episodes, seeing if the Pixel Recorder app can replace my trusty voice recorder, and moving Headspace to my homescreen to see if it helps me meditate more. (So far… no.)

I also have for you a truly wild new pair of AR glasses, a Batman-adjacent show on HBO, a great new book about the end of Twitter, a funny twist on social networks, and much more. Lotta good new TV this week! Let's do it.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you super into right now? What should everyone else be reading / playing / watching / buying / downloading / building out of Legos right now? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tell them to subscribe here.)

The Drop

SocialAI. The reaction to this "social network" for iOS, where you post and a thousand AI bots immediately reply, was so funny. Some people loved it, some hated it, half seemed to think it was a joke. It's not a joke, and it's actually a really thoughtful take on how to interact with LLMs. It also feels alarmingly similar to being on actual social networks these days. Maybe even better.Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. An excellent addition to the canon of books about Musk's takeover and overhaul of the social network we once knew. There's a lot of great new detail in here about the chaos of becoming X, too - a really good read.Simple Snapchat. I'd love to tell you to buy Snap's new Spectacles, but they're ridiculous and also not available for regular people to buy. But you will be able to get Snapchat's new design, which is so much cleaner and more approachable than the app has been in recent years. I'm not sure it'll win many new users, but Snapchat is still one of the best messaging apps out there.The Bose QuietComfort Earbuds. The AirPods 4 got all the shine this week, but I've been a fan of Bose's earbuds for a while - they sound great, they have great battery, and I love the new "Hey headphones" wake word on the new model. And at $179, these are a solid Apple alternative.Omni Loop. The read on this time-travel movie starring Ayo Edebiri and Mary-Louise Parker seems to be that sticklers for continuity will be frustrated but there's some good and thoughtful stuff and a lot of fun to be had. I will be having that fun ASAP. The Penguin. "Gritty Batman show on HBO" is all you need to tell me for me to be fully in on The Penguin. The reviews so far are a bit mixed - I've seen "best show in forever" and "kinda meh," and a lot of people are comparing it unfavorably to The Sopranos. Personally, I can't wait.Tripsy 3.0. I'm traveling a lot this fall, so I'm back on the hunt for a good place to put all my confirmation numbers, flight details, and expenses. Tripit is fine, but Tripsy looks way better. I'm also into the map view, which is a surprisingly helpful way to plot out a day.Agatha All Along. WandaVision is the only Marvel show I recommend to people who don't care about Marvel because the whole thing was so unusually structured and smart. This spinoff sounds just as inventive and just as cool. More Kathryn Hahn is always a good thing.UFO 50. A bunch of developers in 2024 decided to make a bunch of games that look like they're from the 1980s. Taken together, what they made is kind of a historical document about gaming but also just, like, a bunch of really fun retro-style games. Such a cool concept."The Mark Zuckerberg Interview." You probably saw the pictures from last week of the Acquired podcast hosts interviewing Zuck at the Chase Center in San Francisco. The resulting 90-minute episode is… kind of awkward in spots but also really revealing in spots. I don't think I've heard Zuckerberg talk through his own history as a CEO like this before.