Meta’s Twitter clone, Threads, is live, Apple’s shutting down My Photo Stream, and Amazon Prime Day nears.

Threads, from Instagram and Meta, is now available

This, today, from Mark Zuckerberg. His first tweet in more than ten years.

pic.twitter.com/MbMxUWiQgp

— Mark Zuckerberg (@finkd) July 6, 2023

If you’ve got an Instagram account, the Twitter clone is dead easy to set up. Get Threads for Android and iOS

Posts can include:

• text up to 500 characters, including links
• photos
• videos up to five minutes long

The company said in a release that this is the “initial version” and that additionally functionality will be added. That might include different ways to parse your feed, because right now you’ve got no control over the posts you see. You get posts from accounts you follow as well as content recommended by the algorithm.

Also: no hashtags or editing capability. But you can retweet and quote retweet. You can mute words, block profiles, and even hide likes.

And there’s no concern about limited viewing of posts.

Apple’s My Photo Stream service is ending

My Photo Stream was an early cloud-based service from Apple that shared photos you took on your iPhone with your other Apple devices.

What this means is that you’ll need to opt for iCloud storage for photos and videos if you want to share them across your devices. Subscriptions are as cheap as $1 a month for 50 GB, and $10 a month for 2 TB.

Or you can manage them manually.

You may not have been using Apple’s My Photo Stream service, but just in case you should take a few minutes to make sure that if you have photos in there, that you’ve saved them somewhere else so you don’t lose them.

Here’s how to do that.

You’ll want to make sure you’ve disabled My Photo Stream to prevent any new photos or videos from being saved in that soon-to-be-deleted folder.

To do this, on your iPhone or iPad:

• Go to Settings
• Go to Photos
• Turn off “My Photo Stream”
• Turn on “iCloud Photos” if you want to save to your Apple cloud account

Amazon Prime Day begins next Tuesday, July 11

Christmas in July? No, just Amazon Prime Day.

The annual sale at the online retailer runs next Tuesday and Wednesday, July 11 and July 12. Something new this year is the opportunity to get access to exclusive, invite-only deals, like a JBL wireless speaker or a Philips Sonicare toothbrush.

There are always steep discounts on Amazon products, including Amazon Fire TVs, Echo smart speakers and Show devices, Kindles, and Ring doorbells and alarms.

To get the deals you need to be subscribed to Amazon’s Prime club ($10 a month, or $100 a year), which gives you access to free shipping and regular discounts on items, even when it’s not Prime Day. A membership also gives you access to Amazon Music, Prime Video, and Prime Gaming.

You also get free shipping on many items.

The website Camelcamelcamel is a free service that tracks the pricing history of many products listed for sale at Amazon, so you can tell if the price you’re looking at in real time is actually a deal. Keepa is both a website and also provides browser extensions so you can see price history information when you’re actually on the Amazon website.

Both of these services provide the option of creating an account so you can be notified of price drops. Camelcamelcamel makes money as an Amazon referrer and through ads, while Keepa has additional data services you can subscribe to access.