Facebook reports its first-quarter earnings today — which means that Facebook gets to talk about something besides Cambridge Analytica for at least one day. What to watch for: After the algorithm change, did people spend less time than usual on Facebook in Q1? Are its ad prices increasing? And is the social service’s U.S. audience still declining? Meanwhile, Facebook is also prepping for its annual developers conference, F8, next week in San Jose, Calif. And as Facebook feels like it’s starting to close itself off for the first time as part of a correction, F8 is a chance for the company to explain to its developer partners what the heck happens next. [Kurt Wagner / Recode]
Recode Daily: Twitter is growing again
Plus, Snapchat is redesigning its recently redesigned app; bon voyage, Virgin America; and Matt Taibbi serializes his new true-crime novel.
Michael Cohen/Getty Images for The New York Times
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Twitter is growing again. Jack Dorsey’s company posted better-than-expected Q1 results today: It added six million users, and revenue was up 21 percent. TWTR shares were up 6 percent in pre-market trading this morning. [Kurt Wagner / Recode]
Remember all the fuss over Snapchat’s app redesign last November? Parent company Snap is still figuring out what works and what doesn’t, so now Snapchat is already rolling out a redesign to the redesign for a small group of users. [Kurt Wagner / Recode]
To hit its big growth goals, Spotify wants more paid subscribers — so it’s giving away more music for free. The streaming music service is rolling out a new version of its mobile app, which gives free users the ability to play more songs on demand from 15 pre-populated playlists. The idea: If people get more stuff without paying, they are more likely to end up paying in the long run. [Peter Kafka / Recode]
Walmart recently announced partnerships with seemingly everyone for its grocery delivery service, including rival delivery startups Postmates and DoorDash, plus existing partners Uber and upstart Deliv. Everyone, that is, except Instacart, the most popular grocery delivery startup in the U.S. Walmart, the largest grocer in the U.S., plans to expand delivery service to more than 100 U.S. metro areas by the end of the year. [Jason Del Rey / Recode]
All signs of Virgin America’s colorful branding were scrubbed from 29 U.S. airports overnight, including kiosks and signs at baggage claim, curbside check-in and ticket counters. Alaska Airlines merged with Richard Branson-backed Virgin America in December 2016; the ongoing rebranding will include repainting Virgin’s red-and-white Airbus fleet in Alaska’s blue-and-white colors and redesigning flight-crew uniforms. [Leslie Josephs / CNBC]
Some thoughts on the Apple Watch — still something of an enigma after three years. Measured against the original promises murmured by Jony Ive’s voiceover, the Apple Watch is hardly a success. Where the original commercials for the device were all about subtle interactions between people, many of the recent ones are about exercise, which seems to have improved sales. But the technology packed into the Apple Watch — voice recognition, artificial intelligence, smart sensors — hints at the future Apple is trying to build. [Damon Beres / Mashable]
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Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi is publishing his new novel, “The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing: Adventures of the Unidentified Black Male,” as a serialized subscription via email and a website. Taibbi, who is co-writing the story with a former drug dealer known only as Anonymous, says the book is designed to be “narrative fiction for the social media age,” with true-crime flavorings akin to “Serial” and “Making a Murderer.”
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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