Twilio is kicking off its SIGNALS conference, which means we get a bouquet of product announcements.  Most relevant here is their hop onto the external data access bandwagon, with Zero Copy Architecture enabling direct access to data warehouse contents.  Other new features include generative AI-built customer journeys and support for new entities such as business accounts, subscriptions, and products.

I’m still not sure whether I care that TikTok is adding paid search ads to its feed.  I mean, they sold ads already.  But it’s another crack in the wall of Google’s search ad garden, so maybe something to consider as evidence of the shifting landscape.

Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.