Reminiscing about 2021 and looking ahead: Talking Tech podcast
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Hey there, listeners. It's Mike Snider here. Welcome back to Talking Tech. Brett Molina is out today. It's 2022 now, but I recorded this just as 2021 was ending. I started reminiscent about all the crazy tech stories during a year that seem to last forever, almost as an extension of the 2020.
If you remember, there were several internet meltdowns which interrupted our online lives. Lives that became so important as we had to gauge our ability to leave our homes and gather in person. Social media platforms like Facebook went down, and streaming services, apps, cloud storage, and other parts of our online lives were inaccessible for chunks of time. We haven't likely seen the end of those outages, so you might want to think about some work arounds.
My colleagues and I offered some suggestions such as saving important images on a USB drive in addition to having them stored in the cloud. If home entertainment is important, don't throw away that DVD player or Blu-ray player, because you might need to pull out those discs if Netflix and Disney+ go down.
Want to know more about our coverage and why internet outages happen, just search for outage on usatoday.com or in the USA Today app.
There were a lot of crazy fun social media videos and memes during the year, too. One of the first involved a picture of Senator Bernie Sanders at President Biden's inauguration. You look back at the senator bundled up in his brown mittens now seems like that was more than 11 months ago. At least to me. TikTok became the most popular domain in 2021 according to web content delivery company, CloudFlare. Surpassing youtube.com, facebook.com, and google.com.
Some of TikTok's content including so-called challenges to steal or vandalize school property earned the platform bad rap. There were likely some broken bones from the TikTok milk crate challenge. But speaking of bones, among the entertaining and safe content TikTok provided was the bones or no bones day pug. Of course there was lots of dancing. You can catch up on all the fun internet trends and memes in a story from my colleagues, Jordan Mendoza and Asha Gilbert, on tech.usatoday.com.
Of course the metaverse became a thing in 2021. Author Neil Stevenson envisioned the metaverse a persistent online alternate reality in his 1992 sci-fi novel, Snow Crash. It's still a fun read if you haven't gotten to it yet. Regardless, the metaverse will be all over 2022 for sure. Want to catch up on the metaverse, just go to usatoday.com or the app and search for metaverse.
Listeners, stay with the Talking Tech podcast in the coming year as we track all the latest in technology. Remember, if you have any comments, questions, or show ideas, you can find me on Twitter, @MikeSnider. Please don't forget to subscribe and rate us or leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, anywhere you get your podcasts. If you want tech news delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe to the Talking Tech newsletter. It's out every Thursday. Just go to newsletters.usatoday.com.
You've been listening to Talking Tech. We'll be back tomorrow with another quick hit from the world of tech.