Monthly Archives: February 2023

From 1 February 2023, Microsoft has changed what counts towards your cloud storage in OneDrive for personal subscriptions. In the past, email attachments were counted as part of your Outlook.com mailbox quota, but not as part of OneDrive. Now, email attachments in Outlook.com will be counted as part of your OneDrive data allowance.

Although this change does not affect your Outlook mailbox storage amount (presumably Microsoft mean for emails messages themselves), going forward your OneDrive storage will be used up by email attachments as well as its own contents. Microsoft recommends sharing a link to a file already saved in OneDrive rather than sharing the file itself via email, in order to minimise the impact on your data allowance. This will also avoid duplicate files being saved.

Microsoft has also announced changes to Microsoft 365 Personal or Microsoft 365 Family subscribers from 30 November 2023. After this date, these plans will no longer allow personalised email addresses using a domain associated with their Outlook.com account. To do this you will need to upgrade to a paid Microsoft 365 Business subscription. Existing personalised email addresses will not be affected, although if they are removed after this date then they will not be able to be restored.

Both these changes are likely Microsoft encouraging users to move to paid subscriptions in order to benefit from features such as larger cloud storage quotas and personalised email addresses. The announcement from Microsoft is also ambiguous as it does not address the following:

• Whether these changes impact free Outlook.com and OneDrive accounts, which have a small storage quota (5GB), and will be impacted much sooner/quicker.
• If email attachments from Outlook.com will be browsable from OneDrive, seeing as they are now technically stored there.
• If additional free storage will be added to either Outlook.com and/or OneDrive free accounts and personal subscriptions in order to assuage these changes for end users.

Google has announced that it will remove Google Optimize on 30 September 2023.

This will apply to both the free and paid 360 tiers. Any tests or experiences that are still running on this date will come to an end. If your contract with Optimize 360 currently extends beyond this, it will automatically be adjusted to end on 30 September and you won’t be charged past this end date.

You can continue to run personalisations and experiments until then, but we recommend that you prepare for the switch off by downloading your historical data from Optimize and collating your results as soon as possible. You will be unable to access any of your test or experience inference results once the product is discontinued.

To replace this valuable tool, Google intends to integrate A/B testing (and other functions which help you improve user experiences) from third-party platforms into their new version of Analytics, Google Analytics 4 (GA4), which is set to replace Universal Analytics from 1 July 2023.

Google intends GA4 to become a central hub through which to measure and analyse the test results from these integrations. This means that organisations which rely on Optimize may need to find an alternative, third-party solution before the product is turned off. Google intends to share more details about GA4 integrations over the coming months, and we will continue to keep you updated.

It is also worth noting that Google says Firebase Testing will not be impacted by this change, even though it uses some of the Optimize infrastructure.

From 13 February, Twitter is removing free access to their Application Programming Interface (API). They are also removing the paid ‘Premium API’ tier, and will require those who were using this to apply for the higher level paid ‘Enterprise API’ tier.

Twitter will launch new access tiers in their latest bid to monetize their platform. When the API access changes, lots of third-party apps and websites which use it will stop working or will at least have their service interrupted.

Since Twitter first made the public announcement on 2 February, they have now confirmed new access levels, although there remains some confusion after a series of Tweets by the platform owner, Elon Musk, which contradicted part of the original announcements.

There will be the following new tiers:

• ‘Free’ access limited to “1,500 tweets per month for a single authenticated user token”. However, this tier is limited to making and not retrieving tweets, so cannot be used for website feeds or web app integrations.
• ‘Basic’ access at $100 a month, which is limited to “low level API usage and access to Ads API”, to quote Twitter’s official account.
• ‘Pro’ access at $5,000 a month, with much greater usage and access allowances of up to 1,000,000 requests per month.

These changes were announced at short notice and the messaging has been confusing. This, as well as other complications and changes in recent months, may result in developers passing on the cost to their customers, or possibly abandoning integrations and projects altogether. It will likely bring about the end to some of your favourite Twitter tools, features and accounts – which have relied on free and open use of the Twitter API to date.