Steven Johnson engagement report

Best tweets

• Mar 13, 202617x their median

  Steve Jobs literally predicted the iPhone, the Internet, AI and the next 50 years of technology in a single speech from 1983: https://t.co/DtwrMJBx1x

  16K4.3K2922362.0M viewsView on X
• Jun 30, 2026222x their median

  Doom scrolling but make it educational 🤓 Introducing Short Video Overviews in NotebookLM! Turn your most complex sources into 60-second, vertical videos that deep dive into any concept. Rolling out now to Google AI Ultra and Pro subscribers on mobile & web (free users soon!) https://t.co/vaOa4ELbw4

  12K1.0K3794222.6M viewsView on X
• Apr 16, 20262.2x their median

  You can now add custom cover art and descriptions to any of your notebooks 🥳 This is perfect for curating an aesthetic grid or putting a personalized touch on your notebook before sharing it with the world. (We recommend uploading a 16x9 image, specifically of your hero) https://t.co/AxSGXVfdCQ

  2.3K2439427185K viewsView on X
• Jul 30, 202639x their median

  Today, we are officially launching @WonderingApp backed by @ycombinator It’s Duolingo for anything — break down any complex topics, from LLMs to Analytic Philosophy into structured path of short lessons. But it's 10x better than the Duolingo format. Every lesson comes with interactive diagrams, podcasts, and real-world applications, with a thoughtful tutor always ready to help you dive deeper. And it’s all personalized to what you already know and how difficult you want it to be! Wondering is the most delightful way to understand complex topics and turn information into knowledge you can remember and apply. Give Wondering a try here: https://t.co/Xdr1jPWFx8

  2.1K12714448205K viewsView on X
• Jun 3, 202629x their median

  🚨 NEW EXPERIMENT 🚨 Dreambeans is a new, experimental mobile app that uses Personal Intelligence to connect to your Google apps. Every day, it delivers collections of personalized stories, surfacing things you might otherwise miss, alongside topics that are relevant to you, to help you dive deeper into the things you care about most. Available starting today for eligible US-based Google AI Ultra users (+18), with an open waitlist found on our website below! Learn more at https://t.co/jCdAzMHvOD

  1.5K1566857440K viewsView on X
• Mar 10, 2026

  NotebookLM: Do a deep research report and make a video where a consultant gives Sauron a strategy for actually winning the War of the Ring: "All you need to do is sign off to put a simple door on your volcano" The new video generation feature for NotebookLM is very impressive. https://t.co/hpMVMiiDon

  1.0K893824244K viewsView on X
• Jul 16, 202617x their median

  I have some news. But first a little backstory. Almost exactly four years ago, I drove down to Mountain View for my first day as a Google employee. I was fifty-four years old, and somehow had managed to avoid ever having a proper job over that entire period, other than a few startups that I had founded in my twenties and thirties. At that point Google Labs, which had just been formed a few months earlier, was headquartered in a fairly anonymous looking suburban office park off 101, closer to Office Space than Silicon Valley on the Mike Judge spectrum. And as it happened, my first day at Google was a Monday in the summer of 2022, which meant COVID-era work from home policies were still the default, and the office was absolutely deserted. But I’d been set up with a badge and a computer and I had to schedule a phone call with tech support to get my account in order, and so I grabbed one of the empty cubicles and sat down to work through the problems I was having getting into the system. I remember feeling a definite sense of dread in that moment, sitting there in the silence, thinking: have I made a terrible mistake? And then—and I swear to god this actually happened—the silence was interrupted by a lonely robot rolling its way across the carpet past my borrowed desk. Before the end of the summer, though, an inspiring cast of characters began to populate the office, and by October a small group of us had built a prototype of an AI-first tool for thought that my colleague Adam codenamed Tailwind. About six months later, after @joshwoodward previewed Tailwind at I/O for the first time, we set about to give our little experiment a proper name. We had some branding consultants spend an afternoon with the team; we ideated and free associated and placed our post-it notes on the whiteboard, but all the names that they came back with were too impressionistic, too evocative — they didn’t sound like iconic Google names: Maps, Docs, Meet. Because I’d written so much about the history of journals and commonplace books, I had always been partial to simply calling it Notebook. There was something about that framing that just made sense: a notebook is the place where we capture information that we want to remember, where we gather our thoughts. It gives us a dedicated space for thinking, where new connections happen, where we can trace the evolution of our own ideas. And it had a simplicity that fit the Google house style. But we were far too experimental and unproven to take on a name like Google Notebook—remember we had exactly zero actual users at this point—and so we found ourselves a bit stuck: too early-stage for a proper grownup name, but ill-inclined to adopt a name that didn’t sound like the classic Google brands. But at the time there happened to be another Labs experiment that had just launched called MusicLM, and so at some point in late May of 2023 it occurred to me that we could borrow that convention for our embryonic product, and call it NotebookLM. It wasn’t the most elegant name you could imagine, but it had a certain logic to it: we were building a notebook reinvented for the age of language models, after all. I wrote an email to a few folks proposing the idea and included the caveat that if the product ever took off, and Google wanted to elevate us into the canon, we could drop the LM and just be Notebook. And so that’s the news. Three years and somewhere near a billion notebooks later, we are finally ditching the LM. @Gemini_Notebook

  86096572178K viewsView on X
• Mar 30, 20262.8x their median

  New @NotebookLM: The Science Of Ben Franklin, a featured notebook created with @googlearts and one of the world's most esteemed scientific orgs, @royalsociety. Original papers, letters, contemporary sources, and studio creations give us a new vista into Franklin's work. This featured notebook is particularly meaningful to me for two reasons. First, there is the history of the institution itself. The Royal Society essentially invented the modern container of scientific publishing: the peer-reviewed paper, developed in the mid-1800s to manage an earlier explosion of scientific writing. That format has survived as one of the central units for organizing human knowledge for almost two hundred years. Our hope is that public and featured notebooks like The Science Of Ben Franklin can be a format that builds on that tradition, creating a new atomic unit for sharing, synthesizing, and exploring knowledge in the age of AI. So there’s something especially sweet in partnering with the Royal Society on this project. Second, this project brings me full circle to my 2009 book The Invention of Air, where Franklin and the Royal Society were central characters. Invention was ostensibly a biography of the British chemist and political radical Joseph Priestley, who was in many ways Franklin’s most significant intellectual partner. (Among other things, Priestley wrote the book that popularized the now legendary story about Franklin’s kite and the discovery of electricity.) To bring that history to life, the new collection features two dazzling slide decks that tell the story of Priestley and Franklin’s friendship, and the long, fruitful partnership between Franklin and the Royal Society. I keep thinking of how amazing it would have been to have had access to this notebook two decades ago, when I was researching Invention of Air. Like all of our featured notebooks, The Science Of Ben Franklin is designed to adapt dynamically to the interests, native language, and comprehension level of whoever happens to be exploring it. Whether you are a dedicated scholar or simply someone curious about history, this notebook offers a genuinely new way to explore Franklin’s extraordinary mind. https://t.co/Io5kDtFT5A

  129354318K viewsView on X
• Aug 28, 20261.5x their median

  Here's the official blog post announcing the new Expert Intelligence framework bringing published books and more to @Gemini_Notebook (and soon other surfaces across @Google.) It includes info about the free book giveaway we are doing for US users as well. https://t.co/Y2DdMSRB8n

  73145116K viewsView on X
• Apr 20, 2026

  Today, we remember the Ludlow Massacre, when Colorado miners and their families were met with violence for daring to demand fair wages, safe conditions, and the right to organize. From the coal camps of southern Colorado, these workers inspired a nationwide movement that won the labor protections we continue to defend today.

  5452426.5K viewsView on X

Ranked by total interactions across everything we have tracked for this account, which is a longer history than the 30-day window the rates above use. The multiple compares each post to this account's own median.

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