Social Media

Facebook is currently dealing with a scandal over using its information by British political research study company Cambridge Analytica. It didn’t get the data through a hack, however apparently through a Facebook app which gave a researcher user information — and likewise the data of their friends. The majority of …

Snapchat has added some new features, including Groups, a new group chat that lets up to 16 friends share conversation and media. Group chats self-delete after 24 hours by default, and Snaps sent within a group can be opened only once, and replayed only once, by each member of the …

Some of the most beautiful products are the simplest. Take Radio.Garden, for example. This project by Golo Föllmer at Martin-Luther University Halle displays a photorealistic globe full of green dots. Swing your mouse over one of the dots – in Iran, Estonia, or the Faroe Islands – and you can …

French-based location sharing app Zenly hopes to be the next Snapchat and co-founder Antoine Martin came onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt London to talk about how it plans to get there. The original idea came from Foursquare check-ins but Zenly allows users to check-in and share their location with friends and family. Martin …

Reddit has just completed a major redo of its scoring algorithm aimed at cracking down on bots and vote brigades while also showing just how big the site has gotten. In a self post on the site, admin KeyserSosa explained that the team felt that some of the many rules …

Can mobile app startups please stop building SMS invite systems into their apps already? The latest example of a venture-backed startup getting dinged by customers for having spammed their entire address book without permission is Sequoia portfolio company Tribe. The video chat app hit the App Store last year, and had been …

Paving the way for friend-to-friend payments to come to Facebook Messenger in Europe (and after the functionality debuted in the U.S. all the way back in March last year), Facebook has quietly secured an e-money license from the Central Bank of Ireland. A quick search of the state bank’s register …

Secret co-founder David Byttow said his shuttered startup would make a return of sorts, tweeting as much in November. Byttow launched the revived anonymous publishing app as IO on Thursday morning, with a different approach that has more in common with Medium than mobile social apps like Twitter (and with Bold, …

There are plenty of apps out there that purport to keep you “safe.” Apps that immediately phone your main contacts when you are threatened or attacked. Apps that allow you to share your location with key contacts. But for modern women, especially in big urban cities like New York or …

Instagram announced its Live video broadcasting features in November, which allow users to show your followers what you’re up to in real-time, and also let users browse for Live videos happening at this very moment as selected by Instagram algorithmically. Now, it’s making these features available to all users in …