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 …
Read More »Snapchat introduces Groups with up to 16 people, plus new creative tools
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 …
Read More »Radio.Garden lets you tune into the globe
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 …
Read More »Zenly lays out its plan to become a must-have social media app
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 …
Read More »Reddit overhauls upvote algorithm to thwart cheaters and show the site’s true scale
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 …
Read More »Sequoia-backed video chat app Tribe spammed its customers’ address books
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 …
Read More »Facebook just secured an e-money license in Ireland, paving the way for Messenger payments in Europe
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 …
Read More »Secret founder returns to anonymous publishing with launch of IO
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, …
Read More »Hope is an app for millennial women to keep their BFFs close — but not too close
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 …
Read More »Instagram brings live video broadcasts to all U.S. users
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 …
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