TikTok U.S. users have been learning Chinese on Duolingo in increasing numbers amid their adoption of a Chinese social app called RedNote ahead of the TikTok ban. The U.S. law, scheduled to go into effect on January 19, unless halted by the Supreme Court, will see TikTok removed from U.S. app stores and will stop […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

More good news for those looking to exit Meta’s social app ecosystem in favor of a more open alternative: An independent developer is building a photo-sharing app for Bluesky called Flashes. The soon-to-launch app is powered by the same technology that underpins Bluesky, the AT Protocol, and has been built using code from the developer’s […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

American TikTok users have been thumbing their collective noses at the U.S. government’s decision to ban TikTok by spitefully joining another Chinese social media app, RedNote (aka Xiaohongshu), sending it to the top of the U.S. App Store on Monday. Unfortunately, many of those who already made the transition have faced problems with having their […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Pixelfed, a decentralized alternative to Instagram, has launched its official mobile apps. The service today runs on the same ActivityPub protocol that powers open source X alternative Mastodon, YouTube competitor PeerTube, and other decentralized social apps, now including Meta’s Threads and Flipboard (plus its newer app, Surf), that are part of a growing push toward […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

On Friday, the nation’s highest court heard arguments on whether to uphold or block a law that could effectively ban TikTok​ in the U.S. The bill, signed into law by President Biden in April 2024, gives TikTok’s parent company ByteDance until January 19 to divest its U.S. operations or face a ban in the country. […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Wildfires are currently devastating the greater Los Angeles area, burning over 45 square miles, torching over 1,300 structures, and putting nearly 180,000 people under evacuation orders as of Thursday. And yet, TikTok’s LA-based employees are being told to either continue their work from home or use their personal/sick days if that’s not possible, while the […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

TV providers and streamers’ real competition isn’t each other, it’s social video. Or at least that’s what the president of Comcast Advertising, James Rooke, said during an interview on Wednesday at CES 2025 in Las Vegas. The ad exec was speaking about the company’s Monday launch of “universal ads,” a solution that lets marketers buy […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko has spoken out about the significant moderation changes announced by Meta on Tuesday, which will see the social networking giant removing fact-checking across its apps in favor of a crowdsourced community notes feature, similar to X’s. The Mastodon founder, whose app competes with X and Meta’s X rival, Instagram Threads, called […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Triller, a would-be competitor to TikTok, is hoping to capitalize on the potential TikTok ban in the U.S. by pitching to creators to move their content from the popular short-form video app to its own. The company has now launched a website, SaveMyTikToks.com, which promises to back up all your TikTok videos by uploading them […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

X wants to make its platform a home to the future of news and journalism. On that front, the company has now hired John Stoll, a former editor and Detroit bureau chief at The Wall Street Journal, to lead its news group and partnership team at X. The hiring news was announced on Tuesday during […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

At CES 2025 in Las Vegas, Panasonic unveiled its upcoming digital assistant, Umi, which offers families a personalized, AI-powered wellness coach. Created in partnership with Anthropic, Umi uses the Claude AI model to help families “care, coordinate, and connect” with each other, the company said. More specifically, this involves an AI assistant that focuses on […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

3D design app Rooms just landed more funding. Launched into beta in 2023, the app from ex-Google employees allows users to build and code interactive 3D rooms and mini-games using a library of more than 10,000 items, which can be further edited using the programming language Lua. Now, Google itself has invested $1 million into […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

As part of a significant overhaul of its content moderation policies announced on Tuesday, Meta admitted that its approach to limiting political content across its platforms had been “pretty blunt” and would now be addressed. The company said it would once again phase in political content into Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, allowing people who want […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Social network and X competitor Bluesky’s massive growth slowed in December in the U.S., after having surged from 9+ million in September to north of 20 million users in November. The slowdown is based on an analysis of web traffic and mobile app daily active users by analytics firm Similarweb, which found that Bluesky grew […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A new app called Tapestry promising to unify social media, news, and RSS in one place, is nearing completion. Designed by Iconfactory, the same team that created the third-party Twitter client Twitterific back in the day, Tapestry was unveiled at the beginning of the year as a tool that could better organize today’s fragmented online […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Threads is introducing a new way to reshare photos and videos on its social network. Instead of quote-posting the original post and then adding commentary, Threads users will instead be able to click a new option, “Use media,” allowing them to just reshare the photo or video directly to a new post where they can […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The global app economy continued to recover in 2024, after an earlier slowdown in 2022 — at least in terms of consumer spending. In 2024, global consumer spending in mobile apps and games reached $127 billion across the App Store and Google Play, up 15.7% from the prior year. However, those increases were driven by […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Social magazine app maker Flipboard is reinventing itself for the new era of the open social web. While the company’s original app allowed users to collect content from blogs, news websites, and traditional social media services like Facebook and Twitter in order to create curated magazines, its new app called Surf, launching into invite-only beta […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Bridgy Fed, which is working to connect the social network Bluesky with the wider fediverse (i.e., the open social web), which includes sites like Mastodon and others, will be the first app incubated within a new nonprofit called A New Social. The organization, announced Tuesday, aims to bring together developers, researchers, startups, and industry leaders […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

YouTube on Monday announced it will give creators more choice over how third parties can use their content to train their AI models. Starting today, creators and rights holders will be able to flag for YouTube if they’re permitting specific third-party AI companies to train models on the creator’s content. From a new setting within […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.