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Twitter is rolling out its in-app tipping feature to all Android users above the age of 18, following the iOS launch in September. The social media giant says the “Tips” feature is geared toward users looking to get a little financial support from their followers through Cash App, Paypal, Venmo and Patreon directly through the

Instagram has introduced a new “Rage Shake” feature that lets users shake their phones to report a problem with the app. Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced the launch of the new feature in a video on Twitter and explained how it works. “You ever use Instagram and it wasn’t working like it was supposed to?

Facebook announced Thursday that it’s running a test to give users a sliver more control over what they see on the platform. Image Credits: Facebook The test will go live on Facebook’s app for English-speaking users. It adds three sub-menus into Facebook’s menu for managing what shows up in the News Feed: friends and family,

Clubhouse announced yesterday that closed captioning is now rolling out for iOS. This essential accessibility feature has been long missed from the live audio app. Without these live transcriptions, which were already the norm for competitors like Twitter Spaces, Clubhouse had rendered itself unusable to people who are Deaf or hard of hearing. Now, Clubhouse

One of the most popular streaming software makers is in hot water after being called out by top Twitch personalities and the open source project that served as a backbone for the company’s success. Streamlabs, formerly Streamlabs OBS, changed its name Wednesday after backlash spread on Twitter against the company over alleged sketchy business practices.

Snapchat announced earlier this year that it would add Layers to Snap Map, making the social product more interactive. Today, the app is launching its first two layers: Memories and Explore. The Snap Map has been used to show people where their friends are currently located (if they opt-in to location sharing), interesting places to

Instagram’s standalone messaging app Threads is shutting down. The app will no longer be supported by the end of December 2021, the company confirmed to TechCrunch after reports began circulating via social media of its impending closure. Instagram is planning to alert its existing Threads users with an in-app notice beginning on November 23, which

TikTok has developed a bad reputation for hosting dangerous viral “challenges” on its app, which at their worst, have led to serious injury or death — as in the case of the blackout challenge that prompted Italian regulators to take action against the social network this year to remove underage users. More recently, the app

Nader Al-Naji, a crypto entrepreneur who today lives in L.A., has been on a roller coaster in recent years — and he doesn’t pretend otherwise. In 2018, roughly 16 months after raising $140 million from investors for a cryptocurrency startup that aimed to develop a stablecoin, Al-Naji and his Princeton classmates returned $130 million when

If it seems like everyone is listening to the same podcasts, that’s probably not a coincidence. Audio-based entertainment and social media is more popular than ever right now, but the medium is still plagued by discovery issues. While hit podcasts soar in popularity, expand their media empires and secure major brand deals, it’s difficult for

This week, a handful of academic researcher teams will gain access to a new tool from Facebook designed to aggregate near-universal real-time data on the world’s biggest social network. When it comes to who gets access to Facebook data and how, the company now known as Meta is still feeling reverberations from 2018’s Cambridge Analytica

A brand new social media platform focusing on social responsibility today announced it snagged $1.2 million to change the face of fundraising from a Gen Z perspective. Wishly is aimed at the curious Venn-diagram intersection of consumer brands, philanthropists and nonprofit organizations. The hope is to leverage the power of social media for social good.

Twitter is updating its web platform to change the way users see new tweets. The social media giant will no longer automatically refresh timelines on the web with new tweets, and users can now decide when they want to load new tweets. Twitter acknowledged that in the past, tweets would often disappear from view mid-read

The pharmaceutical supply chain across Africa has for decades remained fragmented leading to sourcing and distribution challenges as well as quality concerns; as fake and substandard products flood the market. Yet, these issues facing the supply chain are fixable. Chibuzo Opara and Adham Yehia, being all too familiar with the problems of poor pharmaceutical supply

Mobility 54 Investment SAS, a corporate venture capital subsidiary of Toyota Tsusho Corporation and CFAO group, DOB Equity and InfraCo Africa have invested $3.4 million (€3 million) in electric motorcycle startup Zembo to help it grow its business. Zembo, a French startup with operations in Uganda was founded in 2018 and sells electric motorcycles through

Carrie James Contributor Emily Weinstein Contributor We’ve spent the last decade studying the questions that loom large in the current news cycle. What are the implications of social media for teen mental health? What are the benefits of growing up digital? What’s dispiriting or even toxic, and for whom? We’ve talked about these issues with

Facebook announced today that it’s rolling out new shopping features: Shops in Groups, product recommendations and a test of Live Shopping for Creators. Shops in Groups enables admins of Facebook groups to set up an online store on their associated Facebook Page. It’s up to the admins where this money goes — in the case

Vimeo, the B2B video platform that spun out from IAC earlier this year, has made a pair of acquisitions aimed at building out the suite of features and tools it offers to businesses to create and run their own video strategies. The company has picked up short-form AI-based video creation platform Wibbitz; and Wirewax, which

Instagram added two features to Reels yesterday: text-to-speech and voice effects. These features are popular already on TikTok, but now, creators can use them on Instagram too. This marks yet another effort from Instagram to keep up with TikTok when it comes to short-form video, as Instagram offers big reels bonuses to incentivize creators, Text-to-speech

Twitter will no longer automatically crop image previews on the web after rolling out full-size image previews on mobile earlier this year. On Twitter for the web, images will now display in full without any cropping. Instead of gambling on how an image will show up in the timeline, images will look just like they

Discord founder and CEO Jason Citron sought to reassure users Wednesday that the company doesn’t have impending plans to shift its business toward NFTs. In a tweet earlier this week, Citron shared an image of crypto wallet MetaMask integrated into Discord’s user interface with the text “probably nothing” — shorthand language in the NFT space

Twitter and ViacomCBS today announced a sizable global deal that will see the social media platform streaming digital content from across the ViacomCBS portfolio of news, sports and entertainment brands — including content from live events, TV shows and other franchises. In addition, ViacomCBS-owned streaming service Paramount+ will host three “Twitter Watch Parties” designed to

YouTube today announced its decision to make the “dislike” count on videos private across its platform. The decision is likely to be controversial given the extent that it impacts the public’s visibility into a video’s reception. But YouTube believes the change will better protect its creators from harassment and reduce the threat of what it

Kenyan edtech startup Craydel, a platform for comparing colleges, course options and tuition fees, has secured $1 million in a pre-seed round that will go toward improving its search and recommendation technology and enhancing its online resources.  The round was led by Enza Capital, a private venture fund that invests in early-stage tech startups across

Discord is already the de facto home for NFT communities, but the company could be planning to deepen those connections in a big way. On Monday, Discord founder and CEO Jason Citron tweeted a screenshot depicting Discord integrated with popular crypto wallet service MetaMask and WalletConnect, an open protocol that many mobile crypto wallets are

Twitter’s premium subscription service, Twitter Blue, is launching today in the U.S. as well as New Zealand, offering an expanded slate of features meant to appeal to Twitter’s most engaged users. The service will be available across iOS, Android and the web for $2.99 per month (or $4.49 NZD). Twitter Blue first arrived this summer

Clubhouse hosts and moderators will have a fresh tool in their kit today. The company is pushing a new feature live on both its iOS and Android apps that will let creators record an audio room so that anyone who misses the action live can check it out later. The company first announced that the

Doug Petkanics Contributor Doug Petkanics is the CEO of Livepeer, an open video infrastructure for livestreaming. From imbalanced creator economics and poor security, to centralized control and disgruntled communities — Web 2.0’s flaws have been on full display these past couple of months. First, former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen testified to Congress last month

YouTube is looking to give its TikTok rival, Shorts, a competitive advantage. The company confirmed it’s expanding a recent global test that defaults the YouTube mobile app to open directly in Shorts if the user had previously watched Shorts videos before exiting. In other words, instead of being taken to the YouTube homepage when you

Some Twitter users on iOS are starting to get access to a feature that makes it easy to search an individual user’s tweets. For those with access, when you navigate to a user’s profile, you’ll see a search icon in the top right corner of the screen on the user’s profile banner, next to the