The social media landscape is in a state of rapid, yet nostalgic, transformation. Our latest digital digest reveals major platforms are taking cues from their own—or their competitors'—past successes, while aggressively moving into the AI search era and expanding their core functionalities.
TikTok is explicitly channeling 2004 Facebook with its new Campus Verification feature for college students, aiming to foster real-world connections and create exclusive campus communities. Meanwhile, the original social giant, Facebook, is trying to reignite Y2K nostalgia by pushing the "poke" button again.
Beyond the throwback features, platforms are becoming all-in-one utilities. TikTok DMs now support voice notes and photos/videos, turning the app into a robust messaging tool, and even Spotify is now a chat app. Threads has reached 400 million monthly active users, solidifying its position as a major player against X, even as it focuses on making multi-part posts (threads) easier to follow.
Underpinning these changes is the undeniable shift toward artificial intelligence. Rumors suggest Google is set to make AI Mode the default search experience, signaling "The Death of Search" as we know it, particularly for shopping. This is driving massive interest, with AI companies like Perplexity AI and OpenAI reportedly "flocking to buy Google Chrome," recognizing the browser's immense value in the age of AI-driven web interaction.
Finally, the public sphere is being redefined. Grok is making user chats publicly searchable on Google, raising significant privacy concerns, and the "dead internet theory" gains traction as platforms like X continue to struggle with bot accounts. The new question isn't just who is using a platform, but what is using it.
The first thing I remember about joining Facebook is my brother telling me it was for college students only. He had gone off to school and was annoyed to see his little brother on the newfangled social media site. If you know anything about Facebook's history — or, hell, have even seen The Social Network — then you know it launched in 2004 as a social...
Conversations with Grok, the chatbot from Elon Musk's xAI, can be publicly searched on Google depending on which buttons were pressed, a new report from Forbes revealed.Grok's "share" button — what you might use to email or text a chatbot conversation — creates a unique URL that is made available to search engines like Google, the report states. That...
This month, Threads announced that it reached 400 million monthly active users — nearly as many as X (née Twitter). That’s almost half a billion people.Threads is the Big Bang Theory of social media. Bland, boring, largely unoffensive, and somehow, it was the most popular show on television for years. Game of Thrones got the cultural and critical attention,...
Want to send a cool song or podcast to a friend? If you both use Spotify, you'll soon be able to message them directly through the app. On Tuesday, Spotify launched in-app Messages on mobile devices, which will be rolling out to Free and Premium users aged 16 and older. The feature will only be available on mobile devices, and in "select markets" —...
AI companies are throwing multi-billion dollar offers at Google with one goal in mind: Acquiring the search giant's web browser Google Chrome.Perplexity AI recently offered more than $34 billion to Google for Chrome. OpenAI, which has much larger coffers, has also expressed strong interest in buying the web browser.But, why are all these massive AI...
TikTok is stepping up its game in DMs.Users can now send voice notes, photos, and videos in direct messages on TikTok, TechCrunch first reported and TikTok confirmed to Mashable. Previously, users could only send TikTok videos or text over DMs. Voice notes can be up to 60 seconds long while photos and videos can either come directly from a user's camera...
Instagram has, mercifully, made an iPad app some 15 years after both the tablet and social media site launched.You can download the app now, and there are some significant differences between the iPhone and iPad experience. Most notably, the iPad app takes users directly to Reels. It makes some sense, considering you might prefer to watch video content...
The "poke" technically never went away, but Facebook is trying to make it a thing again. In a nod to Y2K nostalgia, Facebook announced a few updates to the poke button, according to TechCrunch, which spotted the announcement. A fixture in the early Facebook days, no one was ever quite clear on what a poke meant. It could be used for flirting, passive...
Let's get you back to classic search.
New verification options are rolling out to protect you from scams.
Exactly three years ago today, Elon Musk tweeted that 90 percent of his tweet replies on what was then called Twitter were bot accounts. His insistence that Twitter was essentially one large bot farm was one of his main sticking points during his Twitter acquisition. Bots, particularly porn bots, have continued to be a problem on Musk's X, so much so...
If you're an active Threads user, you've probably seen a ton of new changes over the past few days: a newly increased 10,000-character limit, a text attachment feature, and now, as Threads said in a post on its site, the company is "making it easier to thread on Threads."Basically, it wasn't always easy to post a multi-post Thread on the app — or to...
Move over, Google Search. AI Mode is here, and it isn't going anywhere.Rumors are currently swirling around when exactly Google's AI Mode will become the default search tool on Google's homepage, replacing the classic Google Search. As we move deeper into the AI search era, many search experts believe that AI mode will inevitably replace the list of...
After years — yes, literal years — of debating, posturing, and signing executive orders, it seems we're on the precipice of a deal that would officially allow TikTok to operate in the United States.ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese parent company, has been on a timeline to either find a new owner or get banned in the U.S. due to hotly debated security reasons....
Alex Rampell, Justine Moore, The a16z Newsletter, Sept 22, 2025 Can we imagine AI being 'The Death of Advertising'? I think that if we substitute the word 'learning' for 'shopping' a lot of this article carries over, but a lot of it doesn't, and the trick is to distinguish between the two. The clue, I think,...
We all know Instagram is prioritizing short-form video content via Reels, so it should come as no surprise that a redesign is on the horizon.In a post on Instagram Reels (of course), Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced the app has reached three billion users, which prompted them to look at what fueled that growth. "And if you look at the last few...
Instagram has always been pretty precocious. Now, just ahead of its 15th birthday, we have a new measure of its global fame — and it is on a level far beyond the dreams of regular teenagers. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Wednesday that the once-humble photo-sharing app, which he had the foresight to buy for a mere $1 billion in 2012, now has more...
Meta announced today (Sept. 25) that it would be expanding its youth safety feature, Teen Accounts, to Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram users around the world — a move that will place hundreds of millions of teens under the company's default safety restrictions. The tech giant has spent the last year overhauling Teen Accounts, including placing limitations...
In one sense, Meta AI's Vibes — an endless scroll of AI-generated videos, submitted by creators and launched on the Meta AI app and website Friday — is the purest expression of what Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wanted to build when he was designing Facebook in the first place. Still tinkering in his Harvard dorm
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