We’ve been hearing rumblings that Facebook was working on an “assistant” within Messenger, but today we’ve gotten the details that pull it all together. This puts the company squarely in competition with Apple, Google and Microsoft in the digital personal assistant space. In a Facebook post, Facebook Messenger lead David Marcus spoke a bit about Facebook’s… Read More
Why pay Kickstarter 5% or Indiegogo 4% to 9% when most crowdfunding traffic comes from project creators and their own promotion? And why publicize a crowdfunding page that will only live for a month instead a business’ own website that can take orders forever? That’s the idea behind Celery Launch, which lets people accept crowdfunding, pre-orders, and traditional purchases from… Read More
Simon Khalaf, Yahoo’s senior vice president of publisher products, today outlined some big shifts in the mobile ecosystem and unveiled some new tools for mobile developers. He made the announcements on-stage at the Yahoo Mobile Developer Conference in New York City and in related blog posts. Let’s start with the developer tools. The first one is Tumblr In-App Sharing.… Read More
Slack’s true power is being a platform. A platform that other tools can plug into and play nice with. The company says there are 80+ of these types of integrations and thousands of developers hacking away at adding more. Right now, you have to rely on you or someone on your team finding the integrations that you want on the integrations page and then adding it to your instance of Slack.… Read More
Facebook Moments, the social network’s recently launched photo-sharing app which aims to address the problem of getting friends to send each other the photos they’ve been hoarding on their own phones, is expanding to video. The app received its first major update today since its mid-June debut, and will now automatically create a video of your shared photos which you can… Read More
Over three years after its acquisition by LinkedIn, SlideShare this morning is getting deeper integration with the professional social network, a rebranding (now it’s “LinkedIn SlideShare”) and a new tool that allows users to clip out the best slides from presentations and save them to topic-based clipboards. The added feature, simply called “Clipping,” has been… Read More
Stay long enough in tech and you’ll see the same ideas being recycled, usually with a slight twist. To wit: Friendsy, a student-only social network that’s aiming to bringing Tinder-style meet-up ease to existing communities of U.S. college students. Like TheFacebook of yore, it requires users have a .edu email to sign up. While its app also includes the now ubiquitous Tinderish… Read More
A group of high school friends, now UC Berkeley engineers, have created an app called Bash to make it easier for friends to organize hangouts, meetups and other events. Launching today on the App Store following a small beta test on the UC Berkeley campus, the idea with Bash is to offer a less cumbersome alternative to using text messages or emails to organize these sorts of… Read More
If you’re a Twitter on the web user, like I am, then you’ll be happy to know that the company has now introduced web notifications when you get a direct message. Just keep Twitter open in a tab and click around wherever else you like, the notification will jump out at you anyways on the top right side of the screen. When you click on the notification, it’ll open up the DM… Read More
Uber lets us trade money for time. But the cheaper the rides, the more people who will use Uber. That’s why it’s testing a way to let you pay less money for a little less convenience and a little less time saved. I recently spotted a new option in UberPool in San Francisco, and Uber now confirms it’s testing what it calls “Smart Routes”. Rather than hailing an… Read More
Though services dedicated to photos of food – like Foodspotting or Forkly, for example – have exited the scene (as well as consumers’ collective consciousness) over the years, snapping photos of your delicious dinner still remains a popular activity. Now Google is looking to capitalize on this ongoing trend with a new feature in Google Maps that encourages users to share… Read More
Two services that tracked deleted tweets by politicians and other diplomats in an effort to maintain a transparent, public record of statements made on social media, Politwoops and its sister site Diplotwoops, have now been cut off from accessing Twitter. According to a post published Sunday by the Open State Foundation, Twitter revoked access to its API for Diplotwoops on Friday, as well as… Read More
Back in May, Google and Twitter partnered to bring tweets into mobile search results. It was, and is, a pretty big deal for both companies. The relationship is apparently going well, as Google announced in a short update on its original blog post that it’d be including tweets within search results on desktop as well. Read More
At least Twitter isn’t alone. Alibaba also set a record low today. In the post-IPO market, Twitter is sucking air. After repeated quarterly reports detailing slowing, anemic user growth, shares in the social media company today reached a new nadir: the firm’s IPO price. Twitter went public at $26 per share. It skyrocketed from that dollar point, eventually managing a $39.93… Read More
Twitter is unveiling several new features for advertisers who want their campaigns to go beyond Twitter itself. And it’s giving the program a new name, the Twitter Audience Platform. Last year, the company launched something called the Twitter Publisher Network, giving advertisers one interface for buying campaigns that ran not just on Twitter’s websites and apps, but also… Read More
If you long for the shitty quality videos of pre-2000, the ones shot on a camcorder, then this iOS app is for you. Fittingly, it’s called VHS Camcorder and it costs $3.99. It’s kind of worth it, and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t pay for a lot of apps. Not only does your video get turned into something with zero HD quality whatsoever, it also sounds like… Read More
There are plenty of things on Steve Huffman’s to-do list since returning to Reddit as its CEO. Having a gifted technical mind himself, currently doing double duty as Hipmunk’s CTO, the need for a technical lead at Reddit was glaring. Today, the company has announced that it has hired founding engineer at Pinterest, Marty Weiner, as its first CTO in company history. Weiner spent… Read More
A conspiracy has been hatched by the world’s top Triple-A and indie developers to change the way computer games are financed. It’s called Fig. It’s a highly curated reward and equity crowdfunding funding platform just for games. Each month, Fig will debut one major studio title and one independent release, and already has campaigns lined up from lauded studios… Read More
Today, Twitter launched an emoji tied to the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards, which will air this weekend. Users hash tagging either #VMA of #VMAs will get a very tiny moon man emoji to pop up in their tweet. 
Which emojis do New Yorkers use more than other U.S. states? How diverse is California’s emoji usage? Do Alaskans dream of emoji fish? 