Steve Thomas - IT Consultant

Yesterday, X began rolling out Grok, the “rebellious” AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI startup, to Premium+ subscribers on X’s platform. Today, Musk says that Grok’s rollout to all U.S. Premium+ subscribers is now complete, but cautioned that the beta would face many issues, though it would be steadily improved. He also offered a […]

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Snapchat’s premium subscription is showing no signs of slowing growth as it comes off its best month ever, in terms of in-app revenue, new data indicates. As it turns out, many of Snapchat’s younger users are willing to pay for the perks of Snapchat+, which offers tools to enhance stories, pin a Best Friend, change […]

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Less than three weeks ago, French startup Amo released ID. As I hinted in my article covering this much-anticipated launch, ID was Amo’s first idea. Today, the social consumer startup is releasing its second app called Capture. Once again, this new app will be dissected by social app enthusiasts and other companies working in this […]

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After scaling back operations and reassigning staff to other projects, Tumblr owner Automattic’s CEO Matt Mullenweg said that the company would hone in on the parts of Tumblr’s service that worked, and kill those that didn’t — as it did with the subscription offering, Post+ last month. Now, the company wants to focus on the […]

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While today’s bigger news from the world of Meta’s messaging apps was the rollout of end-to-end encryption in Messenger, the company is also bringing another useful feature to its WhatsApp users: disappearing voice messages. The new feature will allow users to send a voice message that can only be listened to once before it disappears, […]

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Retro is a super interesting social app that helps you share photos and catch up with long-distance friends, family members and everyone who matters in your life. And today, the company is shipping a major update with a handful of new features. Retro is now also available on Android and in more places following a […]

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Mammoth, an app from the Mozilla-backed startup focused on building a more consumer-friendly entry point to the world of decentralized social media, is out today with its next big upgrade: Mammoth 2. The third-party Mastodon client had already focused on various pain points for joining the open source Twitter/X competitor, including better onboarding and its […]

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With the news that Microsoft’s Copilot is getting OpenAI’s latest models and a new code interpreter, it’s clear the battle over the future of AI is increasingly being fought at the developer and engineering level. If you can get developers hooked on “your” AI Copilot, then you will be able to better sell into that […]

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In September, Google announced it would shut down its standalone podcasts app, Google Podcasts, sometime next year. Now that the end of 2023 is nearing, the company is today launching a migration tool that will allow U.S. users to shift their existing podcast subscriptions over to YouTube Music, which will be Google’s new home for […]

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Alongside other AI updates announced today, Meta AI, the company’s generative AI experience, is gaining new capabilities starting today, including the ability to create new AI images when prompted as well as support for Reels. The former, a feature called “reimagine” allows users in group chats to have more fun by recreating AI images with […]

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Earlier this year, Meta introduced a set of AI characters, including those based on real-life celebs including the likes of Paris Hilton, Mr. Beast, Kendall Jenner, Tom Brady, Charli D’Amelio, Snoop Dog, and others, which users could chat with across Meta’s apps. Today, the company announced its 28 AI characters are fully rolled out across […]

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Bluesky is changing course by allowing users to opt out of a change that would expose their posts to the public web. Last month, the company announced its decentralized alternative to Twitter/X would soon open up a public web interface allowing anyone to view the posts on its platform, even if they didn’t have an […]

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