This week's big trend: It's all social all the time I loved Sarah's analysis this week of what the ever-glowing hell is going on at Twitter. In the wake of Twitter’s identity crisis under Elon Musk, the social media landscape is blooming with alternatives like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Meta’s Threads, creating a buffet of brief-post platforms. It’s a golden age for those fleeing X (formerly Twitter), but a headache for early adopters juggling half a dozen apps. Amid this chaos, Tapestry and other aggregators aim to be the Marie Kondo of social media, promising to tidy up our digital mess with a unified app. Good luck with that in a world where even the aggregators need aggregating. There's been a lot of movement in the social media startup world over the past couple of weeks. Perhaps most notably is Bluesky reaching for the, er, sky. After nearly a year as an invite-only application, Bluesky, funded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, has opened to the public, positioning itself as a promising microblogging platform. Bluesky differentiates itself from its decentralized infrastructure, the AT Protocol, which is open source, allowing for transparency and the opportunity for developers to build on it. As the platform opens to the public, its CEO is facing her biggest challenge yet, and the platform got almost a million new users overnight. As Bluesky is opening up, Meta's Facebook is going the other direction. Meta’s announcement of shutting down its Facebook Groups API has left businesses and social media marketers in turmoil, signaling a significant shift in its operational philosophy. The closure is bad news for a lot of startups building tools on the API. It's yet another reminder to build a company, not a feature. X, née Twitter, had a hell of a boost this week, after Tucker Carlson’s announcement of his interview with Vladimir Putin propelled the X app to the top of the U.S. App Store, overtaking Instagram Threads. The interview, Putin’s first with a Western media outlet since the Ukraine invasion, is seen as a strategic move by Putin to reach a wider, potentially sympathetic audience through Carlson, known for his controversial stances. Other tweet-sized morsels of social media news from this week: Oh snap: Snap’s doing the corporate shuffle again, axing 10% of its workforce to “support growth,” which seems to be corporate speak for “we’re not making enough money.” This sequel to last year’s layoffs saga features a $55 million to $75 million tab for severance and a side of hierarchy trimming. Meanwhile, Snap’s hardware adventures flop harder than a Pixy drone in a recall. Put that away: Meta is stepping up its game against sextortion with new updates and a global awareness campaign. The company is enhancing the Take It Down tool, which helps teens remove non-consensual intimate images from the internet. This initiative allows users to generate a digital fingerprint of the image without sharing the actual content. TikTok on the rise: Pew Research Center once again shared its biennial peek into America’s social media closet, revealing — to nobody's surprise — that platforms rise and fall like the tides. This year, they discovered the earth-shattering news that TikTok is in, BeReal is barely a blip, and Facebook somehow still clings to relevance like a cat to a screen door. |
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