Instagram founders Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom launched the social network Artifact on Tuesday (31). The platform consists of a news feed and texts selected by artificial intelligence, similar to TikTok, but without the dances.
“Discover interesting articles and stay on top of the headlines that matter. Artifact is a free app that learns your interests and brings you the best articles the web has to offer. We make it easy to keep up with the things you’re interested in while filtering out the noise “, says the description of the app.
Krieger, who is Brazilian, and Systrom, have been working together since 2010, when they started developing the software that would become Instagram. Both left Facebook (now Meta) in September 2018 after clashing with Mark Zuckerberg, according to The New York Times.
The name Artifact, according to the founders, is a fusion of the words “articles” and “facts”. The app is now available on the Play Store for Android and on the App Store for iOS. To create an account, however, it is necessary to join the queue on the company’s website.
The application’s home page displays popular stories chosen from selected vehicles, from major newspapers to specialized blogs.
As with TikTok, when clicking on one of these texts, the application’s algorithm will understand that the topic is of interest to the user. Then, Artifact will start to suggest similar publications, as in the “For you” tab of the Chinese social network.
In future updates, the app should also include a feed of articles shared by accounts followed by the user and a private message box. For now, it is not allowed to publish texts without links, such as on Twitter, according to The Verge.
The social network also resembles Google Reader, a service for reading blogs and websites that ended in 2013.
The launch of Artifact comes at a time when major tech companies are making massive layoffs. In November, Meta announced the cut of 11 thousand employees, or about 13% of the total number of workers. On January 20, Google announced that around 12,000 employees would be laid off.
In addition, Twitter, a social network also dedicated to texts, is going through a bad time. Since billionaire Elon Musk bought the company, more than 500 advertisers have paused activity on the social network. According to The Information, the company’s daily revenue on January 17 was 40% lower than on the same day a year earlier.
Founded by Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom in 2010, Instagram was sold to Facebook in 2011 for $1 billion, about $1.3 billion today. At that time, the social network had about 30 million users. Since then, the company’s growth has accelerated, surpassing the 1 billion user mark in 2018.
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