With the apparent self-implosion at Twitter, Instagram-parent Meta launched into the microblogging scene with Threads. Aimed at users and advertisers fed up with Twitter’s handling following the Musk takeover, it made a large splash in the first week with over 100 million sign-ups. This was helped along by Twitter announcing it had temporarily limited the amount of tweets users could view in one day. Threads works in a similar way to Twitter, where a mix of short posts from accounts followe...| Business of Apps
Facebook probably needs no introduction; nonetheless, here is a quick history of the company. The world’s biggest and most-famous social network was launched by Mark Zuckerberg while he was a student at Harvard University, in early 2004. TheFacebook, as it was then known, was originally intended to serve a digitised version of the ‘face books’ held by Harvard’s various colleges, which were paper directories containing images and personal information about students. Initially limited t...| Business of Apps
BeReal is the newest social app to make its mark, coming at a time when many were disillusioned with Instagram and its focus on algorithmic content. In 2022, it broke out in the US and UK with millions switching to the app, but has struggled to retain those users long term. Built by ex-GoPro employee Alexis Barreyat and Kévin Perreau and launched in late 2019, the basic premise of the app is to take a photo with the back and front camera at a random time each day. The impromptu nature of the...| Business of Apps
WeChat was launched in 2011 as Weixin, Mandarin for ‘micro-message’. As the name suggests, it originally functioned as a simple messenger app, a Chinese equivalent to WhatsApp in essence. WeChat was developed by and belongs to Chinese tech behemoth Tencent, one of the most valuable companies in the world. Other names in the Tencent stable include QQ Messenger and Tencent Music. Though it started as a simple messenger platform, WeChat has become far more than that. Through its mini program...| Business of Apps
In a second attempt to be one of the first inductees of the startup incubator Y Combinator, University of Virginia roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian built Reddit, which they labelled “the front page of the internet”. The site functionality remains much the same as it was back in 2005. Users write posts, upload photos, videos and link to other parts of the internet. To organise the content, Redditors upload to specific subreddits. If the post receives a lot of attention, it may be...| Business of Apps
TikTok, known as Douyin in its home market, was launched in China in September 2016. It quickly started to gain traction in China and parent company ByteDance launched an international version the following year. Originally launched as a short-form video sharing platform, primarily for lipsyncing and dancing videos, TikTok has grown into a fully-fledged video service, with content available for all types of viewers. ByteDance had prior experience on running wildly popular apps, as the operato...| Business of Apps
Twitter is a real-time microblogging platform, publicly launched in July 2006. At launch, its defining features were the tight limits placed on each post, known at a tweet. Originally, users could only use 140 characters, although that has been elongated over the years. Formed by former Odeo employees Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, the site originally used SMS to send tweets onto the network. It received its first boost of users at SXSW 2007, when the founders showed al...| Business of Apps
