The average smartphone user spends 2 hours and 20 minutes a day or 70 hours on social media apps every month and 55% of the population, or 4.88 billion people, have social media accounts. It is the most popular type of internet service, responsible for hundreds of billions of interactions every day. In the late 1990s, as the internet was moving to web 2.0 stage, several online messaging and social networks launched with new multimedia services, propelling them to new levels of popularity. Liv...| Business of Apps
A bit of an unconventional name for a social app but one that fits with the main function of Gas, the act of “gassing” friends or crushes through polls and giving them compliments. Targeted at high school teenagers and only available in a select few states in America and Canada, the app creates polls such as “Who should DJ at every party?” or “Who do you secretly admire?” with the name of four people at the school. The names can be shuffled or skipped, which provides the user with...| Business of Apps
When the deal to acquire Twitter was finalized, several Twitter alternatives were floated for those that did not like Musk’s politics, his ideas for Twitter, or just wanted a new microblogging platform. Bluesky has been one of the few to maintain steady growth since the acquisition, with a new surge post US election. Bluesky was formed inside of Twitter by the then-CEO Jack Dorsey, as a potential way to decentralize Twitter. After two years in development and consultation, the ‘Authentica...| Business of Apps
Pinterest is an image search platform, which functions somewhat like an online mood board. Users pin images they like to boards. Images are uploaded by users, and can then be re-pinned by others. Pinterest was launched by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra and Evan Sharp in 2010. Silbermann had previously worked in the advertising department at Google. Prior to Pinterest, Silbermann and Sciarra launched an app called Tote, which failed to gain traction. Launched on March 2010 to family and friends,...| Business of Apps
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
Snapchat is an image and video messaging app, developed by Stanford University students Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown in 2011. Its unique selling point was that photos and videos sent to friends would only be viewable for a set duration of 1 to 10 seconds, although Snapchat has removed these limitations. A number of additional features have also been added, the first of which was Stories. This allowed users to post photos and videos to a feed for 24 hours. The feature was notor...| Business of Apps