Artifact: TikTok for text
Instagram founders are back with a new app
2/1/2023 3:58 p.m
The hype surrounding Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has rocked the social media world. A number of new services are gaining traction. The two founders of Instagram have also recognized this – and are launching a surprise attack with their new application.
More than four years after the founders of the world-famous photo and video application Instagram left the company, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger present their new app Artifact. The app is a personalized newsfeed powered by artificial intelligence. The name is made up of the English words for article and facts.
According to a post on Instagram, the two founders have been working with their team for more than a year to launch the application. Interested users can now put themselves on a waiting list. The company plans to quickly onboard users.
Unlike Instagram, the app focuses more on articles than photos. Artifact will recommend content based on interests and enable discussions with friends, reports the US portal “Platformer”. A main feed shows popular articles from large media organizations to smaller bloggers. A user’s feed becomes more and more personalized based on what they click on.
According to Systrom, the company wants to provide its readers with high-quality news and information and therefore only wants to involve publishers who adhere to editorial quality standards. Artifact wants to include both left-leaning and right-leaning publishers. But the company isn’t afraid to make its own judgment on who’s included and who’s not.
The hype surrounding Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has rocked the social media world. A number of new services such as Mastodon have gained traction. Meanwhile, TikTok’s rapid rise is pushing numerous apps, including Instagram, to copy its features. “Platformer” described Artifact as “TikTok for text” and possibly “even a surprise attack on Twitter”.
Artificial intelligence inspires imagination
Systrom and Krieger co-founded Instagram in 2010 and sold it to Meta two years later for $1 billion. The two eventually left Instagram for good in 2018. At the time, it was rumored that the founders had fallen out over CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to further integrate the app with Facebook. According to “Platformer”, Systrom and Krieger have since founded a company focused on the social apps of the future. Artifact is the first product from this company.
With the money from the sale of Instagram, Systrom and Krieger actually didn’t have an urgent need to find a job again quickly. “We generally like to build,” Systrom told Platformer. “There is no other place in the world we would rather spend our time than writing code and building products that people enjoy. I just love it.” Ultimately, developments in artificial intelligence would have fired their imaginations. “I think machine learning is hands down the coolest thing to work on right now.”