Patreon, which gives fans a way to pay their favorite creators on a recurring basis, on Tuesday introduced Lens, a feature similar to Instagram or Snapchat Stories that gives patrons special access to their favorite creators’ behind-the-scenes peeks. The feature, which is part of Patreon’s mobile app, lets creators take photos and videos with their …
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Snapchat is giving you more options to customize your Bitmoji avatar. On Tuesday, the social media app unveiled Bitmoji Deluxe, a new iteration of its feature that lets you create a cartoon version of yourself to use in messaging apps. With Bitmoji Deluxe, you can snap a selfie and use that as a starting point for creating your avatar. With …
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Snapchat Stories are branching out, hoping to bring more people in. Stories, the app feature that lets people and publishers string together photos and video clips that eventually disappear, will be easier to share outside the Snapchat app, as part of a redesign unveiled Tuesday. The one big caveat: My Story, the compilation that you as an individual user can …
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Platforms like Snapchat and Instagram have made recording and watching vertical videos commonplace. But if you’ve ever played a vertical video on YouTube, two giant black bars filled most of your screen. YouTube’s latest update for the iPhone changes that. On Tuesday, in a Twitter post, the venerable site for internet videos announced that the YouTube player for iOS will …
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You can save the Instagram Stories into an archive and build a highlights reel from previous Stories, the app announced on its blog Tuesday. Stories, which are collections of personal photos and video, previously expired in 24 hours. With Stories Archive, the app will automatically save your Stories. You can then use the archived Stories to build Stories Highlights in …
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Get ready to watch a lot more bite-size videos on YouTube. Reels, a feature announced Wednesday, lets YouTube’s “creator” community string together videos of up to 30 seconds long to fashion a sort of playlist separate from their other work. It’s the latest example of a tech company borrowing from Snapchat’s popular “stories” function, which was instrumental in making Snapchat …
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Finding the right filter to make your Snaps shine just got easier. Snapchat is currently rolling out context-aware filters that will show up based on what it detects in your most recent photos, a spokesman for the app confirmed to CNET Monday. The most relevant filters for your pictures will pop up automatically in the filter carousel, allowing you to …
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Ask teenagers how many “streaks” they have going, and they’ll know exactly what you’re referring to. That’s how many people they’ve been Snapchatting back and forth with for consecutive days. It’s actually addicting, they’ll tell you. So much so, Facebook apparently wants in on the game. Facebook confirmed to Mashable on Wednesday that it’s testing out a feature similar to …
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Augmented reality is expected to become a new, major tech platform in the years to come, and Apple wants a piece of the action. The iPhone maker is working on a new AR headset that could become available as soon as 2020, according to a report Wednesday from Bloomberg. Also on today’s podcast, we talk about Snap’s lousy quarterly results …
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Remember how crazy everyone went in 2016 when buyers stood in long lines for the chance to buy Snapchat Spectacles from a robot? The gambit may have garnered social media company Snap 150,000 sales of the glasses that shoot and broadcast snaps, but a new report from The Information (paywall; via Quarz) suggests that the hype overshadowed demand, leaving potentially …
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