Team News

Chinese-owned video streaming app TikTok says it will offer text-only posts as competition between social media giants heats up.

The platform says the new feature gives users “another way to express themselves.”

Earlier this month, TikTok launched a new music streaming service to rival platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.

And on Monday, Elon Musk’s Twitter ditched the famous blue bird logo and switched to a black and white X.

TikTok users will now be given three options in the app – whether to post photos, videos or text.

They will also be able to personalize posts by adding sound, location or Duets, which are video reactions to other TikTok users’ posts.

“These features make your text posts just as dynamic and interactive as any video or photo post,” TikTok said.

TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance, recently launched a new music streaming service, TikTok Music, in Brazil and Indonesia.

Last week, the company also released a beta version of the service in Singapore, Mexico and Australia.

A spokesperson said it will allow users to “listen, share and download music they’ve discovered on TikTok, and share their favorite songs and artists with their TikTok community.”

The app is testing other features, including a new landscape mode with selected users around the world.

In 2021, TikTok became the most popular online destination in the world after having more visits than the American search engine giant Google.

That year, the app also said it had more than a billion active users worldwide.

Competition between rival social media firms – such as Instagram owner Meta and X, Mr Musk’s rebranded Twitter platform – has heated up in recent weeks.

This month, Meta’s new Threads platform launched in the Apple and Android app stores in 100 countries, including the UK.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg later said his company’s Threads platform had signed up more than 100 million users in less than five days.

Also this week, Twitter’s blue bird branding was replaced by a logo with a white X on a black background.

The term tweet will also be changed to “x’s”, according to Musk.

How do we experience the whole future amid grief and the loss of our dearest people?

An artificial intelligence (AI) company called “You, Only Virtual” is creating a chatbot modeled after our loved ones who are no longer alive, with its founder, Justin Harrison, telling “Good Morning America” ​​that he hopes people don’t have to grieve at all.

“You, Only Virtual” scans text messages, emails and phone calls shared between an individual and the deceased to create a chatbot that composes original written or audio responses imitating the deceased person’s voice and modeling the relationship and rapport the two shared in real life.

The company, founded in 2020, hopes to offer a video-chat option later this year and eventually offer augmented reality that allows interaction with a three-dimensional projection.

Harrison, who used the technology to create “a virtual mother” after his mother’s death, dismissed potential privacy concerns raised by using personal conversations to build a chatbot without the consent of the deceased.

“You absolutely do not need the consent of someone who is dead,” he said. “My mom might have hated the idea, but this is what I wanted and I’m alive,” he emphasizes.