Image credits: artifact
Personalized news aggregator app Artifact is taking another step towards becoming the place where you can discover not just the latest headlines, but all kinds of interesting links. After adding a way to share organic posts and links of all kinds through the service last month, the AI-powered app from the Instagram co-founder is today also adding a way to share your favorite places like restaurants, bars, shops, and more. Added. Or another place you would recommend to a friend.
This addition is changing the nature of the news app once again, quickly turning it into a search engine for the broader web, if not a full-fledged Twitter/X competitor. Artifact users can also establish themselves as curators who can grow their following on the app by sharing recommendations, thoughts, and even highlights.
The ability to share your location will now be part of the Artifact posting experience, and users will be able to post their own titles, text, and images by pressing the plus “+” icon. At launch, Artifact suggested that posts could be used to share restaurant reviews, how-to guides, family recipes, app breakdowns, design inspiration, and more. This addition makes the app a place for organic content, with or without links, nudging it closer to X territory. But while X has focused on text-based posts for the past year, Artifact recently added a generative AI tool that adds images to posts to grab the attention of other users.
AI is playing a larger role within Artifact, where it is used to power recommendation engines, rewrite clickbait headlines, and summarize news articles to give readers an overview of a particular article. Masu. These AI summaries are now also available when you click on a heading and read the page in the in-app Safari web browser, along with other features in Artifact that let you comment on and save articles for later. will be available. These features will work in both native mobile apps and Safari’s share extension, said Artifact co-founder Mike Krieger, who announced the update in a post on his Instagram Threads.
As of last month, Artifact had about 400,000 mobile app downloads, according to estimates from market intelligence provider data.ai.
Since its public launch in February 2023, the app has rapidly released new features such as user profiles, comments, link sharing, and posts, raising the question of whether the app aims to tackle X head-on. is occurring. . Krieger said last month that he thought it would be fun to have a “flavor” of Twitter/X within Artifact. That means we want the app to help people discover if there’s a story that unites everyone around that day. But he acknowledged that the app hasn’t achieved that yet.
By following the long tail of news and discussion, the app is instead becoming more like Flipboard with a curated news magazine, or perhaps Pinterest, as a discovery engine for inspirational content from the web. there is. However, if you don’t specialize in just one area, you can get confused about what Artifact is for. Is it a news app? Discovery tool? Recommended app? Rival of X? and so on. Time will tell where Artifact ends up, but until then, it’s one of many places users can scroll through news, links, and content that interests them.