Introduction:
The co-founders of Instagram’s personalized news aggregator Artifact are releasing a new feature that expands the app’s capabilities beyond tracking, summarizing, and commenting on the news. The app will now be more directly rivaled with social apps for sharing text or links, like X or Threads because users can share any link from the web to receive a tailored feed of relations based on their preferences.
According to the company, the feature, dubbed Links, aims to demonstrate the potential of Artificat’s AI technology.
You only need to share a URL to get started, and the URL will then be displayed in a visual feed within the app’s new Links page. Here, a meal with the familiar moniker “For You” will display additional links based on your preferences.
Artifact users can share a link with additional content such as a caption, more images, or “hot takes,” and curate the best ideas for their posts. This has the effect of transforming users into the type of Artifact producers who could gain a following. According to the firm, the app will start displaying shared connections to other pertinent users to assist the author in growing an audience.
The new Links feature will also give users access to imaginative tools that facilitate speedy image uploading, cropping, and reordering. Additionally, producers can use Artificat’s AI, initially employed to summarize lengthy news pieces, to assist in caption creation.
When reading stories on Artifact, creators can share quotes by marking the text and selecting “Share to Links” from the new pop-up menu.
Personalized News App Artifact:
Personalized News App Artifact (Image Source: techcrunch.com)
Early adopters have reportedly used Links to share new items, movies, headline summaries, app reviews, recipes, slideshows of architectural designs, and much more. Due to this, the app appears to rival websites that allow users to pin links, such as Pinterest, and social media apps like X and Flipboard.
With recent expansions, including commenting on articles and tools for authors to claim their profiles and track their viewership, Artifact has been edging closer to social networking. However, the new Links feature goes even further.
Now that anyone has built a social profile on the app, users can search for and follow them. Here, a brand-new “Following” area will display fresh postings from users you follow. Recent links that have been added are now displayed in these profiles as well.
Links make utilizing Artifact less of a passive news reading experience and more of a collaborative news discovery experience for its users. However, some users may also try to feed the app with articles from smaller websites, blogs, and other shadier news outlets where the information isn’t as extensively fact-checked as the prominent publishers Artifact initially supported.
The business claims to approach this possible issue in a two-layered manner. To find offensive information that violates its community guidelines, it will first employ AI that searches via various third-party moderation services. We are informed that the second layer is a manual review actively monitored by the team and crowdsourced.
“The same AI that powers article discovery can be used for anything on the web — though it’s less tractable to crawl it all, and likely better to let users choose the best stuff,” argues Artifact co-founder Kevin Systrom, who developed the application with his Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger. “Artifact is about fulfilling your curiosity, and that goes beyond the top publishers in the world. Sometimes, the best stuff may be found on a small blog and deserves to be found on a site like this, the author continues.
IOS and Android devices support the Links function, and Android will soon support publishing.
