social networking

Ahead of Meta’s launch of a text-based social network, female-founded social networking startup RTRO is launching its app this week with the goal of connecting brands, creators and their fans an

Unlike Facebook, TikTok grew in popularity by connecting users with their interests, not their real-life friends and family. In fact, many people today deny the app’s request to upload their con

After launching premium memberships as a pilot late last year, Discord will now allow more servers to offer paid memberships in exchange for special server-specific perks. Plenty of Discord communitie

Twitter’s throwback feature, Twitter Status, is today expanding its list of potential status updates to choose from, in a continuation of tests that began this July. The feature, which is someth

Tencent, the biggest social networking and video games company in China, hasn’t really managed to scale its popular products in the Western mainstream. The behemoth’s international expansi

Facebook this year has been struggling to maintain its position among the Top 10 apps on the U.S. App Store, according to an analysis of iPhone App Store data. As younger consumers shift to newer soci

Dating app maker Bumble revealed more of its plans to strengthen its social networking features during last week’s Q2 earnings, which saw the company’s shares slump over its lowered finan

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. Global app spending reached $65 billion in th

Reddit is launching a new NFT-based avatar marketplace today that allows you to purchase blockchain-based profile pictures for a fixed rate. The company said that you need not have a crypto wallet to

BeReal, LiveIn, Locket… what do these new consumer social apps have in common besides a highly ranked position on the App Store’s Top Charts? They engage their users through a combination of push

Web3 has plenty of money going for it — well, yes quite a bit less than a few months ago — but it’s still hard to argue that mainstream consumers have lined up to embrace web3 intern

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today that Horizon Home will roll out as part of a new update to the Quest 2 headset. Despite Meta’s insistence that virtual reality is the future

Twitter Communities — the private, interest-based networking feature launched last year — will now gain their own algorithmic-based timelines, similar to Twitter’s Home timeline wher

Poparazzi, the anti-Instagram social app that hit the top of the App Store last year, is today, for the first time, detailing the growth stats for its business, its future plans and its previously unc

Yubo, a social livestreaming app popular with a Gen Z audience, announced today it’s becoming one of the first major social platforms to adopt a new age verification technique that uses live ima

Dating platform Bumble is looking to enhance its non-dating social features with a further investment into its Bumble BFF feature, first launched in 2016. This friend-finding feature currently uses th

BUD, a nascent app taking a shot at creating a metaverse for Gen Z to play and interact with each other, has raised another round of funding in three months. The Singapore-based startup told TechCrunc

Putin’s regime continues to tighten its grip on how information on the war in Ukraine is shared in Russia, and in the wake of that, tech giants in the country — which, like Facebook, Google and Tw

What’s Facebook doing on TikTok? Scoping out the competition? DM’ing Charli? Recruiting beta testers? Buying ads? We’ll know soon enough, because the social networking company has se

After publicly launching in the U.S. this past September, Facebook Reels today is becoming globally available in more than 150 countries. The feature, which is a key part of Meta’s response to t