Instagram is introducing the ability for users to broadcast live to just their Close Friends list, the company announced on Thursday. The new “Close Friends on Live” feature allows users to go live with up to three other people.
Instagram says the new feature can be used to share what’s on your mind, spontaneously catch up with friends, share memes, plan trips, do homework together or just hang out casually in real-time.
While Instagram launched live broadcasts back in 2016, they were always meant to be public and open to everyone who follows you. The feature is widely used by celebrities and influencers as a way for them to connect with fans. For regular users, the idea of going live to everyone who follows you may not be appealing.
With this new feature, Instagram is giving users the option to have control over who can see their broadcast, which could entice people who haven’t used the feature in the past to check it out.
The launch of the new feature indicates that Instagram is continuing its push toward more private and curated connections on its platform.
Late last year, the company introduced a status feature called Notes to allow users to update their real-world friends using just text and emoji. Users can post a Note that will appear at the top of their friends’ inboxes for 24 hours. Instagram sees the feature as a way for users to start conversations with their friends in a lightweight and private way.
As Instagram becomes increasingly associated with influencers and ads, it makes sense for the social network to release features for regular users who miss the early days of Instagram, when the platform was about connecting with your real-life friends.
Instagram is introducing the ability for users to broadcast live to just their Close Friends list, the company announced on Thursday. The new “Close Friends on Live” feature allows users…
We’re out-of-this-world excited to announce that we’ve added a dedicated Space Stage to TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. It joins Fintech, SaaS and AI as the other industry-focused stages — all under…
Gynger, a platform that lends capital to companies for technology purchases, has raised $20 million in a Series A round led by PayPal Ventures, it told TechCrunch exclusively. The financing…
Lightspeed Ventures-backed audio platform Pocket FM just announced that it has partnered with voice cloning company ElevenLabs to quickly convert text content, such as script, into audio series using AI.…
Claude 3.5 Sonnet can analyze both text and images as well as generate text, and it’s Anthropic’s best-performing model yet — at least on paper.
As the U.S. Surgeon General is calling for a warning label on social media sites, similar to those found on tobacco products, one startup is launching a set of new…
The U.S. is facing an accountant shortage. Fewer first-time candidates took the CPA exam in 2022 than in 2006, according to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. One possible…
Christopher O’Donnell has hobbies. He likes music and playing guitar, but above all, he loves building software. Which is why three years after leaving HubSpot, he built Day.ai, a CRM…
Active Directory, the Microsoft directory service for connecting users with network resources, is used by more than 90% of all Fortune 1000 companies and many more besides. So it’s no…
Online shopping trends are expected to stay strong this year, but e-commerce is more fragmented than ever. With brands selling on so many platforms — from TikTok Shop, to established…
Non-hosted podcasters can now upload videos to Spotify. Over 250K video podcasts are on the platform.
The global freelancer market, a $1.3 trillion industry fueled by over 200 million knowledge workers, drives demand for solutions that automate payroll and streamline employment and tax regulations worldwide. However,…
Amazon is bringing its generative AI listing smarts to more sellers, revealing today that those in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the U.K. can now access tools designed to improve…
Worldcoin — the crypto “proof of personhood” startup co-founded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman — has been given the green light to resume iris-scanning and other operations in Kenya after a…
Paris-based VC firm Breega has observed Africa’s tech ecosystem mature over the years. From receiving less than a billion dollars in venture capital per year to a record-high $6 billion,…
Malicious hacking is getting increasingly sophisticated, and that’s leading to a very clear trend in security technology. To keep people and organizations safe, security also has to continue improving. Security…
Hero, a new fintech startup based in Paris, is announcing an €11.3 million all-equity funding round led by Valar Ventures ($12.2 million at today’s exchange rate). For the past couple…
Wordsmith, a fledgling Scottish legal tech startup, has somehow managed to attract the backing of two well-known venture capital firms. The startup targets in-house legal teams and law firms with…
Like it or hate it, artificial intelligence – especially generative AI – is the technology story of 2024. OpenAI, with its rollouts of viral services like ChatGPT and billions in…
Ilya Sutskever, one of OpenAI’s co-founders, launches Safe Superintelligence (SSI), just a month after leaving OpenAI.
Like many highly valued startups, SpaceX sometimes allows its employees to cash out some of their shares by selling to company-authorized outside investors. TechCrunch has gotten a peek at an…
Hiya, folks, and welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. This week in AI, generative AI is beginning to spam up academic publishing — a discouraging new development on the disinformation…
The future of the space industry may look a lot like its past, or so believes Peter Beck, founder and CEO of Rocket Lab. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in San…
Four years after acquiring Shine, a French fintech startup that offers bank accounts to freelancers and very small companies, Société Générale has announced plans to sell Shine to Ageras. In…
The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has initiated a formal “phase 1” investigation into Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) planned acquisition of Juniper Networks. The CMA said it’s in the…
Meta AI removes restrictions in answering election-related queries in India while Google is still restricting them.
