Tiktok plans to launch new app to rival Instagram
The Instagram and Tiktok wars continue as Chinese tech giant Bytedance prepares to launch a new photo app.
Instagram, owned by Meta, created its reels feature in 2020 to compete with Tiktok’s rise in popularity, and now, Tiktok appears to be preparing to launch a photo and text app to compete with Instagram.
The news began leaking last month when some Tiktok users took to Reddit to share screenshots of notifications they had been receiving on the upcoming launch.
“As part of our continued commitment to innovating the Tiktok experience, we’re exploring ways to empower our community to create and share their creativity with photos and text in a dedicated space for those formats,” Tiktok said in a statement.
The app, called Tiktok Notes, will not be broadly available at this time, a Tiktok spokesperson told USA TODAY Friday. The testing phase of the app isn’t currently being rolled out in the U.S., they said.
Though Tiktok users log more time on its app, Instagram is still seeing more downloads. Tiktok still trails behind Instagram in accounts created, Tiktok with 1.12 billion users and Instagram with 1.47 billion.
A peek at Tiktok’s new app
“Tiktok Notes, a new app for photo posts, is coming soon! Your existing and future public Tiktok photo posts will be shown on Tiktok Notes. If you prefer not to show your public Tiktok photo posts on Tiktok Notes, turn this off now,” a pop-up told some Tiktok users, according to a screenshot shared on Reddit.
“It looks like Tiktok is trying to use your content to start to populate the content in the app,” a Tiktok creator with the handle Marketing With Sam said in a video breaking down what is known of Tiktok Notes. There is a toggle for those who wish to keep their photos off the new platform though, she said.
The website, notes.tiktok.com, is live, but doesn’t open up in the App Store. You will, however, get a glimpse into the app’s aesthetic when you visit its landing page.
Will Tiktok Notes land with users?
“The copycat phenomenon runs rampant across social media platforms,” Mike Proulx, chief marketing officer at Forrester, told the BBC, noting that these efforts sometimes “pay off.” A good example of this was Instagram’s creation of “Stories” to rival Snapchat, Proulx added.
“Consumers could have app fatigue,” Sam concluded in her video. “But a lot of brands are saying their carousel posts are a lot higher engaging than their video photos,” she said.
KYIV – Ukraine’s top commander said on Sunday that Russian forces aimed to capture the town of Chasiv Yar by May 9, setting the stage for an important battle for control of high ground in the east where Russia is focusing its assaults.
May 9 is the date Russia marks the Soviet victory in World War II with an annual military parade overseen by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Red Square.
Moscow’s rapid capture of the town with a prewar population of 12,200 to the west of the occupied city of Bakhmut would indicate growing Russian battlefield momentum as Ukraine grapples with a slowdown in Western military aid.
Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskiy, who warned over the weekend that the situation in the east had deteriorated, said Russia was focusing its efforts west of Bakhmut to try to capture Chasiv Yar before moving toward the city of Kramatorsk.
Kyiv’s brigades were holding back the assaults in the Donetsk region for now and had been reinforced with ammunition, drones and electronic warfare devices, he said in a statement on the Telegram messenger.
“The threat remains relevant, taking into account the fact that the higher Russian military leadership has set its troops the task of capturing Chasiv Yar by May 9,” he said, without elaborating.
The war has escalated in recent weeks with Russia staging three massive airstrikes on Ukrainian power plants and substations, raising fears over the resilience of an energy system that was hobbled in the war’s first winter.
More than two years since Russia’s full-scale invasion, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned the Kremlin may be preparing to launch a big offensive in late spring or summer.
It is unclear where that attack would come, but Russia has focused its offensive efforts in the eastern Donetsk region.
Ukraine has this year tried to find a pressure point to strike back against the Kremlin, using domestically produced long-range drones to bomb oil facilities deep inside Russia.
Chasiv Yar, which is bisected by a canal, lies 3 to 6 miles from Bakhmut, the devastated city captured by Russia in May last year after months of bloody fighting.
Ukraine now faces manpower challenges and artillery shell shortages, aggravated by a long delay in vital U.S. military assistance that has been stalled in Congress for months.
Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a think tank in Philadelphia, said on X that Chasiv Yar would likely prove an important battle.
“Chasiv Yar is located on defensible high ground. If Russia takes the (town), they could potentially increase the rate of advance deeper into Donetsk (region) as part of an expected summer offensive,” he said.