Artifact

Artifact is a new personalized news feed app from the co-founders of Instagram, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. It uses machine learning to understand users' interests and offer them a feed of popular articles from a curated list of publishers. The app is being described as a TikTok for text, where users tap on articles that interest them, and Artifact will serve similar posts and stories in the future. The app will also have a direct message inbox to discuss the posts with friends.

The app is opening up its waiting list to the public, and users who come in from the waitlist today will see only that central ranked feed. However, Artifact beta users are currently testing two more features that Systrom expects to become core pillars of the app. One is a feed showing articles posted by users you have chosen to follow and their commentary on those posts. The second is a direct message inbox to discuss the posts you read privately with friends.

While personalized recommendations for news articles and blog posts have not been successful, Artifact hopes to leverage the recent advances in artificial intelligence to improve proposals and offer high-quality news and information. The founders are committed to including only publishers who adhere to quality editorial standards and plan to remove individual posts promoting falsehoods. In addition, the app will take the job of serving readers with high-quality news and information seriously. Its machine-learning systems will be primarily optimized to measure how long you spend reading about various subjects.

While the app's success is yet to be determined, it represents an effort to use machine learning to improve the consumer experience of text-based social networking. The app's success will depend on whether it can do more than show users a collection of interesting links and capture conversations about the core feed.