Latest news with #Flashes
Sharjah 24
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sharjah 24
Wamdat and Crafts & Professions reinforce Al Wusta TV programmes
In this context, the channel is presenting the heritage programme "Crafts and Professions" and the social and cultural programme "Wamdat' (Flashes). 'Crafts and Professions' "Crafts and Professions" airs every Tuesday at 8:00 PM and is presented by media personality Obaid bin Hamed Al Tunaiji. Through this programme, the channel seeks to preserve the craft heritage and encourage interest in authentic Bedouin crafts and professions by hosting a number of prominent craftsmen and handicrafts for which the Central Region is famous, and sharing their experiences and beginnings in these crafts and industries. 'Wamdat' "Wamdat" programme, presented by media personality Saeed Al Qamzi every Saturday at 6:30 PM, highlights the creativity and successes of the sons and daughters of the Central Region who have excelled in the fields of science, literature, and culture, and have also excelled in their professional lives, making them role models for society. Preserving and documenting Al Wusta heritage Saeed Rashid Al Ketbi, Director of Al Wusta from Al Dhaid TV Channel, said that through "Wamdat" and "Crafts and Professions" programmes, the channel sought to highlight the people of the Central Region and their significant roles in supporting and developing the region, whether through their literary, scientific, cultural, or heritage works. Al Ketbi added that traditional crafts and industries are gaining traction at events and occasions, so the channel decided to dedicate an entire programme to them this year as part of our commitment to preserving and documenting our tangible and intangible heritage and passing it on to new generations.
Yahoo
01-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Mark Cuban backs Skylight, a TikTok alternative built on Bluesky's underlying technology
Skylight, a startup taking on TikTok with a more open alternative, is launching its mobile app to the public on Tuesday after just 10 weeks of active development. The app, which is backed by Mark Cuban and others, is now one of many to build on top of the AT Protocol -- the same technology that underpins the social network Bluesky and a growing number of other apps. Developed by co-founders Tori White (CEO) and Reed Hermeyer (CTO), Skylight offers a short-form video app experience with many familiar features, including an in-app video editor; the ability to comment, like, and share videos; set up your own user profile; and follow others. Because it's also built on the AT Protocol (or "ATProto" for short), users will immediately be tapped into Bluesky's network of over 33.8 million users. That means videos posted on Skylight can be seen and engaged with by users on Bluesky and other ATProto-based apps, like the more photo-centric app Flashes, for example. The company is funded by a pre-seed round from Cuban, who said earlier this year that he wanted to fund a TikTok alternative built on the AT Protocol. Leslie Feinzaig's Graham & Walker Venture Fund also invested. White, who used to be a travel influencer and is now a self-taught software developer living in Seattle, says she and co-founder Hermeyer were inspired to create Skylight when they first heard that TikTok was getting banned in the U.S. In preparation for the ban, which is currently on pause, White had backed up her TikTok videos. But she still worried about losing access to her community and comments. She and Hermeyer had already been playing around with ATProto and saw the potential. "The first thing that interested us about ATProto was that Bluesky was not failing," Hermeyer told TechCrunch at the ATmosphere Conference in Seattle in March. "We didn't see the 'fail whale,'" he said, a reference to the graphic that appeared in Twitter's early days when the app was constantly crashing. "That made us feel comfortable about the underlying technology." Hermeyer and White soon realized this was an ideal time to build a new social app on the protocol that could be "ban-proof." Tapping into her influencer background, White began documenting Skylight's development on TikTok, which helped bring exposure to the product and build a following of potentially interested users. "We started with distribution," White explained. "I actually made a video before we ever wrote a line of code for this … [so] everyone can follow our journey as we build," she told TechCrunch at the conference. "We were like, oh my gosh, we are building this thing that we think is so cool, but no one cares yet. So we have to build a way to tell people about it so that they would care, because we know people need it," she said. Today, White's @buildwithtori TikTok profile has nearly 50,000 followers, many of which turned into early testers. Like Bluesky, Skylight supports video uploads of up to three minutes in length, a recent increase from the one-minute-long videos supported previously. But White sees Skylight becoming more than just a decentralized TikTok clone. She hints that Skylight in the future will allow users to customize their feed, including by utilizing new gestures beyond swiping and scrolling. Other features in the works include support for sounds, duets, stitching, bookmarks, and playlists. The app is in beta on the Google Play Store and is now available publicly on Apple's App Store after initial testing. This article originally appeared on TechCrunch at
Yahoo
30-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Beyond Bluesky: These are the apps building social experiences on the AT Protocol
A year ago, Bluesky was opening up to the public and was known as one of the many X competitors that emerged after Elon Musk acquired the network formerly known as Twitter. Today, Bluesky's social network has grown to over 33 million users, while the technology it's built upon -- the AT Protocol (or ATProto for short) -- is being used to develop dozens more applications designed to work together as part of an open social web. The developers behind many of these apps attended the first conference dedicated to the AT Protocol, ATmosphere, held in Seattle last weekend. There, they learned what's ahead for ATProto, what challenges still need to be overcome, and what other things they'll need to think about as they build for this new social app ecosystem. Others attended online, watched the talks and presentations remotely, and participated in a growing Discord chat for community members. The ATProto community is working to rebuild Web 2.0, an earlier version of the social web that included social media websites, blogs, wikis, video- and photo-sharing sites, and other collaborative and hosted services. Except this time around, the apps are being built on open technology, not siloed into centralized services that tend to be operated by tech giants. Bluesky was the first of these services to emerge, but if the open social web movement has any staying power, it won't be the last. Below is a list of AT Protocol-based, consumer-facing apps that are either built on top of Bluesky or its underlying protocol, allowing users to take back control over their social networking experiences and personal data. Many of these are still in early development but showcase the potential for what's ahead in this expanding ecosystem. This is a work in progress! Apps are still being added. Feeling left out? Email sarahp@ (Note that this list is focused on consumer-facing apps people can use now, not small projects or dev tools.) Flashes is an Instagram alternative based on Berlin developer Sebastian Vogelsang's earlier app, Skeets, a Bluesky client. Launched publicly at the end of February, Flashes grabbed 30,000 downloads in its first 24 hours for offering a classic Instagram experience. Users can upload up to four photos or videos of up to 3 minutes in length, up from 1 minute previously, thanks to an update Bluesky released. The app offers photo filters, curated feeds from artists, custom feeds, and a Portfolio Mode where photographers can showcase their work. Spark (originally called Reelo) is a video-first app that is built on top of the AT Protocol, not just Bluesky. That allows the app to differentiate itself with a broader feature set that will include support for longer videos, filters, effects, a music library, and, eventually, livestreaming. Built by Seattle-based co-founders Victoria ('Tori') White and Reed Harmeyer, Skylight is built on top of Bluesky, offering features such as likes, follows, comments, and profile pages. Users can follow the app's active development on its co-founder's TikTok page as the team adds more features, including video support. The app is in testing on iOS and Android. Pinksky is another one of many apps trying to build an alternative to Instagram using ATProto. Built by developer Ramon Souza, the app is available on both iOS and Android and will focus mainly on photo-sharing, like classic Instagram did. The app offers similar features to Instagram, including user profiles, a feed of photos and videos, and a Stories section where posts remain visible for 24 hours. Bluescreen, also built by Vogelsang, is an upcoming app that will focus on videos posted to the Bluesky social network. The generically named Videos for Bluesky is another app built on top of Bluesky from 'MszPro,' aka Hoshida Takiyoshi, an indie Japanese developer. Like others, Videos for Bluesky lets you browse videos posted to the Bluesky social network by vertically scrolling in a TikTok-like user interface with familiar Like, Repost, and Reply buttons. Streamplace is the first livestreaming video service built on top of the AT Protocol. The service, which was recently used to livestream the ATmosphere conference in Seattle, offers a familiar streaming experience with support for high-quality videos, livestreaming, clips, and uploads. All the video content is also cryptographically signed by creators and respects their consent preferences. It is built on the same public key infrastructure as decentralized social networks. Founded by Eli Mallon, Streamplace was initially backed by his previous employer, Livepeer (another decentralized video platform), which operated a crypto treasury where funds are invested into other projects. That allowed him to get Streamplace off the ground. Now he sees potential in building out a technology that could appeal to creators like Twitch streamers, who would rather connect directly with fans through their own app or website instead of having to split their revenue with Twitch owner Amazon. Graze is a startup that lets you easily build, customize, publish, and manage Bluesky feeds and, eventually, monetize them with ads, sponsored posts, and subscriptions. The service is working with the Bluesky firehose, aka the Jetstream, which includes all the public posts on the social network. Flipboard's newest app, Surf, lets you build your own custom feeds from across the open web, including not only Bluesky but also Mastodon, RSS, and more. That means you can mix in news articles, blog posts, podcasts, and YouTube feeds into the custom feeds you build in Surf, alongside social posts. You can then use Surf to browse your feeds and others from the community across a range of topics and interests. Surf is still in private beta testing, but a signup list is available. A web-based, TweetDeck-like client for Bluesky, SkyFeed lets you create a dashboard of your feeds and profiles. However, most of its users come to SkyFeed because it also offers an easy way for even nondevelopers to build custom feeds based on lists or regexes. Germ's big idea is not just to offer an alternative to your phone messages, like Signal, but to build a social platform where you could discover and connect with others for any reason: marketplace exchanges, dating, social networking, and more. However, it would be one where you were in control of the data you were sharing and could stop that sharing at any time. Currently an end-to-end encrypted messenger that you can download from the App Store, Germ lets you build and share multiple identities. Plus, you can start chatting with someone on Germ even if they don't have the app installed, thanks to its use of Apple's App Clips technology. This allows you to have a lightweight app experience on your iPhone before you download the full application from the App Store. Germ was founded by writer and Stanford lecturer Tessa Brown (CEO) and former Apple privacy engineer Mark Xue (CTO). The team is now working on a Bluesky integration that would allow users to chat securely with their Bluesky friends. A peer-to-peer messaging app built on the AT Protocol, Roomy is similar in some ways to Discord but taps into open standards. For instance, ATProto is used for social discovery, while Automerge is used for peer-to-peer discovery. The app is backed by funding from Skyseed and is currently in alpha testing. You can log into Roomy with your Bluesky account and direct message other users to engage in chats. The messages are encrypted, but this is an experimental project and not audited, so be aware. Plus, some non-encrypted metadata shows who you were talking to but not the contents of those messages. (In other words, don't swap out Signal for Roomy yet.) Founded by former Stability AI engineer John Sabath, Dazzle offers a website that makes sense of the firehose of data from Bluesky and organizes it into categories, highlighting the trends across various topics. While much of the early discussion on Bluesky today leans political, Dazzle's site can help you find other topics and conversations taking place. Dazzle lets you give it instructions to tune the site to your own interests, too. You could ask it to show you a topic but without any posts featuring political discussions, for example. That means you could use Dazzle to show you local news, but not national politics, or you could keep your experience focused only on those who are posting with a positive sentiment. The idea is that you'll be able to switch between these different modes, generated using AI technology, without actually having to build custom feeds. Instead, you can just type in what you want to see (or not see) into a chat-like interface, then have Dazzle reconfigure itself to offer you posts that match whatever "vibe" you had just requested. Link aggregation service Sill lets you keep up with what everyone's talking about on alternative social media sites like Bluesky and Mastodon in one place. The service is similar to the older startup Nuzzel, which was acquired by Twitter as part of its deal for Scroll in 2021, then integrated into Twitter's app. Popular with news junkies, Nuzzel helped users keep track of what everyone on Twitter was talking about, reading, and resharing that day. Sill is also among the early adopters using Bluesky's OAuth for the AT Protocol instead of app passwords, making it easier to log in. Once connected, you'll see the most shared links across your services and the resulting conversations. A decentralized and federated link aggregator built on ATProto, Frontpage offers a simple interface for organizing and upvoting interesting posts and links being shared across the social network. It also supports commenting and notifications. Also by Vogelsang, Skeets is an alternative to Bluesky's main app that's optimized for accessibility and works well on both iPhone and iPad. Another TweetDeck-style web app, lets you fill your screen with columns featuring your Home feed, Notifications, custom feeds, lists, and more. The app also supports multiple accounts and the scheduling of posts. An event and RSVP management system, Smoke Signal is the Bluesky alternative to something like Eventbrite or Facebook Events. Built on top of ATProto, Smoke Signal supports OAuth, allowing users to discover communities and create and RSVP to events while also keeping hold of their own personal data. A Markdown blogging service for the AT Protocol, White Wind lets you use your ATProto account to log in, then write in Markdown. The service includes tools for uploading images, previewing your post, and more, with everything stored in your account's PDS (personal data service). When you post on Bluesky, those replies are included on your blog automatically. Largely a growth and analytics toolset for Bluesky, BlueSkyHunter also offers a way to tap into trends on the social network. One section in the app called Viral Posts showcases the more popular posts. This could help content planners pick up on trends and memes or find templates that are popular with other users that they could adopt. Fedica offers an online dashboard that allows you to compose and schedule posts across social networks, including Bluesky, Threads, X, Mastodon, and Pixelfed, among others. It also supports more traditional social apps like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and YouTube. Included in its plans are a variety of features for social listening, tools for tracking hashtags, keywords, and post reach, as well as those for follower analysis. This article originally appeared on TechCrunch at
Yahoo
11-03-2025
- Yahoo
Bluesky users can now post longer videos and save the inbox from chaos
Bluesky is clearly having its feature update moment this year. Merely days after it got an Instagram-like experience with the Flashes app, the Bluesky mobile app has now received a couple of big multimedia and messaging upgrades. As part of the v1.99 update, the social media platform now allows users to upload videos that are up to three minutes in length. So far, the duration of video posts was capped at 60 seconds. For comparison, Instagram Reels can be up to three minutes in length, but it allowed a maximum 90-second video upload as recently as January this year. TikTok's mobile app allows users to record and post videos with up to 10 minutes run time. Bluesky is already testing a Trending video feed as part of a beta test, so it makes sense that the platform is increasing the video upload limit. Instagram chief, Adam Mosseri, recently mentioned that creators have asked for an expanded limit because 90-seconds may not always be enough to tell a story. Another notable feature addition is a dedicated 'Chat Requests' inbox in the messaging section. Moving ahead, when users get a message from an account that's not mutual or which they don't follow, it will land in the chat request section. Users can choose to reject or accept such message requests at their own convenience. The idea is not too dissimilar from X, which follows a similar approach to DMs from unknown accounts, a strategy that keeps spammers from throwing the message section into utter chaos. On a similar note, muting an account is now easier. On the main feed, when users tap on the three-dot menu button corresponding to each post, they will now see a 'Mute account,' feature, sitting right above the block and report controls. Bluesky also offers similar protections for spammy content appearing in the feed, and shows warnings for impersonator accounts. As far as the latest set of features go, the v1.99 update started rolling out on March 7, as per the Google Play logs and is now widely available to Bluesky users.
Yahoo
28-02-2025
- Yahoo
Flashes, an Instagram alternative based on Bluesky, is available for iPhones now
Anyone looking for an alternative to Instagram might have a suitable candidate in Flashes, a recently launched app built on Bluesky that seems to get all the important basics right. Flashes technically launched on the App Store on February 24, but a series of updates released in the days after launch have made the app much easier to recommend. If you remember an Instagram before Meta turned it into its Facebook replacement, you have the basic gist of what Flashes is. It's an app for sharing photos and videos, with some Bluesky-flavored wrinkles, like multiple custom feeds to choose from instead of Meta's algorithm-driven default option. When you first open Flashes you'll be prompted to login with a Bluesky account or create a new one to use exclusively with Flashes. If you use your existing account, the app essentially repackages image and video posts from whoever you're currently following into an Instagram-style feed. This setup also works in reverse: Any post you put on Flashes will also show up in your normal text-focused Bluesky feed. See for yourself — The Yodel is the go-to source for daily news, entertainment and feel-good stories. By signing up, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy. The app itself features multiple tabs, with a home tab for your feeds, a search tab where you can search for posts and view trending topics, a dedicated tab for creating new posts, a notifications tab that features all of your Bluesky notifications and a profile tab. Flashes includes some filters to apply to your photos, along with some custom feeds that you can use if you want, but otherwise customizations are minimal. It's really an image and video-focused version of Bluesky. That comes with some annoying drawbacks, though. If you get a lot of Bluesky notifications, you'll now get them twice, once in the Bluesky app and once in Flashes. If you delete your account from one app, it will also be deleted from the other. Building a more customizable, portable version of social media that doesn't lock you to one platform is a big part of Bluesky's goal with the AT Protocol and what apps like Mastodon and Threads are trying to do with ActivityPub. It's not clear if one standard is going to become the default, but Bluesky has been picking up momentum. The app hit 20 million users in November 2024, prompting a dramatic expansion to its moderation efforts, and then passed 30 million users in January 2025. Flashes design means all of those new Bluesky accounts are potential Flashes users, too.
