Facebook reportedly tried to buy South Korean Snapchat clone Snow over the summer after learning about its popularity in Asia.
The visual messaging app, which both looks and functions like its Western counterpart, has been accumulating tens of millions of downloads across Japan, South Korea, and China throughout the year. It also recently received a financial boost thanks to Japanese messaging giant Line’s $45 million investment in the platform.
Both Snow and Line are owned by South Korean internet company Naver. After hearing of the app’s success, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly contacted Snow’s parent company with an offer, according to sources close to the matter who spoke to TechCrunch. We reached out to Facebook but did not immediately receive a response.
In the wake of Line’s investment, and with over 80 million downloads and counting, Snow is thought to be valued at $180 million. So, why exactly is Facebook reportedly willing to fork out such a large sum for an app that is relatively unknown outside of the West?
While it bears an uncanny resemblance to Snapchat, Snow does boast a few nifty features of its own, including an exhaustive number of graphics and selfie filters (a number of Asian themes among them), and its very own GIF mode.
Primarily, Snow offers Zuckerberg and co. an entry point into Asia, a region where Facebook is still lagging behind rival platforms. The Snapchat clone shot to the top of the app store chart in China (where Facebook is banned) this summer, and has since maintained its popularity. Not to mention the fact that Asian messaging platforms WeChat and Line are both more popular than Facebook with local users.
Facebook has spent the past year experimenting with Snapchat-style features both within its own app, and with the introduction of Stories to Instagram. The latter has been a success, generating 100 million daily views. That’s exactly the type of engagement Facebook craves for its own social network. A similar social sharing feature has been spotted within the company’s Messenger app in Poland and Australia, and within its flagship app in Ireland.
Discord is trying to push more visibility on the internet for some of its biggest communities, and there's a good chance your messages could end up in a Google Search. The platform is preparing to make conversations from certain public servers searchable on the web, so there's a privacy setting you might want to check before the rollout begins.
According to Discord's official announcement, the changes will roll out in two stages. Starting November 16, qualifying servers will have public web pages featuring automated summaries of conversations. By mid-December, individual messages from eligible public channels could also appear word-for-word in Google and other search engines.
You just opened X and started typing your thoughts. Imagine the jump scare when a hand suddenly pops up on your screen, pointing at the promote button. It doesn’t say a word and simply points. For a growing number of X users, this isn’t a made-up scenario but something they have been seeing since yesterday, and very few of them are amused.
Most of us have learned to tune out the usual in-app upsells, whether it’s a glowing upgrade banner or a pop-up about a premium plan. A floating hand hovering over your draft is much harder to ignore, and that’s probably the whole point.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?