Labs

When we created Vine in the summer of 2012, there weren’t any video-sharing platforms that made it easy to create and share videos on mobile devices. We used Vine to design a new way of making videos that focused on artistic expression, and we pioneered the touch-and-hold-to-record interface. With 200 million users, the app was also the first platform post-YouTube that people used to cultivate their fame and following. After Vine was acquired by Twitter in its beta stage, we gave it proper branding and designed a UX for a larger scale. While Vine is no longer around, it brought autoplaying videos into existence and kickstarted the generation of mobile video.

In 2016 (the era of live video streaming), we found ourselves asking, “What’s next for interactive media?” Our answer was HQ Trivia, a mobile game show that blended interactive gameplay with live TV production. At its height, HQ had 35 million downloads and 2.4 million players on the app concurrently. The live interactive mobile format we invented impacted both design and technology on a global scale and has since been replicated many times over.

Literally Anything is an experimental AI tool that allows users to create any kind of app, game, widget, or digital service directly in their browser by entering text prompts. No coding experience is required. Users can prototype and quickly build apps they can instantly share without the need for copy-pasting code, deployment, or any other development practices.

Unhuman is an overarching brand for our artificial intelligence experiments, the first of which is Unhuman Autoblogger. Custom software that harnesses the power of AI to manage dynamic content hubs, Unhuman Autoblogger references third-party APIs — such as Google Trends and Google Search —to amplify the power of ChatGPT and create (and review) large content databases tailored to your specific needs.

In 2012, Lady Gaga was the most followed person on Twitter, and an investor and friend of the company, wondered what would happen if we made someone more famous than her. In search of an answer, we built Fame Game, a Twitter contest that made a random player “famous” for 24 hours. People could enter the contest by connecting their Twitter accounts, and a random number generator would pick a player the rest of the participants would automatically follow — and then unfollow the next day. Featured in BuzzFeed and Observer, Fame Game averaged 8-10K players a week before it was shut down by Twitter.

One day, we discovered an entire subculture on the internet that enjoyed creating art using an already expressive medium: emojis 😍. Opening a space for imaginations to run wild 🤪, Emoji Paint lets people use their fingertips 👉👈 to paint emoji artworks 🎨 in a grid. All artwork can be shared through text 📱💬 and other text-based media 📧🌐, and they’re stored in personal galleries 🖼️. Emoji Paint is still live on the App Store 📲👀.