😸 New friend request

Social media is a hard nut to crack as a founder. To go up against titans like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat and carve out a piece of the pie is no easy feat. How many new social apps have we seen wind down just as fast as they pop up?

That’s why a new social app, built by Gen-Z whisperer, investor, and former Product Hunt employee Tiffany Zhong, is raising eyebrows. Noplace is an app backed by Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian that aims to bring back the more whimsical days of social media and friend-finding. It opened to the masses last week and immediately shot to the top of the App Store charts, clinching the number one spot.

Noplace is like old-school MySpace, where users can create colorful and customizable profiles to share anything from mundane status updates to what they’re listening to and their relationship status. It’s designed to appeal to a younger generation and create more community amongst young people.

It doesn’t have more features than traditional social media—it has fewer, and that’s where I see the appeal. Noplace is entirely text-based, so there are no photos, videos, or files. It also has no vanity metrics such as likes or reposts. All you have is a number that shows how many responses a post gets.

Noplace also ditches the algorithms other social apps use to keep us hooked on the endless flow of content. Instead, it uses AI to moderate and curate content between two feeds: one made up of your friend's posts and the other, which is kind of like a global messaging board where you see original posts and ones in response to them.

Profiles follow the same theme of simplicity. You get a profile picture, a bio section, an add friend button, and your wall — the home for everything you post.

Writebook is a platform for creating and publishing web-based books by 37signals — the team that also built Basecamp and Hey, co-founded by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Writebook is a downloadable software you can self-host, giving authors the power of ownership. Read more.

Suno is an AI-powered music app that secured $125 million in funding for its text-to-song method of generating entire tracks. It launched its new iOS app. You might have also seen its name around because Suno is being sued by music labels for copyright infringement. Read more.

next play is a new community network from Ben Lang, who’s known for helping lead Notion’s community growth from its early days. The next play community helps support people in finding their next role through introductions to startups, gatherings, and newsletter content.

Voice Isolator is another launch from AI company ElevenLabs that removes unwanted background noise and produces clear dialogue for audio clips and videos. You can see if it is as impressive as the demo is here.

Google launched Gemma 2. The lightweight models (9B and 27B) are being pitched to developers who want to incorporate AI into their apps or smart devices. Gemma 2 massively improves its performance on math-based questions, creative writing, cognitive reasoning, and more. Read more.

Below the fold but still in our hearts.

• Todoist launched a new weekly calendar feature.
• The Matchball is a quick alternative to fantasy football for the Euros.
• brickd lets you get social with your LEGO collecting, building, and organizing.
• Shazaam added Events to find concerts by genre, artists, venue, or date.
• Hall can save Slack messages into a branded, SEO-optimized knowledge base.
• StudyRecon streamlines research by mapping the landscape and organizing relevant studies.

Maker's corner

• Summer lets you add an AI summary button for your blog readers.
• Git2Log turns Git commits into a beautiful changelog for free.
• tquic_client is a high-performance CLI to benchmark HTTP/3 servers.
• Discover more tools in our Product Hunt Dev weekly newsletter.

🍎 Apple will get an observer role on OpenAI’s board.

🧵 A year after launching, Threads has hit 175 million users.

💰 Telegram now lets users share paid content across channels.

🤖 Amazon is discontinuing Astro, its WALL-E-esque robot business.

📊 Anthropic is launching a new fund to create better AI benchmarks.

🤖 Figma has pulled an AI tool after it was criticized for “ripping off Apple.”

🔦 iOS 18 comes with a new flashlight feature that lets you narrow or widen it.

📔 Windows Notepad gets spell check and autocorrect, 40 years after launch.

🎧 Spotify is testing emergency alerts for things like natural disasters in Sweden.

🗣️ OpenAI shared a new demo showcasing GPT-4o voice mode teaching languages.

Are you in San Francisco tonight (July 8, that is)? Want to demo your product while meeting other amazing makers in the scene? Join us for our latest AI demo night, in collaboration with Solaris AI. Spaces are almost full, so be quick!