Toutiao, one of the flagship products of Bytedance, may be the largest app you’ve never heard of–it’s like every news feed you read, YouTube, and TechMeme in one.
What's most interesting about Toutiao isn't that people consume such varied content all in one place it's how Toutiao serves it up.
Going a step further than merely serving up content, Toutiao's algorithms also create content: During the 2016 Olympics, a Toutiao bot wrote original news coverage, publishing stories on major events more quickly than traditional media outlets.
Toutiao's underlying technology learns about readers through their usage - taps, swipes, time spent on each article, time of the day the user reads, pauses, comments, interactions with the content and location - but doesn't require any explicit input from the user and is not built on their social graph.
Toutiao could gather more content more quickly and at a lower cost, creating a major advantage in a business were customer value is directly tied to content quality, relevance and refresh rate.
I haven't heard about Toutiao up until today but it seems to be an immensely useful product. The technical innovations that are popping up outside of the United States, especially in regards to Blockchain is starting to become very noticeable.