Another
“blink-and-you’ll-miss-it” week in social media
These internet minutes are feeling even more
jam-packed with the flurry of announcements and updates that have come out in
the last couple of weeks. Clearly, those boys in Palo Alto (and particularly
Facebook) have put their development into hyper speed. Let’s recap on what they’ve
been up to.
Facebook takes on Snapchat in its next step
towards world domination by...
Introducing Instagram stories
It’ll sound very familiar if you’re a Snapchat user: 24
hours of photos and videos from your life. It’s in addition to the current functionality
of sharing images with your followers. They can swipe through your story at
their leisure. Like Snapchat, you’re able to choose from a selection of filters
or add in text and images. It’s billed as the place to share the highlights
from your memories.
We said it’ll sound very familiar.
Adding in photo filters on Facebook
Before you get too excited, so far this is only available in
Brazil having been launched to coincide with Rio 2016. The idea behind this is to encourage you to
take and post your photos on Facebook instead of simply sharing them on
Facebook having imported them from Snapchat or Instagram (which is what we call
do now). Given the co-launch with the Olympics, most of the current filters are
specific to sports, a team (e.g. Team GB) and Rio 2016.
We’re hoping that the filters will be tested during the
Olympics, tweaked and then released to all of us.
Allowing Instagram to be selective about what
comments (if any) you can post
You might have heard of Taylor Swift barring all comments
containing the snake emoji or Kylie Jenner turning off comments completely on
her feed, but Instagram has now allowed ‘selected users’ (aka famous people) to
trial this feature. Billed as a feature to minimising trolling for some of the
most followed accounts - and preventing trolling is always a positive - it does
also change the nature of social media. It’s always been real-time and
unfiltered. This change allows for feeds to become curated and managed to show
a particular view.
Facebook has got quite a challenge on its
hands if it wants Instagram to overtake the popularity of Snapchat with the
18-24 demographic.
Apple announces its own gender diverse emoji
update
You’ll remember that we talked about Facebook’s messenger emoji
update before, but now Apple has announced that its iOS 10 update will include
a wider range of emoji of women depicted doing sports like basketball and
surfing. It’ll also show women carrying out new professional activities. For
balance, we’ll also see men getting a haircut and a scalp massage which is
currently shown as a female-only activity.
