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.

What do you reckon to the Snapchat vs Instagram rivalry? Who are you betting on coming out on top? Get in touch or tweet me @anthonyjohns0n with your thoughts.