Instagram Stories has 100 million DAUs after two months After only two months in the expiring content game, Instagram Stories has hit 100 million daily active users – already two thirds that of Snapchat. Instagram as a platform has a total of 500 million monthly active users, halfway there to catching up Facebook Messenger’s ONE BILLION MONTHLY ACTIVE USERS. Oculus demos new VR friends hangout opportunities Mark Zuckerberg has demoed a new Oculus feature which lets you hang out with friends (in avatar form) in virtual/augmented reality. Using Oculus touch controllers you can also express emotions, select real-world scenes in the form of 360 photos and ‘meet’ your friends there to play games like ‘chess, cards’ or you can ‘sword fight’. This is great news, because the last time I had a sword fight in front of Big Ben, I was arrested.
Operation WhatsnApp continues It’s a race against time for the Facebook app family as it tries to copy and sell Snapchat’s best features to audiences who haven’t really experienced Snapchat yet (Outer Hebrides??). This week, Whatsapp is enabling people to add text (in multiple colours and fonts), drawings and emoji to images and video you send to friends. They’ve also incorporated at Snapalike front-facing flash feature, leading me to christen it WhatsnApp. God I’m good.
Facebook launches Marketplace With 450 million people already buying and selling on Facebook, Facebook has made it official with Marketplace – an in-app tab dedicated to peer-to-peer shopping. Goods will be sorted in relevancy to you (and I do hope it’s a bit more more accurate that the banner ads I get or it will be a whoooole lot of pregnancy tests for moi!) and also you’ll be shown things that are nearby to you. No ‘pages’ or businesses are allowed on for now but watch this space…
Facebook releases standalone Events app in the US Did anyone actually go to any of those ‘world’s longest slip and slide’ events this summer? No? But at least we knew about them due to Facebook and all our friends thought we went. Facebook events make it so easy to look cool to others by clicking ‘interested in’ attending events we’d never dream of missing X-Factor for. Now Facebook has created an app totally dedicated to events for its US users, in the hope people will ‘attend’ more outdoor cinema events than EVER before.
Snapchat changes Stories function Ever find yourself checking on a mate’s Snapchat Story and then all of a sudden you’re elbow deep in a random’s Story about a gutter clean out? Yeah – I know how you feel. Snapchat has rectified this by stopping the auto-advance function on stories that scrolls you through all your ‘friends’ stories so you can choose who you look at and who you don’t. They’ve also moved Sponsored Discover Stories to below your friend’s updates so you don’t tap on them by accident.
YouTube offers new paid promotion text option for creators YouTube has created a new feature which helps creators declare when they have been paid to create content. The new optional video feature adds text to videos for the first few seconds. Creators can add this to existing videos without losing view count or other metrics. Spotify and Apple Music get unofficial mixes Spotify and Apple Music have just had their first unofficial single-track remixes go live thanks to a new partnership with music rights management service Dubset. Dubset enables labels and artists to get royalties when their music is sampled in remixes which has relaxed labels enough to allow mixes to go ahead on major platforms. The deal will come as a blow to Soundcloud, which, until now, was the go-to platform for unofficial, user-uploaded content that the major labels don’t release.
Sainsbury’s new #Gary range goes viral A ‘real life cheese fan’ has started a revolution after finding the new range of dairy free cheese in Sainsbury’s a bit too unpalatable. He angrily suggested on the Sainsbury’s Facebook page that the range, which is made from, in his words, ‘COCONUTS’, should not be called cheese at all, suggesting ‘something like Gary’ instead. Turns out no idea is a bad idea, as Sainsbury’s has announced it will be re-naming the range Gary in the poster’s honour.
And it’s not even April Fools’ Day! On the day of the tweet #Gary was trending and other brands even started using #Gary to describe their non-dairy products, with Italian restaurant Zizzi tweeting about their vegan offerings using #Gary. I’m starting a change.org petition to get all gluten-free products re-named Colin.
