Welcome to this week’s social media round up my dear friends, colleagues, social professionals, acquaintances and mum.
Twitter’s tantalising tech tale
Social media Goliath*, Twitter is working on a bookmark feature for users. Gone are the days of having to superficially Like a tweet just so you can come back to it and rant at the Twitter user when the three mimosas kick in.
*From March 21 2006-March 22, 2006
Speak GIF-y to me
The narcissist in all of us who is desperate to grow their social standing within their High School Reunion WhatsApp group or through Facebook can rejoice. Captions, a new app, now turns your audio into mixed media GIFs. No longer must you endure Kevin Hart or Homer Simpson hogging all the GIF glory. The app creates up to 60-second videos using the user’s personal visual content and audio along with a library of GIFs to create these pockets of social magic.
Just think of it this way – a podcast and a GIF had a baby, and that baby is Captioned.
The Happening 2: Twitter
Twitter is, like, totally happening. With the release of new feature, “Happening Now,” it hopes to attract newcomers. Wait a second – isn’t that what ‘Moments’ was for? Apparently, Happening Now is completely different because it takes users to a dedicated timeline of tweets related to the event at hand. Designed to let you experience an event live from the perspective of the audience, it is great for sports and entertainment, and it’s not hashtag dependant…
Facebook likes food apps and it cannot lie
Facebook you get us, you really get us. It has announced that it is teaming up with a host of delivery services that will let you order food for delivery or pick up straight from the app. The service is available with iOS and Android – all you need to do is click on the ‘Order Food’ tab in the explore menu and dinner is served. If it is a success in the US, Australia better loosen its belt buckles!
Would you rather….
A lot can be learnt from an alcohol-free, post-puberty game of Would You Rather, such as not discounting the power of millennials craving real life, living and breathing and probably balayaged friends. A recent study from 9GAG shows that, given a choice between 10,000 social ‘friends’ and 10 real-life ones, 95 per cent chose real life friends. Now if my math is correct, and I am almost 34 per cent certain it is, the other five per cent were the total sum of the Kardashian/Jenner clan.
Facebook loves you
Another day, another Facebook acquisition of a growing tech platform. This time it’s the polling startup tbh – an anonymous teen compliment app – yep you heard that right: COMPLIMENT! TEENS! TECHNOLOGY! It cost Facebook less than $100 million to acquire. What it does, only in the US, is it lets people, mainly teens, answer POSITIVE multiple choice questions about their friends. Some of you more cynical and jaded folk may have snorted in disbelief just then, but this app has had 1 billion poll answers since it launched in August.
Snapchat finally adds context
I mean, how many times have you seen a Snap and fallen to the ground screaming context? No longer will you need to fall to your knees in frustration. Snapchat has launched Context Card, and the new feature lets you find out more information about any Snap shared, whether that’s restaurant reviews, reservations, getting an Uber or contact information. The cards will only include those Snaps that have been tagged with a venue-specific Geofilter or added to the public ‘Our Story.’
That’s the social/tech/Rashell thinks she’s funny update for the week. Feel free to tweet the author with cute puppy photos at any given time, day or night @rashellha
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