Topic: Features
Snapchat Introduces More Flexible Stories Feature (May 23, 2017)
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Instagram Launches Selfie Filters (May 16, 2017)
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Snapchat Adds Several New Features the Day Before its First Earnings Call (May 9, 2017)
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Facebook Rolls Out Instant Games and Other Features from F8 on Messenger (May 2, 2017)
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Tumblr Launches Social Video App With No Connection to Tumblr (Apr 18, 2017)
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Snapchat Introduces 3D Augmented Reality Overlays For Rear-Facing Camera (Apr 18, 2017)
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Instagram Adds Folders for its Bookmarking Feature (Apr 17, 2017)
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Twitter Introduces Custom Hearts, a Sponsored Filter Equivalent (Apr 10, 2017)
Twitter today announced Custom Hearts, an equivalent of sorts to Snapchat’s Sponsored Filters product for advertisers. Advertisers can now use the Custom Hearts product to replace the standard heart icon that users use to show appreciation for a live video stream in Periscope or Twitter with a brand image of some kind. The example used here is the movie franchise The Fast and the Furious using “F8” as an alternative to promote its eighth film, which premiered over the weekend. It’s a lot subtler than Snapchat’s Sponsored Filters, and it doesn’t have the same social multiplier effect of users applying a sponsored filter to a picture or video and sharing it with their friends, but it’s good to see Twitter innovating to find new forms of advertising given its recent struggles with growing ad revenue. More importantly, it’s also doing more with analytics, something I’ll cover in a second post shortly.
via Twitter
No one is using Facebook stories, so it turned your friends into ghosts – The Verge (Apr 5, 2017)
If Facebook had to choose between a huge backlash against the way a feature was rolled out and general ambivalence towards it, I’d guess it would choose the latter. That seems to be happening now with the version of the Stories feature in the core Facebook app, despite the massive popularity of the equivalent feature in Instagram, and in contrast to the negative response to the versions Facebook launched in Messenger and WhatsApp. The good news here is that Facebook rolled the feature out much more carefully and subtly, though this new wrinkle of showing faded versions of the profile pictures of friends who haven’t used the feature is a sign that Facebook may be starting to turn up the dial a little on promotion, though it’s an odd way to go about that. Hopefully Facebook will be smart enough not to force the issue by over-promoting it in obnoxious ways as it did with live video in the core Facebook app or with My Day in Messenger. Again, far better to have a feature fall a little flat than turn users off entirely.
via The Verge
Facebook Shows Users More Content Which Doesn’t Come From Your Friends – TechCrunch (Apr 3, 2017)
Almost exactly two months ago, I wrote in my Techpinions column that Facebook’s next big opportunity was finally stepping beyond the idea of showing users only content shared by their friends, and using AI and machine learning to show them other content like content they’d previously engaged with. Doing this, I said, would dramatically expand the amount of interesting content that could be shown to users, thereby keeping them on the service for longer, and giving Facebook more time and places to show ads. And as I wrote almost exactly a year ago, this is just another consequence of Facebook becoming less of a social network and more of a content hub. Today, we’re seeing Facebook not only roll out a video tab (and a video app for TVs) with suggested videos, but also now testing a dedicated tab for recommended content of all kinds in its apps. This is yet another extension of Facebook’s increasing absorption of activity from across users’ lives into its various apps in an attempt to capture more of users’ time and advertisers’ dollars, and I suspect it’ll work pretty well if it’s managed right. Of course, it’s demonstrated several times lately that it’s somewhat lost its touch in that department, so it will need to proceed carefully in pushing forward in this area to avoid alienating users.
via TechCrunch
Snapchat Makes Stories Searchable – Mashable (Mar 31, 2017)
We’re seeing a shift among the social networks from making accessible only content shared by friends to opening up a much wider range of content from others, whether that content is exposed through recommendations, curation, or, as in this case, search. Given how much social networks have become essentially content hubs, the amount of time people spend on them today is much less about spending time with friends as spending time with content, and so the more content can be surfaced, the longer they’re likely to spend there. Snapchat is now adding search as a way for people to find Stories not shared by their own friends but which might relate to their interests, whether those are sports teams, venues, cities, or other interests (like “puppies”). That should help users both find more content but also potentially discover new accounts to follow on an ongoing basis, all of which should deepen and lengthen engagement. In some ways, this is analogous to the recent work Facebook has done with recommending videos in both its mobile and TV apps – both companies are looking beyond the social graph for ways to surface interesting content for their users. Snapchat, of course, already has its Discover tab for content created by brands and professional outlets.
via Mashable
Inside Twitter’s Obsessive Quest To Ditch The Egg – Fast Company (Mar 31, 2017)
This has some of the background on why Twitter today replaced its famous egg avatar for users who haven’t chosen their own photo with an outline of a person, but the most interesting part is why Twitter is doing this now. My first reaction on reading the piece was that this just means all the negative stuff trolls do on Twitter will now be associated with these head-and-shoulder outlines rather than eggs, this move was clearly designed to take effect after Twitter had taken several actions to curb abuse and harassment on the site, such that the new avatar could potentially start life without those negative associations. The logic is certainly sound, but it feels like this happened just a little too early in this transition. A few months from now, if Twitter’s various changes have indeed curbed abuse, that would be the perfect time to make this switch, but right now there’s still little evidence of that and people’s negative associations with anonymous accounts (regardless of the avatar) are still far too fresh. Much better to have waited six months and seen results from the abuse curbs before unleashing this new blobby avatar.
via Fast Company
Twitter Removes Usernames in Replies from 140-Character Limit – Mashable (Mar 30, 2017)
This has been a heck of a long time coming – Twitter first announced this change way back in May last year, but it’s taken until now to actually implement the change, supposedly because Twitter has been testing various ways of making it work, though we’ve seen essentially this version in the wild now for some time. Though this change is positive in principle, because it frees up the payload of the tweet from the signaling, allowing more of the 140 characters to be used for content, not everyone is a fan of the implementation. That’s because the indication a tweet is a reply has now been extracted from the tweet itself and put above it in the interface, which makes it harder to see that context. There was no perfect way to achieve this objective without at least some of that tradeoff, but it’s still ridiculous that it took Twitter this long to implement the change when it seems to have been working on this specific implementation for months. It’s just another sign that Twitter continues to move very slowly in evolving its core product, and that fixes for big remaining frustrations are likely to take equally long to emerge.
via Mashable
Facebook launches stories to complete its all-out assault on Snapchat – The Verge (Mar 28, 2017)
We’ve known this was coming for a while, but there are a couple of extra wrinkles here. First up, let’s get the obvious out of the way – yes, this is another example of Facebook copying Snapchat, although at this point it’s also copying itself, specifically with regard to the presentation of Stories within the Facebook app, which is very similar to what it already does on Instagram. The good news is that it’s avoided the heavy-handedness that characterized its launch of the Stories equivalent My Day in Messenger and to a lesser extent the equivalent Status feature in WhatsApp – this feature is more subtle and slots in at the top of the app a la Instagram, which should lead to less of a backlash from users. One of the weirdest new features here, though, is a new direct message feature, which is an odd Google-like doubling up on messaging given the existence of the Messenger app. There are some other unique features, but several of them feel different for difference’s sake rather than being valuable or more appropriate for the Facebook setting than Instagram, and I’d expect at least some of them to make it into Instagram Stories in time. To take a step back, though, this is an entirely logical next step given the success of Instagram Stories: the latter has over 150 million users out of a monthly active user base of 600 million, while Facebook has a total user base three times that size, meaning it could bring the feature to many more people. And of course, in the process it’s likely to further dent Snapchat’s growth, which continues to be one of the biggest question marks over its long-term trajectory.
via The Verge
Google details Talk transition, SMS removal for Hangouts, other G Suite changes – 9to5Google (Mar 24, 2017)
This has been a heck of a long time coming – Google’s various messaging apps have been a confusing mess for ages now, and it’s good to see some rationalization of the portfolio and a bit more clarity about which bits will survive and what they’ll be used for. SMS-style messaging now belongs in the Messages app, which doesn’t have an equivalent on the desktop, while the ages-old Google Talk will finally be retired in favor of Hangouts, which will carry over some but not all of its functionality, with the rest going away. Some users will no doubt be annoyed at some of the lost functionality, but on the whole this should be a good thing for users. Of course, there is still Google Voice, which combines elements of services also found in Hangouts and Messages, so this doesn’t clear things up completely.
via 9to5Google
Facebook Messenger rolls out mention alerts and message Reaction emoji – TechCrunch (Mar 23, 2017)
With all the fuss about Facebook cloning Snapchat features, it’s worth remembering that not everything Facebook adds to its products is a copy of Snapchat, and this is a good example of adding features that owe more to Facebook’s core product than anyone else’s app. Given the backlash against the My Day feature added recently, it’s somewhat brave of Facebook to add yet more features (and potentially clutter) to Messenger, but these features look like they’ll add value too. And perhaps help to distract from the negative response against My Day.
via TechCrunch
WhatsApp brings back text Status it replaced with Stories – TechCrunch (Mar 16, 2017)
My Techpinions column today argues that Facebook has recently been trying too hard to force new features on users, and needs to tone things down. That’s mostly been the case in the Facebook-branded apps, but this WhatsApp change a while back was another example of replacing something users liked with something Facebook wanted them to use. The good news here is that the backlash wasn’t nearly as bad as with last week’s My Day launch in Messenger, and the company is already rolling back the change while preserving the new feature as well. It’s interesting, though, that both My Day and this Status change in WhatsApp were essentially clones of the Snapchat Stories feature which had previously worked so well for Facebook in Instagram. This cloning has been a story for some time, but the way Facebook is now pushing it on users is starting to backfire, which is a particular shame because the Instagram version was handled so well and has performed well too.
via TechCrunch
Messenger just became the latest Facebook app to launch a Stories feature – Recode (Mar 9, 2017)
This feature has been in testing since September, but is now rolling out globally. As I’ve said previously, Facebook has done much better in cloning Snapchat successfully since it stopped trying to recreate the entire app and focused instead on features, with Instagram Stories being the standout example. It’s now rolling out Stories in various ways in its separate apps, with Messenger second to go global, and the core Facebook app likely coming next. And why not? Though I think it’s a little distasteful to see Facebook copying Snapchat so blatantly, it certainly appears to be working, and taking a feature used by a competitor with 160 million users and making it available to ten times that many seems entirely logical.
via Recode
Instagram Stories launches geostickers as its Snap attack continues – TechCrunch (Mar 7, 2017)
Just a quick one here to document yet another “borrowed” feature from Snapchat in Instagram: this time, geostickers. No sponsored stickers yet, but given how hard Facebook is currently pushing to find new ways and places to serve up ads in its various properties, those can’t be far behind. The geostickers are pretty limited for now, but no doubt they’ll also spread in time. This doesn’t feel like one of the most important missing pieces in Instagram’s feature set, but no doubt it’ll help Snapchat converts feel a little more at home once it rolls out more fully.
via TechCrunch
Pulse is Twitch’s new social feed and GIF-delivery system – VentureBeat (Mar 6, 2017)
In my last post about Twitch just over a week ago I described Amazon’s acquisition of the site as one of the most interesting it’s made, and talked about the two separate tracks it’s pursued with Twitch: deepening the gamer focus on the one hand, and using it as a jumping off point for other things on the other. This news is yet another example of the latter strategy, in which Twitch is being used as a platform for creating a Twitter- or Facebook-like feed of content from brands and creators. For now, that’s not going to have mainstream appeal beyond the core Twitch audience, but as Twitter also continues to evolve into something more like YouTube, that could actually become very interesting. In reality, of course, what’s missing for now is the social side – it sounds like this is mostly a one-way feed from creators to followers. But there’s no reason it couldn’t evolve into a more social or two-way following relationship between regular users as well, even if they’re not regularly posting gaming videos. Between Twitch and Echo, it’s starting to feel like Amazon has the beginnings of some really interesting and potentially powerful extensions to its ecosystem well beyond its current focus areas.
via VentureBeat