Maybe it’s because it’s the end of the month, but the social media world came to a sudden slow this week.
Facebook and Instagram both experienced outages, and general social media news was a bit quiet. Nevertheless, this issue of Spark Bites by Spark Growth puts all the latest need-to-know updates in one place for your reading pleasure.
YouTube
YouTube has added a “Breaking News” section to its homepage. This section collects videos that cover breaking news and displays them in one place for you to conveniently locate and watch. It’s not yet clear whether the Breaking News section will only appear when there is broadly significant news to report on, or whether it will be a constant instalment on YouTube.
Facebook is updating some features and updates to celebrate memories. Here are the highlights:
Due to the success of Facebook’s “On This Day” feature, the social network is now introducing a recap feature that works similarly. Facebook will compile a monthly or seasonal story of recent memories that you can choose to share to your friends.
Facebook will now congratulate you for having friends who like you!
Users will be presented with congratulatory messages when they make a “notable” amount of friends, or when they’ve garnered a notable amount of likes on their posts.
Facebook is also updating On This Day to prevent showing users posts that, as Facebook puts it, “may spark negative feelings that you would rather avoid.” We’re really hoping this means they won’t show you old pics of your ex.
Snapchat continues to make its mark, even on WhatsApp. The Facebook-owned chat app has updated status updates with new features in its iOS and Android apps. Now you can go crazy decorating your text-based updates with different backgrounds or with photos and videos, much like Snapchat. We hope this isn’t the start of WhatsApp trying to be, like, the tenth social media app copying Snapchat this summer.
And those are all the social media updates we’ve got for you today! Have a great week, everyone!
