Never fear, friends, Spark Bites blog is here to protect you from evil social media monotony and its sidekick, FOMO! We’ve flown all around the world wide web to discover Twitter’s alliance with the NBA, Instagram creating new features and YouTube zapping old ones. Stick with us if you want to save your posts from the cruel fate of being scrolled past. Spark Bites to the rescue!
Now rolling out on iOS, a new feature allowing users to publish to multiple accounts at the same time. For example, if a post might be appropriate for your Insta and your Finsta it might save you a bit of time. However, if you want to change the caption because your accounts have different voices or styles, you’re out of luck and you’ll have to post the same photo or video twice regardless. For that reason,we predict the functionality of this feature to be minor. Plus, given that someone might see the same post multiple times on their feed, it also seems to be counter to the originality that the platform has promoted for by refusing to create a native regram feature.
Twitter partnered with the NBA to livestream a very special version of NBA games. The deal, beginning with the All-Star game in February, will give fans a chance to see the second half of some games from an angle focusing on their favourite player. In the first half of the game, users can tweet their vote @NBAonTNT and in the second half, the player who receives the most votes will have the “iso-cam” focus solely on them for the entirety of the twitter livestream. This could give fans a more intimate look behind the curtain and perhaps behind some of those carefully placed hands meant to cover comments by some of the league’s biggest stars and trash-talkers.
YouTube
The most recent version of the iOS app will include a new feature of swiping to advance to the next video or to go back to the last one. For those among us who binge watch videos, but can’t wait for the autoload (Which is all of us, right?) we now have an upgraded skip button.
This week, YouTube announced it is removing another one of its antiquated features. The option of automatically posting your Youtube activity on Twitter will no longer be available. The reasoning was that these posts have been proven to be less engaging than a more customized post promoting new content. Sharing can still be done, of course, with the Share button and creators will be prompted to use this option directly after uploading new videos. Kudos to YouTube for reducing redundancy on the platform and making an effort to keep only the most effective features.
We’re in the clear for now… Tune in next week as we continue the search for a secret weapon in the infinite battle to defeat a boring feed! Same Spark Time. Same Spark Channels.