“Stories” Now on Every Major Social Media Platform: It’s appears 2019 will be the year of the “Story,” with LinkedIn and YouTube both now adding the content format to their primary platforms — joining Snap, Insta and Facebook as a way to share chronological, vertical, short-form content that disappears.
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Local News on Facebook: This week Facebooked launched “Today In,” a local news aggregator feature, in 400 small to medium-sized US cities. The feature includes previews that link out to news sites about top headlines, current discussions, school announcements and more. If you live in one of these cities, you can find this new section in the Facebook app by tapping the menu (☰) and then tapping on “Today In.”
Instagram Combating Fake Follows and Engagement: This week Instagram announced it will use machine learning to identify fake followers, likes and comments from users using bots and apps to falsely increase their accounts and posts. If you see an profile’s follower accounts drop en masse, it’s not because that profile offended people, but most likely because the followers were fake.
Bye Bye YouTube Annotations: You know those annoying translucent pop-up boxes that interrupt video viewing on YouTube? As of January, they will disappear for good across the platform. Thankfully brands and user can still use Cards and End Screens to direct viewers to additional information. Use of annotations had decreased by 70 percent, which is likely because they ever worked well on mobile (and because they were annoying!).
Other stories worth skimming this week…
- This week, for the first time since the song was released in 1994, “All I want for Christmas Is You” by Mariah Carey reached the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100, fueled in part by 210 million streams on Spotify.
- Vox details the growing number of people calling on others to cancel their Amazon Prime subscriptions.
https://twitter.com/Y0HUNA/status/1064364332518178817
- We are loving the new “Like and Subscribe” series from Funny or Die. It features Skyy Goldwynne (Dillon Francis), as a Hollywood manager who locks four of his influencer clients in a house with a camera crew. Put this on your watchlist for the weekend.
- Christopher Wyle, the whistleblower who flagged that Cambridge Analytica had harvested 87 million profiles using an app that Facebook had authorized, wrote a lengthy blog post about what life has been like since being banned not only from Facebook but also from all the other companies that Facebook owns.
“If Russia had dropped propaganda leaflets by airplane over FL or MI that would universally be condemned as a hostile act. We’d shoot down the plane. But this is exactly what is happening online”
- You can challenge your officemates to a holiday-themed Jenga game with R.L. Stine’s infamous Goosebumps villain thanks to this new Augmented Reality (AR) game, “Slappy’s Haunted Christmas” (download here: iOS, Android).
GREG SWAN 