The week in social media news hand-curated by your friends at Fandom Marketing. This week marks four years since Instagram first launched. Learn why Facebook hates fake likes and why Facebook was so aggressive about migrating users over to Messenger.
10 Things We Learned About Social Media Users’ Charitable Habits
September 19, 2014
As the#IceBucketChallenge campaign showed us, social media can be a powerful medium for charitable organizations. However, the precise nature of the relationship between social good and platforms like Facebook and Twitter can often be unclear. Do social media users really absorb the message? Do people use activism on a social platform instead of actually donating money to a charitable cause?
Full story on Mashable
Your Embedded Instagrams Will Now Appear Much Bigger and Clearer
October 3, 2014
Instagram rolled out a big improvement to the way embedded photos will look on the web on Thursday. Embedded Instagram photos will now be bigger and cleaner than before, with a narrower bezel around the frame and a Follow button above the image. This will make it easier for readers to follow the Instagram account of the embedded photo’s owner via a Follow button.
Full story on Mashable
Why Facebook Hates And Fights Fake Likes
October 6, 2014
Facebook is launching a campaign to rid its service of fake, or “low-quality” likes. There are spammy businesses out there that prey on Facebook page admins with offers to get them thousands of likes to their pages.
Full story on Forbes
Four Years of Brands on Instagram
October 6, 2014
Four years ago from October 6, 2010, Instagram was launched. Led by co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, a small team of employees had been hard at work on an easy way for people to capture and share the world’s moments. By the end of 2011, the Instagram community had grown to one million users.
Full story on Instagram for Business
This is Why Facebook Was so Aggressive About Migrating Users over to Messenger
October 6, 2014
In June, Facebook announced that users who wanted to send private messages from their phones would have to download a separate app–Messenger–in order to do so. So why was Facebook aggressively herding users over to Messenger? Now, we have clear hints of one possible answer: User-to-user mobile payments.
Full story on Fast Company
Social Curation Platform Storify Gets a Redesign with Support for Group Collaboration
October 7, 2014
Storify, a service that allows users to curate tweets, photos, and other social media posts to create a coherent story, is getting a new design. More than just giving the product a new look, the redesign supports an important new feature — the ability for multiple journalists or other Storify users to collaborate on stories together.
Full story on TechCrunch
Facebook Launches Hyper-Local Ads Targeted to People Within a Mile of a Business
October 7, 2014
Facebook’s mobile ubiquity and push for always-on location sharing came to fruition today with the launch of hyper-local advertising that could convince people to visit stores they’re nearby. Advertisers can set a radius as small as a mile and the ads will show up on people’s phones or web browsers.
Full story on TechCrunch
Interview with a DDoS troll: Meet ‘the Gods of the Internet’
October 7, 2014
DDoS attacks are a way to keep corrupt corporations honest, according to an anonymous member of DerpTrolling, who gives us an inside look at the self-proclaimed gods of the Internet. To talk to the anonymous member they plugged into a private chat session from opposite sides of the globe using an encrypted Chrome add-on.
Full story on CNET
Facebook’s Audience Network: Open for Business
October 7, 2014
In April, Facebook’s Audience Network was introduced, which helps publishers and developers to monetize their mobile apps by showing Facebook ads to their users. Over the past few months, Facebook has optimized their network to improve performance, and on Tuesday, they formally launched and extended the service to more developers and publishers across the globe.
Full story on Facebook Developers
Facebook’s Audience Network: Open for Business Ello and Goodbye? Another Social Utopia Gets its 15 Minutes
October 7, 2014
Ello is the en vogue social network for the person who doesn’t want their data compiled, crunched, and sold to the highest bidder. Released in beta in early August, the invitation-only site was on no one’s radar until it was thrust into the spotlight in September. The big sell? Ello is the anti-Facebook . It’s both free and ad-free — and always will be — and you can be whoever you want, real name or otherwise.
Full story on The Street
Twitter Sues the Government for Violating Its First Amendment Rights
October 7, 2014
Twitter just sued the federal government over restrictions the government places on how much the company can disclose about surveillance requests it receives. On Tuesday, Twitter asserted in its suit that preventing the company from telling users how often the government submits national security requests for user data is a violation of the First Amendment.
Full story on Wired
Report: Facebook Readying App for Anonymous Sharing
October 8, 2014
Facebook might soon offer the option for users to interact with one another completely anonymously. According to a report in the New York Times, the app will launch in the coming weeks and allow people to use pseudonyms so they can have discussions about topics “which they may not be comfortable connecting to their real names.
Full story on Mashable
Online Trolls are Narcissists, Sadists and Psychopaths, Says Study
October 9, 2014
Recently published research from Canada suggests trolls have something wrong with them. Well, a lot. But don’t we all? Researchers sought to discover whether trolls were, in layman’s terms, a touch nuts. Specifically, did they evoke aspects of narcissism, sadism, psychopathy and even that greatest of corporate traits, Machiavellianism.
Full story on CNET
Google Launches Hangouts Desktop App and Polls for Google+
October 9, 2014
Google Hangouts users can now chat and make calls from their desktops without opening their browser. The company rolled out a new desktop app for Chrome OS and Windows users Thursday and announced new social polling features for Google+. The desktop app allows chats and calls to run independently of a web browser, and chats and notifications will automatically be synced between the desktop and mobile app.
Full story on Mashable
Internet.org Summit Addresses the Content Barrier
October 9, 2014
On Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the first Internet.org Summit in New Delhi, India. The Summit brings together like-minded thought leaders who are focused on addressing the lack of relevant localized content online. This is critical to Internet.org’s efforts to connect the two thirds of the world not yet connected.
Full story on Facebook Newsroom
What We’re Watching
It’s amazing to see technology merge closer and closer to the physical life. Here’s one way students combined the old traveling message concept to digital communications. I wish one of these balloons would drop on my porch!
Colombini built as a student project at ECAL, with funds raised on a crowdsourcing site and the help of Robopoly, an electronics and robotics group from partner school EPFL. The process starts at a custom website, Attachment.cc. There, you can enter your name, your email address, a short message, and a favorite image or video clip. The machine prints the message and a unique URL for your content onto a slip of paper, the paper gets put in a tiny biopolymer container, and the container gets attached to a yoga ball-size balloon. At that point, as Colombini’s description puts it, “the balloon will travel haphazardly to a potential recipient.”
~ Melonie
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