Here is a quick roundup of some of the latest happenings in the social media world.
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Facebook announced that it had tweaked the News Feed algorithm again to surface more high-quality articles and show less meme photos. When users click links, related articles may also be highlighted under the posts. Additionally, old stories will be bumped in the feed when friends have added new comments.
Facebook also confirmed what a lot of marketers had noticed over the last few months:
Because the content in News Feed is always changing, and we’re seeing more people sharing more content, Pages will likely see changes in distribution. For many Pages, this includes a decline in organic reach. We expect this trend to continue as the competition for each story remains strong and we focus on quality.[…]
Page owners should continue using the most effective strategy to reach the right people: a combination of engaging Page posts and advertising to promote your message more broadly. Advertising lets Pages reach the fans they already have and find new customers as well. The fans you have matter.
(Source: Facebook for Business)
Tired of some of your friends’ silly updates? You can now unfollow them.
Facebook’s Developers Site has been redesigned.
Instagram may soon have a private-messaging feature.
It was another busy week for Google. Check out the list below:
- Trends: new topic predictions and group searches for more than 700,000 topics and seven countries.
- News: updated Android and iOS apps.
- Calendar: autocomplete predictions from Maps, relevant events and contacts when searching for events, and automatic updates for event guest lists when people join or leave a group.
- Gmail: ability to download Gmail data.
- Search: more options for in-depth articles in Google.com.
- Google+: two new Auto Awesome features.
Tailored Audiences is now available globally. The feature, an experiment started in July, allows brands to serve relevant ads to existing and potential members of their audience on Twitter.
While we want to make our ads more useful through tailored audiences, we also want to provide simple and meaningful privacy choices to our users. Twitter users can simply uncheck the box next to “Promoted content” in their privacy settings, and Twitter will not match their account to information shared by our ads partners for tailoring ads. And because Twitter supports Do Not Track (DNT), Twitter will not receive browser-related information (a browser cookie ID) from our ads partners for tailoring ads if users have DNT enabled in their browser.
(Source: Twitter Blog)
Reuters reports that Twitter has partnered with U2opia Mobile to make its service available to mobile phone users who do not have access to the Internet in emerging markets.
YAHOO
Yahoo launched Picture of the Day, a new Flickr Group that will be featured in its News section in France, Germany, Italy, the Middle East, South Africa, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
The company has also acquired live concert streaming platform Evntlive.
HTTPS encryption will be rolled out to all Yahoo Mail connections by January 8, 2014.
MORE SOCIAL MEDIA NEWS
This week, 2 million social media accounts were compromised. Most of these accounts belong to websites and services like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Reaserchers from web security firm Trustwave shared some numbers on stolen data:
- 1,580,000 website login credentials
- 320,000 email account credentials
- 41,000 FTP account credentials
- 3,000 Remote Desktop credentials
- 3,000 Secure Shell account credentials
ADP, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Yahoo have reset passwords for hacked accounts.
Creative Commons introduced a new suite of licenses for intergovernmental organizations.
The new Foursquare for iOS 7 is available.
The Medium team has revamped its blogging platform.
Pingdom has a brand new Android app.
Have you noticed that SlideShare has a new homepage? The company also reports that more than 15 million items have been uploaded since the creation of the site.
Apple purchased social media analytics platform Topsy for $200 million.
Trapit is not free anymore. The app, which now has 100 million users, will only be available to paying customers after January 15, 2014.
