Tuminds Newsflash – October

Big Changes At Twitter

It has been a whirlwind month for Twitter; where to be begin…

It started with the announcement of co-founder and former CEO, Jack Dorsey, returning as the company’s permanent CEO. Following this, a new Executive Chairman was appointed from Google, Omid Kordestani.

However, in addition to the changes made to the Twitter board, there have also been adjustments throughout the rest of the workforce, with 1 in 12 employees (around 8%) being laid off as the company claims to streamline its product roadmap. In a letter written by Dorsey to the team, he cited the reasons for the changes as enabling the company to “focus on the experiences which will have the greatest impact”.

In this statement Dorsey may be referring to the new ‘Moments’ feature which was added to the social media platform earlier in the month. Twitter themselves describe it as “a bold peek into the future of how people will see what’s going on in the world”.

The new feature uses human curators to highlight the most popular conversations and topics on the network and delivers it all under one tab both on the desktop and mobile version (look for the lightening bolt sign). This much needed addition to the platform will be of particular value to those who find the main Twitter stream a little overwhelming and daunting to scroll through.

With all the changes currently happening in the Silicon Valley area, we wonder what is next for one of the biggest players in social; will growth be a much desired product of the streamlined process, or will the difficult times continue in what is becoming a very saturated and competitive market?

LinkedIn Making Groups Private

LinkedIn, the largest professional network in the world, is tightening it’s grip on privacy and changing the way Groups work within the platform.

Starting October 14, discussions on LinkedIn Groups have been made private, with only official members of the group being able to see the content and contribute to the discussion. This change not only affects the platform itself, but it also means Google will not be able to trawl discussions and content posted on the Groups, which again increases the privacy of this social channel.

Group owners now have to choose between Unlisted and Standard Groups which each have different criteria and levels of privacy. Read about them here.

Facebook Wants To Be More Like YouTube

The social media giant has announced that it is testing a dedicated place on the platform where users can go to only watch video content. This includes videos saved by users themselves, videos shared by friends, pages they follow and other video publishers on Facebook. Videos will also pop up in users’ feed which are considered “relevant” and something that the user is going to “Like”.

With the platform increasingly becoming the place to watch the latest news clips and viral videos, as well as the most recent blockbuster movie trailers, similarities are being drawn with the king of the video, YouTube. Furthermore, Facebook does not look to be turning it’s attention away from videos anytime soon with the company’s Ad Product Lead, Ted Zagat, stating, “a year or two from now, we think Facebook will be mostly video.”

Facebook is currently testing new video-specific features, including the new video section and immersive VR-like 360-degree video as it plans to make moving pictures an even more prominent part of the Facebook experience.

Instagram Introduces Boomerang

Hallelujah. It finally looks like there is a solution for GIFs and sharing them on social, specifically on Instagram which has been a notoriously difficult platform to work with when sharing GIFs. The looping mini videos have been around for a while, but it has never been straight forward or easy to upload the files on social media platforms… until now.

Instagram have now launched a new app to join their family of Hyperlapse and Layout, which allows users to create and share mini videos put together by a burst of five images, which are stitched together and made into a 1-second GIF, that loops the images backwards and forwards, creating the “Boomerang” effect.

The app does not have a newsfeed, but automatically saves the video to the user’s phone and allows it to be shared on social media. The one thing to be prepared for when using this app is the countless hours you will lose creating an endless amount of 1-second GIFs! Enjoy this new social obsession… I know I will!