social network Tag

Facebook Rolls Out New Sports Hub to Make it Simple for Users to Talk About Sports

When it comes to social media, Twitter has always been the place that people go to if they want to watch their friends and the rest of the world react live to a sports game that is in progress. Twitter has made it easy for people to talk about sports and see tweets about the game just because of the way that it organizes tweets and displays them. No other social media outlet has found a way to challenge them. Until now. Facebook just launched Sports Stadium, a place where people will be able to keep track of game stats, current plays, friends’ reactions, and even expert commentary.

Facebook’s new Sports Stadium will be divided into four tabs so that people will be able to look at the specific information that they are most interested in. The first tab of the Hub shows the information about the game including the score, most recent play, and videos that relate to the game. The second tab shows what friends are posting about the game allowing users to engage in the conversation already in progress. The third tab shows expert commentary from different sports commentators and players. The final tab has statistics from the game.

All together the new Sports Stadium makes it so that Facebook users are able to engage in the game as they might not have previously been able to. The goal of this new Facebook feature is to allow friends to sit and watch a game together even when they are spread across the country. It allows people to connect over a sports game in a similar way that Twitter does. The feature is being launching for iPhone users this week ahead of the NFL playoff games. It will be available on computers as well before the Super Bowl.

The new feature is competitive with Twitter as it allows real time communication about sports. Users don’t have to search for a specific hashtag as they might need to in the Twitter platform since Facebook has the game information already grouped and ready for them to begin looking at it right away. The feature is certain to benefit Facebook as it will draw more advertisers and commentators to the website as more users become interested in the feature.

Twitter Planning to Extend Character Limit on Tweets

For a long while, something that remained unique to Twitter and no other social media site was the length of the posts a person could make. Unlike Facebook and other social media sites, Twitter has maintained at 140 character limit for every tweet on its site. While some different applications allowed users to extend the limit, the limit offered within Twitter was still kept at 140 characters overall.

Now there is talk that all of this might be changing. The Chief Executive of Twitter posted a message suggesting that Twitter will be altering its limit to a much larger number of characters. In the message, he states that at the beginning the intention was not to limit Twitter users to a specific number of characters and that this came about to make it possible to fit a Tweet within the length of a SMS message. Since so many changes have been made since the site’s launch, it seems practical for the character limit to be extended.

One of the main reasons that Twitter is considering this change is because users have been finding other ways to extend their character limits. Users can do this by using specific applications on their phones or by screenshotting a larger body of text to post as a picture. This suggests that users want to be able to post longer messages on Twitter. Twitter’s approach to these workarounds seems to be that it is better to join them than to fight them.

Many users are worried about the idea of longer character limits within Twitter. They feel that this will change the social media site and shift the focus from short messages and quick conversations between individuals. Others argue that there is no problem with changing the limit and in fact this would be beneficial in many ways. Screenshot text is not searchable or highlightable which can make it more challenging for it to be used within the Twitter medium. Changing the limit for text would allow more text on Twitter that could be searched and used in conversation. Additionally, Twitter would continue to show only the first 140 characters of a tweet to keep Twitter feeds from being filled with large pieces of text.

Changing the limit on characters is definitely beneficial to Twitter itself since this will allow users to actually post what they want to on their Twitter feed. Twitter won’t have to deal with people sharing links to full stories which cause people to leave their site to learn more. Extending the length of a Tweet beyond 140 characters is likely to allow this social media site to grow and change in new and unprecedented ways.

Facebook Changes “Year in Review” Feature to Make it a Bit More Positive

One of the great features of Facebook has always been the way that you can look back on the past year and reflect on the different things that have happened. Their “Year in Review” feature selects some of the different photos that a user has posted over the last year to compile a review of the entire year individual to each user. This feature allows users to easily put together a review of their year and display it for all of their friends to see.

In the past, Facebook received complaints about the pictures that were selected for the “Year in Review” since many of these pictures brought back unhappy memories for those who looked at them. People who were using the feature to put together a fun review of the year, felt that these pictures really ruined the experience for them. They didn’t want to remember some of the memories that Facebook brought up for them.

One father even wrote about the feature in a blog, speaking out about the “inadvertent algorithmic cruelty.” His main complaint was that there was no way to opt out of making a review and each time he went on his Facebook page, there would be a message that popped up asking him to make one. He had experienced a challenging year after losing his daughter and was frustrated that pictures of her kept popping up each time he went on Facebook as part of the message asking him to create a “Year in Review”.

In a response to the critique of the 2014 “Year in Review”, Facebook decided to change the way that the “Year in Review” for 2015 is put together. This year there are new filters that have been applied to the system to help it chose 10 photos that captured the year in a happier light. These filter out any pictures that your exes or people with memorialized accounts are tagged in to avoid bringing up bad memories. If you still don’t like the way that the “Year in Review” looks, there are easy features that allow you to edit out pictures that you don’t want and to select new photos.

Twitter Stops Cropping Pictures to Allow the Site to Focus More on Images

The newest change to Twitter is its end to the photo cropping that ensured that all images were limited to a certain size on its timeline. Though Twitter began as a text only social media site, the site has since added the ability to post photos and even videos. Up until recently these were kept from dominating a timeline by being cropped to size, but now Twitter is allowing pictures to be viewed in full without a user having to click on the image to see the whole picture.

This new feature is sure to be a relief to all of the people who have previously been frustrated with the way that photos appeared. It is far simpler for users to scroll down their timeline without having to click on tweets in order to see the pictures in their full versions. Eliminating the cropping allows users to display photos as they are meant to see while allowing followers to easily look at pictures on the page. The new feature also changes the way that multiple pictures are displayed together to allow users to better show a collage of photos to their followers.

There is likely to be some level of frustration with the new photos among those more interested in the text part of the site since these are now overshadowing tweets without media attached to them. The photos take up a great deal of space in the timeline and are much more likely to gain focus from those scrolling through the page. Many people who joined the original version of Twitter might not be too happy about further changes to the focus of the site.

Twitter claims that it decided to make the change to bring the website up to date with the experience of modern media. It accepts that images are an important part of how people interact on social media and wants to add value to the way that photos are displayed within the website. Changes like this one bring Twitter into a better space to compete with other social media organizations such as Facebook and Instagram.

Instagram Testing a Feature for Multiple Account Functionality

Instagram is fairly new to the social media world when compared to Facebook and Twitter, but its growing popularity with both businesses and individuals is causing some problems for those who need more than one account. Anyone possessing more than one Instagram account has to log out of one of the accounts just so that they can login to the other account. This can be a major complication for the posting process, making it so that many users have asked for some solution.

This doesn’t sound like such a big problem if you don’t have multiple accounts, but of course this is a complication for people who have Instagram accounts for work or for their business as well as personal accounts that they use with friends. You don’t want the people who follow your business on Instagram to see all of those selfies or pictures of your cat, you want them to get posts that actually relate to your business and make sense for this particular account and what it is made for. Unfortunately, is easy to forget to log out of your work or business account before switching over to using the personal one.

Instagram has finally addressed this problem making it easier for business owners, or anyone with multiple accounts to move between the accounts without logging out. The social media site recently began testing a new feature on their app for Android users. This feature allows Instagram users with multiple accounts to easily switch between accounts, avoiding the hassle of signing in and out on the app. The app allows users easy access to all of their accounts so that they can pick which one they are using with the click of a button.

For many people, the new feature is a long awaited one allowing them to easily go from a work account to their personal account and back without ever having to worry about making the posts in the wrong account. The feature will be getting a lot of love from small business owners, photographers, and social media managers since it will make their lives and multiple accounts so much easier to manage. It is also great for individuals who might want multiple personal Instagram accounts that they can use for different types of pictures that they might be interested in sharing. In a world where social media is prevalent both for personal and business related pursuits, this is one feature that can help a great number of people.

Twitter Goes Into Library Archives

We are always told we need to be careful what we post on the internet because it could one day come back to haunt us. Now matter how far back we’ve posted, our tweets could come back to haunt us. That’s because on Wednesday, The Library of Congress announced they will now archive all public tweets dating back from 2006.

“The Library’s primary mission is research and it receives copies of every book, pamphlet, map, print, and piece of music registered in the United States,” said Twitter CEO Biz Stone in a blog post. “Recently, the Library of Congress signaled to us that the public tweets we have all been creating over the years are important and worthy of preservation.”

According to the Library of Congress, “The Library has been collecting materials from the web since it began harvesting congressional and presidential campaign websites in 2000. Today we hold more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office, and websites of Members of Congress.”

The news broke on Twitter yesterday afternoon and the response from the Twitter community has been mixed.  Melissa Fazli, an avid Twitter user said she was excited about the announcement and tweeted, “We are a part of history.  Awesome!”

Twitter’s Population Is How Big?!

Twitter is all about change this week.  Yesterday the company announced they will begine to add advertisements known as “Promoted Tweets” to the site.  Today the company is answering the question that’s been on everyone’s mind for years.  “How many people are actually on Twitter?”

Twitter CEO Biz Stone announced at the companies first developer conference, Chirp, that the site has exactly 105,779,710 users.  Obviously that number has jumped since this morning, but that’s about a third of the US population and about 25% of Facebook’s population.  The number is quite an accomplishment and is on the right track to be the next to Facebook. (more…)

How Twitter Is Making Now Money

Twitter has launched it’s advertising platform, which many have been anticipating for months.  Obviously, Twitter has to make money some how and today is the day that ad’s are introduced to the site.  And like Biz Stone said back in November, “It’s going to be amazing.” The best part seems to be that the ad platform seems to be well liked in the first hour of it’s debut.

Unlike most ad’s which can take up plenty of room, ad’s on Twitter come in a small box underneath a tweet, saying “Promoted by…” which will come up in search results.  In all honesty, it doesn’t take up to much room and doesn’t make the site look awful, however it’s still noticeable, which is good news for businesses that are going to want to jump on board. (more…)

iePlexus Social Media News Brief: March 31, 2010

Is China to blame for the latest Google drama? Twitter’s homepage gets a facelift, what some of you are saying about the new look? And why a few third graders are causing some of the biggest controversy of the year so far in today’s viral video… (more…)

How Many People Just Joined Foursquare?!

I’ve been talking about Foursquare a few times this year, and how both companies and consumers are taking advantage of the locationed based social network and app.   Foursquare gain popularity over the past year, and had roughly about 500,000 users last week.  A half-million users isn’t bad, but it looks like the network is growing now at rapid speed.  With the South by SouthWest festival happening right now in Austin, Texas, Foursquare has gained “100,000 users” in the past 11 days. 

The company tweeted right before their new 100,000 user saying they were almost there.  The company also says that there has been a surge of friend requests on Foursquare, so users can see where there friends are actually at.  (more…)