Does social media ever keep still? In a word – no. Facebook have launched a whole new app this week, Twitter continue to make big changes and Philae the comet lander has tweeted from space!
The tweet may have been sent by the European Space Agency’s humans on Earth, but it was confirmation that their comet lander Philae had woken up and was back in contact. Nice to see a bit of inter-galactic tweeting!
Facebook users share hundreds of millions of photos every day — more than 350 million, by the social network’s last count. But for every selfie, holiday snap and Instagram pic that you share, the majority of our photos still stay on our phone.
Facebook has launched a new app for those photos, called Moments.
Image: Facebook
The app aims to make it easier for friends to privately share photos outside of Facebook. It syncs with the photos saved on your device (you can choose which ones it can access) and organises them into albums for you. Once synced, you can choose which photos to share with your family and friends.
Photos shared through Moments are private and not posted on Facebook, though the app does allow you to share directly to your camera roll, Facebook, Instagram or other apps if you want to. I really like the sound of Moments – particularly for those family photos etc that you only want to share with a small group of people.
Over on Twitter, the big news this week has been their decision to drop the 140 character limit for direct messages. It hasn’t come in to effect yet (it will be some time in July, they haven’t given an exact date) but it does mean private messaging will become lengthier and perhaps more useful.
“You may be wondering what this means for the public side of Twitter,” Sachin Agarwal, Twitter’s product manager for direct messages, wrote last week. “Nothing! Tweets will continue to be the 140 characters they are today.”
Would love to know what your thoughts are on this one. I know some people are worried about spam, and feel it stops being Twitter being, well, Twitter! Others are welcoming it. What do you think?
By Kate Tyler
Managing Director at Shake Social and self-professed social media geek.
Kate Tyler is the founder of Shake Social and our long time social media expert. A regular speaker at events, Kate offers consultancy and training on a range of digital marketing topics, in particular safeguarding and using social media in an educational setting.