Yahoo seems to be in the mood for some summer purging. It has brought under the axe a total of twelve of its products and services, which will phase out by the end of September. The list includes AltaVista- web’s primeval text based search engine and the more recent Yahoo Axis.
One of the most popular features on Twitter – the hashtag, is now on Facebook. Although Facebook and Twitter are bitter rivals, it hasn’t stopped Facebook from capitalizing on the popularity of the hashtag. Facebook is not the only website to adopt the hashtag. A few months back, popular image sharing website – Pinterest, made the hashtag official on its website. Now Pinterest users can use hashtags to categorize and optimize their pins or images better on the website. Hashtags also allow people to find images much more efficiently on Pinterest.
The popular blogging platform – Tumblr, was recently acquired by search engine giant Yahoo! After days of speculations about the possible sale of Tumblr, Marissa Mayer – CEO of Yahoo confirmed the news via her Twitter account. Around the same time, founder and CEO of Tumblr – David Karp also confirmed the news of the acquisition. Yahoo paid a whopping $1.1 billion to acquire Yahoo and the entire amount was paid in cash.
The Google I/O is an eagerly awaited even every year and is a Mecca for techies and geeks. This year attendees were not disappointed as Google announced the launch of a host of new applications, features and changes to existing Google products and services. Perhaps the most important launch at the event was that of the new Google+. Google’s social networking website has been redesigned and is packed with new features. Google+ users were welcomed by the revamped Google+ on Wednesday.
In this digital age, we are being bombarded with information everyday. There is so much information being generated everyday that we are literally drowning in it. Take for example the fact that Reuters publishes more than 3 million news stories every year. Reuters is just one source and it is still capable of generating so much news. So will all these news stories matter in a few years? Will we even remember the sensational stories in say 10,000 years? In this video, Kirk Citron – famous advertising executive and current editor and curator at “The Long News”, talks about news in the current times and how it will matter thousands of years down the line.
Facebook appears to be adding new changes to the news feed and timeline frequently to be able to give users the best possible user experience. It is obvious that visual content is more interesting and eye-catching than plain textual content and the social networking giant is making a push towards improving the prominence of pictures in news feeds and timelines of users. Facebook is testing two link formats – both of which are geared towards increasing the prominence of the images associated with links.
Just a few days ago, Twitter launched its standalone music app – Twitter Music. Although the app is not yet functional, the micro-blogging platform has just inked deals with entertainment giant BBC America to publish exclusive video content from the media company on Twitter. These videos will be of popular series on BBC America and all the videos will be “first-in Tweet branded”. The news of this Twitter and BBC America partnership was announced by BBC America via a tweet on its official Twitter account.
After acquiring the music service We Are Hunted, Twitter is looking to launch its own standalone music app for its users. So far, users have been able to open the page music.twitter.com and have been able to see the Twitter logo, a #music hashtag, a sign in button and a message that says that the app will be released soon. On clicking the sign in button, users are taken to an authorization page but signing in to this app still hasn’t been enabled as users are met with a server error when they try to sign in.
Flipboard is an extremely popular app for tablets that allows users to view content by flipping through it like they would to read a magazine. Flipboard presents tablet-friendly content to users in an attractive manner and people love it so much that this application was able to attract close to 50 million users in a very short span of time.
Along with Instagram, Flickr is one of the most popular image sharing platforms with millions of active users. In an effort to stave off stiff competition from Instagram and Pinterest, Flickr has released a new update for its iOS app that adds hashtag support to the mobile version of Flickr. The hashtag feature will make it easier to categorize images and pick out popular trends. This new feature could improve the user experience of Flickr and could expand the user base of this photo sharing platform.
Twitter is now looking to expand its ad revenues with the launch of its highly anticipated Ads API. This API now lets advertisers create rich and visually appealing ads that can be uploaded easily on Twitter. Facebook is seen as the friendlier social media platform for advertisers as it offers various tools and features to marketers and advertisers. Looking at the success Facebook has tasted by being friendlier towards advertisers, Twitter aims to recreate similar successes with its latest Ads API. This advertising platform was launched on 20th February, 2013 and has received enthusiastic response from online marketing experts.
Now that Twitter has blocked Instagram images from being expanded and viewed on Twitter, Facebook has decided to continue the animosity between the two social networking giants. In its latest move, Facebook has decided to completely block Twitter’s Vine application from Facebook just a few days after the launch of Vine. Vine is a mobile app that allows people to take small looping videos from their smartphones and share them on the Internet. This means that users will not be able to share Vine videos on Facebook – and this could be a huge blow for the success of Vine.