Social Media Saturday: Facebook Culls the App Herd, Twitter Had a Bad Week on Wall Street, and Whisper CEO's Contentious Debate Over Gwyneth Paltrow
This week in social media, Twitter got pretty bruised by Wall Street, Facebook bought a fitness app and got rid of a couple of its less popular mobile offerings, and Whisper's CEO Michael Heyward duked it out with TechCrunch's Michael Arrington. Meanwhile, Tumblr added a huge swath of customization options to its mobile app and the Federal Trade Commission officially chided Snapchat. It's time for Social Media Saturday!
Facebook: Multi-App Strategy Means Purging the Useless, Adding Fitness
One of Facebook's recent general strategies is to provide users with a plethora of apps on iOS and Android that do different things, rather than have one big, complicated Facebook app that does everything. So it's introduced Paper for its news readers, bought WhatsApp for social messaging, but now the company is purging two of its "multiple" apps: Facebook Poke and Camera.
Never heard of those? That's not surprising, and it's why Facebook is killing the apps. Poke was launched in 2012, according to PC World, as a challenger to Snapchat -- before Mark Zuckerberg's company tried to buy the younger-skewed multimedia messaging app (unsuccessfully). It allowed users to send "pokes" and other messages, along with photos, to their friends which would "auto-delete" after a certain amount of time, just like Snapchat (supposedly, but more on that in a bit).
Camera was an app that was intended to mirror Instagram - allowing users to shoot, filter, and share photos. But Facebook now owns Instagram, so the Camera app -- which, like Poke, never really took off -- got the axe this week.
Meanwhile, Facebook added yet another app to its trove, and this one is a fitness app called Moves. We recently recommended Moves recently as a simple, in-the-background way to track your daily health habits, like how far and long you walk every day. That recommendation now comes with a caveat, after Facebook's acquisition: Moves has updated its privacy policy, according to Engadget, to allow the app to share information with Facebook. Privacy-conscious users might not like that fact, but Facebook has said the data it will get from Moves will only be used to help develop the app further and provide users support -- the company said Moves' data won't be used for further targeting ads to users.
Twitter's Very Bad, Horrible, No Good Wall Street Week
Twitter took a nosedive on the public market this week -- well, actually several nosedives throughout the week. This comes after a disappointing quarterly earnings report at the end of April that had already dropped the stock by about 10 percent. This week, it tumbled 18 percent, according to ABC News.
Investor confidence hinges on the critical issue of growing Twitter's userbase, which hasn't been happening as quickly as investors want.
It's not for a lack of trying though. Twitter has made several changes to its user interface to try to make the learning curve for new users, inherent in the somewhat quirky social media network based on 140-character statements, less difficult. This week, Twitter also urged users to take advantage of its new photo features and share more photos on the site - in an apparent attempt to "Instagram-ize" the network, according to TechCrunch, on top of already-established efforts to "Facebook-ize" it as well. But so far, according to Wall Street, not so good.
FTC to Snapchat: Tell Everyone The Truth About "Disappearing" Snaps
This week, Snapchat agreed to settle with the Federal Trade Commission's charges that the social network was deceiving customers about Snaps -- the photo/video messages with text overlays that are supposedly auto-deleted after a few seconds. The FTC said Snapchat misled its users about what actually is "deleted," because the company collects data from messages and Snapchat users can save messages without you knowing it.
As part of Snapchat's settlement, the company will have to have an outside privacy expert monitor Snapchat's privacy policy and user data-related actions for the next 20 years -- if Snapchat even exists for that long.
Tumblr: Turning Customization to 11
Tumbler announced on its blog this week that it was adding a lot of customization options to its app's next update for iOS and Android. A lot. According to Tumblr, you'll have 3.3 billion different combinations to try out "if you were foolish enough to count them."
This means header images, fonts, "an infinity of colors" to choose from, and "a bunch of other things," said Tumblr's blog. Check out the iOS and Android stores for the updated Tumblr app.
Whisper CEO Defends Gwyneth Paltrow Bashing At TechCrunch Scuffle
Whisper CEO Michael Hewyard appeared for an interview with TechCrunch's founder Michael Arrington this week at TechCrunch Disrupt. The interview, dubbed as a "Fireside Chat" turned into a sparring match pretty quickly, after Arrington asked if the mission for Whisper -- the app that allows users to trade and respond to gossip and confessional-style messages -- was in fact to "create the perfect bulling app."
That's because Whisper was the source of a leak about Gwyneth Paltrow's affair, which ultimately led to a split with her husband.
The fight was quite theatrical, with Heyward defending Whisper's editorial policy and Arrington pressing about why they allow gossip about public figures, while at the same time purporting to be a positive, almost self-help, social media network. Things reached their climax when Heyward, using a hypothetical situation to "explain" the company's policy, pretty much called Arrington an *sshole to his face. Check out our on-the-ground coverage for more details. Trust me, it's interesting.
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