This week in social media, Facebook's took its Blue Dinosaur privacy bot mainstream while giving up on Slingshot's lamest feature. Meanwhile, there were more worries over the "Facebookification" of Twitter feeds, after comments from Twitter's CFO, and both Tumblr and Reddit will take part in next week's Net Neutrality protest.

It's time for Social Media Saturday!

Facebook

The Blue Dinosaur Will Visit You

Facebook introduced a blue dinosaur-branded privacy checkup feature a few months ago to help users learn about and manage their privacy settings. Now the friendly cartoon animal is headed to all users' accounts, as Facebook began rolling out its privacy checkup guide to everyone.

If you haven't seen the blue dino yet, you can always manually start the privacy checkup guide by clicking the privacy shortcut menu in the upper right hand side of the Facebook desktop site.

The mainstreaming of the privacy feature comes as some European Facebook users are moving ahead with a lawsuit, claiming Facebook violates European Union laws on data collection and digital privacy.

Slingshot Drops Dopey "React" Requirement

When Facebook released its ephemeral messaging app Slingshot, one of the features the development team touted as an innovation (over what otherwise was a Snapchat clone) was that it required users to send a "reaction" sling before unlocking and being able to see the message they received.

While Facebook thought it was a great way to make everyone a creator and spur on a virtuous cycle of messages, in our app review, we found it tiresome and restricting. Who wants to send a reaction shot every time they get a message and want to see it? And how do you react to a message you haven't even seen yet?

Well, Facebook has finally given up on that, as its newest update to Slingshot allows users to decide whether the messages they send are locked or unlocked -- we're betting unlocked will become the default option.

Twitter

Angering Veteran Users (Again) with Hints of More "Facebookification"

If there's one thing longtime Twitter users seem to hate, it's Facebook. So the recent changes in appearance and function Twitter has made, precisely in order to expand its appeal beyond its core user base, have been met with resistance among the Twitterati.

Now a hint at a possibly major change to Twitter users' timelines, made this week by Twitter CFO Anthony Noto at a tech conference in New York, is absolutely driving Twitter fans up a wall. Among other things Noto said, according to The Wall Street Journal, the executive said Twitter's traditional reverse-chronologically organized timeline "isn't the most relevant experience for a user" and that the company needs "an algorithm that delivers the depth and breadth of the content we have on a specific topic and then eventually as it relates to people."

Twitter die-hards took this as a sign that Twitter might start filtering their timelines the way Facebook does, resulting in angry tweets and blog pieces about how unfiltered reverse chronological order is the very core of Twitter.

Some voices of calm have suggested that the changes might be slight and slow coming, and that everyone's overreacting. In the same breath, for example, Noto did say, "Individual users are not going to wake up one day and find their timeline completely ranked by an algorithm." But how far Twitter goes to mainstream its service still remains a (contentious) mystery right now.

Tumblr and Reddit Join "Battle for the Net" Protest

A few months ago, we speculated that a SOPA-style Internet protest could occur when content companies feel threatened enough by the Federal Communications Commissions Net Neutrality-unfriendly changes to the "Open Internet" rules it uses to regulate Internet service providers.

Now, organized by under the banner "Battle for the Net," social media sites Tumblr and Reddit are doing just that -- if in a slightly less forceful way. Battle for the Net will stage a protest to save Net Neutrality next week on Sept. 10, and sites like BitTorrent, BoingBoing, Cheezberger, Etsy, Kickstarter and others are joining in.

But unlike the SOPA protests, these sites won't actually slow down or blackout their content for users, but they will post a spinning "loading" logo with a message about the Net Neutrality fight and a link to Battle for the Net, which is sponsored in part by advocacy groups FreePress and Fight for the Future.

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