Social Media Sunday: Facebook's Week of Tweaks, Snapchat's Halloween Lenses
This week in social media, Facebook rolled out, experimented with, or otherwise promised a slew of changes to its platform, policies and mobile apps. Meanwhile, Twitter got hit on Wall Street again and Snapchat rolled out its first Halloween-themed sponsored "lenses."
It's time for Social Media Sunday!
Overhauling Notifications
The first of many technical tweaks introduced this week by Facebook is the expanded and more personalized notifications tab in the Facebook app.
In its announcement, the social media giant said its notifications have been redesigned so you can see more timely information and customize your notifications to include additional reminders, like friends' birthdays, sports scores, TV reminders based on Pages users have liked and upcoming events.
If you enable location tracking, there are additional new notifications options including local and popular events, weather updates, movies nearby, and places to eat with links to reviews and the restaurants' Facebook Pages.
The notifications are now displayed in Google Now-style cards, which is no surprise since the major update is basically Facebook taking on Google Now and other context-based information apps, based on the company's own vast stores of data.
Coming Soon: Crushing Candy Crush Invites
Another change coming to notifications actually came as a promise by CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a crowd member at his special town hall meeting in India.
According to Complex, during the Q&A at the Indian Insitute of Technology in New Delhi, an audience member asked, "I seriously don't want to get anymore invitations on Candy Crush. How can I stop getting it?"
The question was met with a round of thunderous applause before Zuckerberg could answer, saying, "I sent a message to the person who runs the team in charge of our developer platform... There are some tools that are kind of outdated that allow people to send invitations to people who've never used a game."
Zuckerberg continued, "We hadn't prioritized shutting that down... But if this is the top thing people care about, we'll prioritize that and do it." That's a relief for anyone not interested in Facebook games.
Tweaking the Share Screen
Another change coming to Facebook is the Share screen on the iOS app. According to Mashable, Facebook decided the way third-party apps connect with Facebook on iPhones and iPads was too clunky, and needed to be streamlined.
"We knew we had a lot of room for improvements to make this a better experience for people," said Facebook product manager Alyssa Levitz to the social media news site.
To fix it, Facebook tweaked the share extension used by other apps, making it easier to share and tag friends, chose public or private sharing options, and see a preview of your post before you actually put it up on Facebook.
Basically, the sharing screen you get to from other apps will soon look a lot like Facebook's own post preview.
Refining Real Name Policy, Again
Finally the week full of tweaks ended on Friday with Facebook announcing new test alterations to one of the most controversial aspects of the platform, the "real name" policy.
According to The Verge, the new experimental changes come after the company received an open letter protesting the policy that requires users strictly adhere to using their "real" or legal name. That letter was co-signed by organizations including the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, and dozens and dozens of women's and LGBT rights advocacy groups around the world.
"We want to reduce the number of people who are asked to verify their name on Facebook, when they are already using the name people know them by," Schultz wrote in a release to BuzzFeed. "We want to make it easier for people to confirm their name if necessary."
If the change becomes permanent, it would give Facebook users the chance to write to Facebook's Community Operations office to explain their name choice, giving users more opportunities to argue for their choice directly to staff. The policy change would also add a requirement that Facebook users who flag people for not using their "real name" explain why they're reporting that person.
Another Rocky Week on Wall Street
Twitter's new CEO Jack Dorsey hasn't been at the position for very long, but he's already gotten a taste of what it's like to have investors flee your company once every quarter.
According to the New York Times, shares in Twitter plunged as far as 13 percent after-hours on Tuesday, following the company's release of its forecast for fourth-quarter revenue and profits. Although the projections accompanied a third-quarter report that exceeded expectations, experts are still bearish on Twitter.
Executive Hire-Back
Dorsey is still making big moves within Twitter's executive makeup as this week he hired Jessica Verrilli back to head the company's corporate development and strategy. According to Quartz, Verrilli worked at Twitter for six years before leaving in May of 2015 to work at Google Ventures.
She had been a big part of Twitter's early successes, like the acquisition of Vine, and even had a hand in some of the only good moves Twitter had made recently, like acquiring live video-streaming company Periscope. Dorsey's decision to pull Verrilli back to Twitter hints that the company may be looking to make more acquisitions to bolster its product lineup.
Snapchat
Lenses' Speed Modifiers and First Sponsored Rollout
Weeks ago, Snapchat added a new feature called "Lenses," which allowed users to add fun graphics to their snaps, as well as adding a new marketing tool to sell advertisers to the company's fold.
Now, Snapchat is expanding the feature set with "Speed Modifiers," which let users add video effects like slow-motion, rewind, and fast-forward to their Lenses-modified videos.
At the same time, Snapchat's first sponsored Lenses, paid for by FOX, rolled out to users. It adds Halloween-themed Peanuts characters and graphics to videos, which is in promotion for the studio's upcoming Charlie Brown film "The Peanuts Movie."
As Latin Post previously reported, those sponsored lenses come a big price, especially during holidays like Halloween: holiday-time sponsored lenses purportedly costs upwards of $750,000 for one day.