This week in social media, Foursquare split its app in two; Twitter tested a mute button for annoying followers; Snapchat added video calling; and Facebook announced a new direction for its social media business. It's time for Social Media Saturday!

Foursquare

Foursquare announced late in the week that it would be splitting the location-based social media app into two separate apps, introducing Swarm, a standalone app for keeping up with friends. "We spend a lot of time talking to people about Foursquare, and we constantly hear they use Foursquare for two things: to keep up and meet with their friends, and to discover great places," Foursquare said in a blog post announcing the change.

"But, as it turns out, each time you open the app, you almost always do just one of those things," the post continued. "That's why today, we're announcing that we're unbundling these two experiences into two separate apps."

The term "unbundling" comes straight from Facebook's recently publicized multi-app strategy, which aims to separate the various functions of its social media network into different apps, providing a more singular, manageable experience for each function that customers might want to perform. It also gives the social media network more opportunities to hone each of those functions (Facebook Paper specializing in mobile news, for example), not to mention providing more opportunities for ad placement.

Specifically for Foursquare, as mentioned by The Verge, the Swarm app will take over the social "check-in" functions of Foursquare, while the legacy app will be honed to take on other location review-and-discovery apps, like (specifically) Yelp. For users, checking Foursquare search for local points of interest won't involve telling your friends where you are. And while you can check in with Swarm, the app is built to passively monitor your location and provide automatic updates (which sounds a little more intrusive), but since it's packaged into a separate app, users will have the option to opt in, based on whether they download and use Swarm or not.

Snapchat: "Putting the Chat into Snapchat"

As the title of its blog post says, Snapchat wants to enable a more direct way for users to connect with each other -- namely, actually chatting. "We felt that Snapchat was missing an important part of conversation: presence. There's nothing like knowing you have the full attention of your friend while you're chatting," Snapchat said in its announcement of the new "Chat" function for its app, which adds video calling.


What Snapchat didn't mention was that its new Chat function, coming soon in an update for iOS and Android, is probably aimed at competing with Facebook-owned social messaging service WhatsApp, which announced earlier this year that it would be adding a voice calling feature for its half-a-billion users. The new Snapchat update will also allow users to save important information from text messages, while all other information will still disappear.

Twitter: A More Polite Mute?

Twitter is constantly experimenting with its social media network, especially after becoming a publically traded company and coming under the scrutiny of investors. Now it appears Twitter is testing a new "Mute" function that may be more polite than the third-party app mute buttons available.

Twitter's Mute would allow you to continue to "follow" someone, according to The Verge, but would make it so that tweets and retweets from that person wouldn't appear in your timeline. However, direct messages from that person will still appear- - so that ostensibly important communications from the person you follow won't be shut out.

This feature would be a welcome addition to Twitter as it's not an uncommon situation where you "have to" continue to follow someone because of social circumstances but couldn't care less about what that person regularly spews onto your timeline -- be it spoilers for your favorite TV show, live-tweeting something you don't care about, or just the most mundane tweets you've ever seen. Now if Twitter could only look into a "VIP" or "super-follow" option that would highlight a specific account's tweets for those of us that have too many accounts in their timeline and don't want to miss anything from a specific person they follow.

Facebook: A New Direction

As we previously reported this week, Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a new direction for the world's largest social media network at the F8 developers conference. Along with leaving its young startup mantra "Move Fast and Break Things" behind, Facebook is opening up its network for faster, better interconnectivity with third-party apps, services and websites, while simultaneously making it less uncomfortable for privacy-conscious users to connect their Facebook account to those apps.

That's because Zuckerberg announced "Anonymous Logins," which allows users to use "Facebook Connect" with third-party services without disclosing their information to those companies. This is incredibly smart because, while users will feel more in control with their privacy (and Facebook might pick up new users because of this), Facebook itself will still track its users' activities across the web.

Basically, "Anonymous Logins" creates a user-powered opt-out to take data away from competing ad networks, while at the same time, Facebook unveiled its "Audience Network" for targeting users on Facebook's ever-expanding slew of apps. With this move, Facebook looks better from a privacy standpoint and also consolidates the data-broker status that supports its bottom line.

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