Social Media Saturday: Facebook Un-Spams Your News Feed, Zuckerberg Gives Back, and Snapchat CEO Apologizes
This week in social media, Facebook readjusted its News Feed algorithms again, Mark Zuckerberg gave money to local schools that will disproportionately help nearby Latino families, Twitter might finally be done with its wild Wall Street ride, and Snapchat's CEO apologized for being a jerk in college. It's time for Social Media Saturday!
Facebook: Now With Less Auto-Posted Spam
Facebook has been going through a relatively big shakeup in the past few weeks, changing the company's motto, adjusting how it links to other products and services (and how much of your personal data they allow others to see), and boosting its developer services. Sure, these changes don't seem as big as buying WhatsApp for billions of dollars or planning the future of the Internet through drones and satellites, but they're real (and some, overdue) changes to the look and content of the social network.
Here's another real, overdue change to how you'll experience big blue: Facebook is adjusting the amount of automatically posted content showing up in your News Feed. The company announced this week that it's giving users more control over how apps post content back to Facebook. You know those apps: You sign up with your Facebook account for what seems like a free service, but then the app directs you to post on your wall, invites all your friends, and possibly likes and follows their app from your account on the social network. How annoying!
Well, it's even more annoying for the people who don't care about the app or game you just started playing, and Facebook is noticing that. "We've found that stories people choose to explicitly share from third party apps are typically more interesting and get more engagement in News Feed than stories shared from third party apps without explicit action," stated Facebook's Developer's Blog. "We've also heard that people often feel surprised or confused by stories that are shared without taking an explicit action. In the coming months, we will continue to prioritize explicitly shared stories from apps in News Feed over implicitly shared stories."
Translation: No more "Sally just got 45 out of 50 right on 'This Quiz You'd Never in a Million Years Waste Your Time On'! Try to beat her score!" spam in your News Feed.
Another Good Deed by Zuckerberg and Co.
As we previously reported, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan donated $120 million this week to underprivileged schools in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Zuckerberg's essay in the San Jose Mercury News expounded on his and his wife's commitment to education reform in the country, while bemoaning the state of schools near his neighborhood. "Last year in the Ravenswood school district less than 40 percent of students were proficient on state tests in English language arts and less than 50 percent in math," he wrote. "This means fewer students from low-income and minority backgrounds graduating from high school or attending and succeeding in college."
"The world's most innovative community shouldn't also be a home for struggling public schools," Zuckerberg said, announcing the donation pledge.
As Fox News Latino pointed out, Latinos make up nearly 40 percent of the city of Ravenswood, comprising the largest minority group in the area. Zuckerberg's money will help start new public and charter schools in the area and will help pay for new equipment in existing schools. The first $5 million of Zuckerberg's enormous pledge will go to the most needy schools in the Ravenswood school district -- which will disproportionately help Latino families in the area. Good guy, Mark Zuckerberg.
Twitter: Changing Its Font and Almost Out of the Woods?
Twitter changed its main font for web users on Friday, which will surely result in tweets from Twitter veterans about how they're losing their favorite social network to further "Facebookization." Here's the new font (it's a screen shot because embeds are still taking the old font):
As the Tweet says, the new font is Gotham -- specifically, Gotham Narrow SSm, according to Mashable. And from the looks of it, it'll be a lighter, airier font than Helvetica Nue, which goes along with the goal of Twitter's previous front-page face-lift: increase the amount of white space on the page and the readability of tweets.
Meanwhile, despite Twitter's last few awful weeks on Wall Street, the company might finally be out of the woods... might. Twitter's stock price was up at the end of the week and finally reached above the lowest price it had been at since the company's IPO last year.
And according to Quartz, analysts for Nomura upgraded their recommendation on Twitter to "buy" this week, arguing that the price is now equivalent of a "niche" service, which Twitter -- despite its growing pains for investors and learning curve for new users -- is certainly not. Nomura said that Twitter's relatively "fixed operating cost structure" should lead to better profit margins coming down the pike. Time will tell.
Snapchat CEO Apologizes: This Time for His Past
The 23-year-old CEO of ephemeral video/picture messaging service Snapchat, Evan Spiegel, apologized on Friday for a collection of emails that were leaked earlier this week. The emails, which were addressed to fraternity brothers while Spiegel was attending Stanford University, included references to all sorts of unseemly behavior, including drug use, coercing women into sex acts and was frequently written with sexist language and attitudes towards women at the school.
Spiegel apologized for the emails in a letter to CNN, calling his former self a "jerk," as we previously reported. "I'm obviously mortified and embarrassed that my idiotic emails during my fraternity days were made public," he wrote. "I have no excuse. I'm sorry I wrote them at the time, and I was a jerk to have written them. They in no way reflect who I am today or my views toward women."
Whether they reflect the Spiegel of today or not is up to interpretation -- or a future exposé by ValleyWag's Silicon Valley watchdog Sam Biddle, who proudly shoots for "a 20-to-1 ratio of ruining people's days versus making them."
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