This week was big in social media, especially for Facebook, which announced new features in some of its apps, an entirely new standalone app, and expanded the amount of information it can collect from you. Twitter, meanwhile, finally enabled tweeting GIFs, LinkedIn faces a lawsuit for violating privacy, and Snapchat got more social with a new sharing feature. It's time for Social Media Saturday.

Facebook:

Taking on Snapchat with Slingshot

Facebook released a new app for Android and iOS this week called Slingshot in another attempt to take on Snapchat's ephemeral captioned video and picture-sharing network. Slingshot lets you take photos and video, add filters and drawings and send them to friends with a timer that makes the message disappear soon after it's seen.

Sound familiar?

Yes, Slingshot is a Snapchat clone, but Facebook added a new feature that will either increase engagement or doom the new social sharing app to instant failure: You can only see a "Sling" sent to you from your friends if you commit to sending something back of your own. The feature forces user engagement since you won't be seeing any messages unless you're also sending. Achilles' heel or secret strength? To be determined.

Improving Other Apps

Facebook also updated a couple of its apps with new features this week. The plain-old Messenger app now allows you to tap and hold to capture a video message, which you can now send to friends. It seems Facebook is doubling down on its Messenger app at the same time it introduces something similar, so maybe even Mark Zuckerberg isn't sure about this forced-reply Slingshot thing.

Facebook also announced this week that it was overhauling its Android app for better use in developing countries. The improved app will have greater data efficiency, a smaller memory footprint and better performance on low-spec phones. The changes come after Facebook sent a team to Africa to see how the Android app performed on emerging networks.

"We purchased several different Android handsets to test the latest version of the Facebook app -- and the testing process proved to be difficult," Facebook engineering manager Alex Sourov said. "The combination of an intermittent, low-bandwidth network connection and a lack of memory space on the devices resulted in slow load times and constant crashes. We even burned through our monthly data plans in 40 minutes."

Facebook is also taking steps to help improve the efficiency of its own network to perform better in emerging regions.

Collecting More Data

At the same time that it's endeavoring to connect more people more efficiently, Facebook is expanding the amount of data it soaks up from everyone. Previously Facebook relied heavily on items shared, Pages and statuses you liked and other things from within its own network.

In a blog post last week, Facebook said it was soon going collect your browsing history in third-party apps as well, using cookies and data collected from Facebook "Likes" on other sites, in order to improve its targeted ads. Awesome, right?

You can still opt out of the newly expanded Facebook advertising-data panopticon by going to advertising settings on the app and clicking "opt out" of interest based ads, or "limit ad tracking," depending on the mobile OS you use.

Twitter GIFs! (Kind Of)

Twitter has been flirting with adding GIFs to its social network for a while. Previously, before Twitter announced it was supporting sharing the animated photo in tweets, you could technically send a GIF, but it had to come from a pre-approved list on an affiliated website.

Now, users will be able to send and see attached GIFs in their timeline without clicking a link to a separate site. The only limitation is that files have to be smaller than 3MB.


But technically, these are not GIFs at all, as TechCrunch aptly pointed out. They're actually MP4s -- video files without sound -- embedded using HTML5. When you upload a GIF, it's converted into an MP4 file. Should you care about this technical difference? Probably not. As long as the images move, we're happy.

LinkedIn Trouble: Using Customers -- To Spam Customers

This week a federal judge said LinkedIn had to face a lawsuit from customers who said it violated their privacy by accessing and using their external email accounts and contact lists for advertising its network. LinkedIn users might know those annoying "endorsement" emails that appear in your inbox perennially, trying to encourage you to sign into your account and interact with the professional social network.

The privacy lawsuit is based on a bit of a technicality, but an overreach is an overreach. LinkedIn customers said that, while they had agreed to let LinkedIn use their email to send the first "endorsement" message, they had not agreed to let the company use their email address to send follow-up reminders when the first email is left unread. In a decision released Thursday, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh of San Jose, California, said LinkedIn "could injure users' reputation" by sending the spam emails and allowed the lawsuit to go forward towards seeking class action status.

Snapchat Opens Up Collaborative Sharing

Snapchat didn't sit idly by and let Facebook roll out a second clone of its app without grabbing some attention for itself this week. Snapchat announced on Tuesday that it would be rolling out a new feature designed for Snapchatters who don't know each other to share snaps about events they all happen to be at. Called "Our Story," the sharing mode is similar to the narrative "My Story" thread, except all Snapchatters share it at once. And instead of only lasting for 10 seconds maximum, "Our Story" Snaps last for 24 hours.

Snapchat debuted the feature at the Electric Daisy Carnival this week, and you can bet it's meant to appeal to the young summer music festival-going crowd. It also represents a shift from private personal messages towards more collaborative social sharing and discovery, which might open up the network's appeal to a broader userbase than it's currently connecting with.

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