This week in social media, both Facebook and Foursquare implemented a piece of their separate-app strategy -- both leading to some controversy. Meanwhile, Twitter quietly removed Bing translation, a feature it added in time for the World Cup this year, likely because it wasn't really ready for prime time.

It's time for Social Media Saturday!

Facebook: Offloaded Onto Messenger, Some Users Are Not Happy

Facebook has been working on diversifying its app catalogue this year -- unpacking the many different features and functions of the one big "Facebook" application into more discrete, and hopefully simpler apps. As part of that process, Facebook revamped Facebook Messenger to include new features like video conferencing, selfie sharing, and group messaging, and, this week, began pushing its mobile users to install the app whenever they sent a Facebook message on the central Facebook app.

Soon, the messaging feature of Facebook's mobile app will no longer work until users download the Facebook Messenger app -- or they can try some other messaging app, if they can find one not made by Mark Zuckerberg that coincidentally all of their Facebook friends also happen to use (good luck).

Needless to say, being forced to download a new app isn't sitting well with many users: as Mashable pointed out on Friday, Facebook Messenger is simultaneously the number one app on the iOS App Store and holds a rating of one star out of five.

Adding fuel to the fire, says The New York Times, is a cloud of misunderstanding and mistrust towards Facebook as users take a look at Messenger's app permissions during the install process. The app asks to access your contacts to sync, as well as your phone's location, text messages (to confirm phone numbers), camera, and microphone. But these requested permissions aren't actually that different from other messaging apps, and users aren't significantly giving Facebook more power by downloading a new messaging app. Perhaps it was Facebook's recent controversial experiments on unsuspecting users' emotions, or maybe it's just Facebook's general growing reputation as a privacy-ignoring data hog, but a growing chorus of users have been concerned and upset about Messenger's privacy, or perceived lack-thereof.

Foursquare: Another App Split, and a Real Privacy Concern

Meanwhile, the new Foursquare app arrived this week as part of that company's own version of an "unpacking" strategy, which involves putting most of the purely social functions of Foursquare into the new Swarm app and turning Foursquare into a kind of ultra-personalized Yelp.

The new Foursquare app is very impressive -- if much more complicated and overwhelming than the old one (expect an upcoming hands-on video review of Foursquare in a few days from Latin Post's Tap That App Tuesday). The most impressive part of the new Foursquare, though, is also what may creep you out. Rather than relying on a user's manually-generated "check-ins" to suggest locations, the Foursquare app now tracks your location, by default, all the time. Even when the app is closed.

This will undoubtedly give the app some almost-magical powers of serendipity, like the ability to notify users when they're just steps away from some place they've never been, but which all previous Foursquare data suggests they will absolutely love.


And Foursquare assures its users it does not share location data with anyone. But users who've heard of the NSA or any of the major hacking attacks in the past year will probably be uncomfortable giving that much location data to any single social media company. Luckily for users, you can turn persistent location tracking off in the preferences.

Twitter: Thanks for the World Cup, Bing Translation. Now Scram!

After Microsoft's Bing translation software, which Twitter smartly implemented just in time for the World Cup, helped the character-limited social media network finally impress Wall Street investors this quarter with impressive soccer-driven user numbers, Twitter has decided to quietly drop the feature from its app.

Twitter is known for constantly performing little experiments. And not the Facebook/OkCupid-style experiments that treats users like lab rats (at least as far as we currently know) -- Twitter's experiments involve releasing new, untested features on a limited basis to help evolve Twitter's services and apps.

So it's not surprising that Twitter would decide Bing Translation -- which has been the butt of many Twitter jokes -- wasn't really ready for primetime and drop it. But Microsoft shouldn't feel bad: Bing Translation is just like every other computer-generated natural language translation engine in that it's still in early stages of development and pretty rough around the edges.

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