Facebook Supporting GIFs Now, Key Twitter Exec Leaves for Google, and Snapchat Gets Even More Funding
This week in social media, Facebook finally decided to support animated GIFs, Twitter lost a high-level executive, and Snapchat raised even more money.
It's time for Social Media Sunday!
Finally Allowing Users to Easily Post GIFs
For meme fanatics, this is great news: On Friday, Facebook decided to support GIFs hosted on external websites like Imgur, Tumblr, or anywhere else.
According to TechCrunch, even though the platform had built-in support for GIFs, Facebook held back on introducing a feature to let users easily post GIFs from meme websites over fears that the site would be cluttered with them. That, and the company was propping up its new autoplay videos, which include ads and has been incredibly successful, at the time Twitter introduced support for GIFs last year.
Now GIFs can be added in with a link and will animate according to users' video autoplay settings when posted.
"Real Name" Protestors to Demonstrate Monday at Facebook HQ
A coalition of drag queens, Native Americans, domestic violence survivors, transgender people, and folks who just don't want to have to use their birth certificate name on the social network are planning a demonstration at Facebook's Silicon Valley headquarters Monday.
According to The Guardian, the "#MyNameIs" coalition will begin demonstrations at 11 a.m. across the street from Facebook's main building in Menlo Park, demanding that Facebook make its appeals process more transparent, stop demanding government ID verification, and remove the fake-name reporting feature from its platform.
Check Your Facebook Messenger Location Settings
This week, after a programmer created an extension for Facebook that enabled "stalking your friends with Facebook Messenger," it became apparent that the messaging app Facebook forced on its users tracks their location by default.
"The latitude and longitude coordinates of the message locations have more than 5 decimal places of precision, making it possible to pinpoint the sender's location to less than a meter," the programmer, Aran Khanna, wrote on his blog. Messenger however doesn't track location if it's running in the background, CNN noted.
Still, to be on the safe side, make sure you check your "Settings" tab on the Android app, or disable location tracking in iOS's main Privacy menu, under "Location," in the Settings app.
Long-Time Key Exec Jumping Ship to Google
Whether it's because of Twitter's long, rocky road with Wall Street since its IPO, difference in vision, or just because it was the right time to pursue other interests -- in any case, Twitter is losing a long-time employee who reportedly played a "key role" in the acquisition of successful Twitter subsidiaries, Periscope and Vine.
According to an exclusive report by Fortune, director of corporate development and strategy at Twitter Jessica Verrilli is stepping down to join Google Ventures as a partner. She began working at Twitter in 2009. Neither Twitter nor Google commented to Fortune about the nature of her departure.
Snapchat
Another $500 Million in Funding Puts Value at $16 Billion
The rich startups just keep getting richer, if Snapchat is any indication. According to The Wall Street Journal, the non-public "startup" Snapchat just raised about $537 million in new funding from investors, including a reported $200 million from Chinese giant Alibaba -- as revealed in a recent SEC filing.
That brings Snapchat's value up to $16 billion, according to the WSJ's anonymous source, which is 60 percent higher than its last record-setting $10 billion valuation after its last funding round late last year. The tally for Snapchat's total private fundraising since it began has now reached $1.1 billion.
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