Social Media Sunday: Facebook's 'Free Basics', New Notes, & Instagram Surpasses Twitter
This week in social media, Facebook renamed its free Internet service to create some separation from its charity offerings, and redesigned a long-forgotten feature of its flagship platform. Meanwhile, Instagram hit a milestone of 400 million users, surpassing continually troubled Twitter.
It's time for Social Media Sunday!
Internet.org App Called 'Free Basics'
On Thursday, Facebook's Newsroom announced a new update to the global platform of free mobile Internet being offered in developing countries, Internet.org. The platform is being expanded, the company said, and with that, it is separating out the overall initiative from the programs and services it provides on mobile:
"In May we introduced the Platform as a way for developers to easily create services that integrate with Internet.org, and a way to give people more choice and control over the services they access. Starting today, the Platform is now live."
Facebook said that over the past few months, developers have been working on services for the Internet.org Platform's low-bandwidth requirements, and announced that 60 new services would be available in the 19 countries that Internet.org already operates. In addition, Facebook announced the addition of HTTPS security protocols for the platform.
It also announced a new name for the app and mobile website: "Free Basics by Facebook." It's available at www.freebasics.com and on the Google Play store. "We're making this change to better distinguish the Internet.org initiative from the platforms and services we're providing," announced Facebook, "including Free Basics."
Addressing the Controversy?
As we've previously noted, while seeming like a great, altruistic idea to bring the large proportion of the non-connected world to the Internet through Internet.org, there are some problems with it. Namely, Facebook seemingly gets to choose winners and losers where it creates new parts of the mobile web through its Internet.org platform.
The name change, addition of independent developers, and implementation of basic security protocols are all likely to be seen as a response to critics of Internet.org, though whether it's successful or not in silencing them is yet to be seen.
Update for Facebook Notes
One part of Facebook that many are probably not familiar with is Facebook Notes, an experimental way to write longer blog-like posts. Now, according to Facebook an update is rolling out that will make it more fun, and beautiful to use.
"With this update, you can add a cover photo that represents what your note is all about. You can caption and resize photos, and format your text into headers, quotes or bullets," said Isaac Salier-Hellendag, a Facebook UI engineer on the company news blog.
It does look a lot snazzier than the average Facebook post. As a bonus, the new Notes are also fully viewable on the mobile platform.
Hits 400 Million, Surpassing Twitter
Facebook-owned Instagram announced a big milestone last week, having gained a total of 400 million active users on a monthly basis. That's more than Twitter, according to CNBC, which only has an official count of 316 million active monthly users, as of the last time it released the figures for the second quarter.
If Instagram's figures are impressive, remember that two other companies in the Facebook family hit milestones this month as well, as we previously reported: Facebook Messenger hit the number two spot on digital analytics company comScore's top 15 ranked smartphone apps for July 2015, with nearly 60 percent of all U.S. adults using Messenger on either iOS or Android. At the same time, WhatsApp, purchased by Facebook last year, hit 900 million monthly active users.
Twitter Polling Trial
As the long election slog begins to heat up, Twitter has decided to try to capitalize on the primaries by introducing an experimental new feature to some users: polling.
According to The Guardian, some users are getting updates that allow them to create polls within the mobile app or desktop site that are embedded inside tweets, meaning you can vote on them while using third-party Twitter apps as well. Twitter hasn't said yet if the experimental feature will eventually make it to everyone, but any Twitter users can currently vote in a poll if it pops up in their timeline, so how about we vote on whether we like the feature or not?
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