Social Media Saturday: Pinterest Gifts, Weibo IPO, and Zuckerberg Gets Mad About NSA
This week in social media, Pinterest debuted a "Gifts" feed, Adult Swim premiered an episode by sending more than 100 Instagram videos, China's Twitter filed for an IPO, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was so miffed by an NSA revelation that he called President Obama himself. It's Social Media Saturday!
Rick and Morty on Instagram Video
Adult Swim, the Cartoon Network subchannel for "adults," meaning college-aged stoners, pulled a publicity stunt by premiering an episode of Dan Harmon's "Rick and Morty" on Instagram video, before its regular TV broadcast on Monday, March 17.
Unlike some Adult Swim shows, Rick and Morty -- a primetime original send-up loosely based on the relationship between Back to the Future's Marty McFly and Doc Brown -- is a full half-hour long. That meant that Adult Swim's posting the episode on its Rick and Morty Instagram account required more than 100 15-second video clips to air the whole show. That's a lot of Instagram posts to check out to get a sneak preview of Monday's show.
"Adult Swim feels 'Rick and Morty' fans are more than up to the challenge," said the network to Variety. They probably bet their fans also have a lot of time on their hands.
Pinterest's "Gifts" Feed
Pinterest debuted a new feed on the image clipping-centric social media network this week, but if users thought it was a feed full of gifts for them, they were wrong. According to Tech Crunch, the Gifts feed is exclusively for "product pins," which are clips enhanced with extra details, pricing, and availability online. Basically the Gifts feed is Pinterest's advertiser and marketing feed.
The Gifts feed was created after Pinterest tested a similar feature during the holidays and found a good deal of success with it. Pinterest Gifts has a price selector, with four filters ranging from less than $50 to over $200. Those filters aren't available on the mobile app yet, but Pinterest says Gifts is a work in progress.
IPO for Weibo?
Weibo, often called China's version of Twitter, filed the first documents Friday in the process to have an initial public offering in the U.S. Weibo, incredibly popular in China boasting 129 million monthly active users, is looking to raise $500 million in the IPO. Right now Sina Corp. owns most of Weibo and its predicted that raising those funds will be a step towards Weibo cutting free of Sina, according to Forbes.
Zuckerberg Gets P****d Off About NSA Facebook Spoofing
Perhaps the biggest story of the week was two-fold. First, Glenn Greenwald reported revelations this week that the U.S. National Security Agency reportedly posed as Facebook servers in order to trick some computers into connecting to NSA servers -- after which, the NSA would upload various spying malware into the users' computer.
Then came Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's response the next day. Zuckerberg posted on his Facebook account a long message condemning the activities of the NSA and mentioned that he had called the President himself to gripe about it. "I've called President Obama to express my frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our futures," said Zuckerberg. He went on in his post, calling for the end to NSA attempts to break internet security protocols -- you can read more here.
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