The week in social: Twitter, Vine, Instagram and Facebook - the good, the bad and the timeline

Look out Twitter, WhatsApp’s coming to huff and puff and blow your house down

Facebook’s journey to world domination is in full swing especially since it announced WhatsApp’s 1 billion users worldwide. The company recently revealed that WhatsApp is now becoming more of a life tool than a person-to-person messaging service, and the implications this has on Twitter are drastic.

Jan van Vonno of IDC recently stated: “There appears to be a consensus that the decline of Twitter usage is due to the increase of WhatsApp, especially amongst younger generations. Although I personally do not have the stats to back this up, I think there’s no denying WhatsApp is replacing a lot of these Twitter conversations.”

Tribe is a nifty walkie-talkie app going up against the big guns

Welcome to the Tribe – a new social app for iOS and Android that is going head-to-head with Taptalk, Snapchat and other big social messaging apps. The app is certainly nothing new, and anything it can do Snapchat and Taptalk can too, but it doesn’t try to do everything, making it a refreshing approach to messaging.

It includes text and video, with a real focus on video, and like Snapchat, material disappears once viewed – not just from the contact’s phone, but from the app’s servers. Considering the saturated market, the startup surely has its legs, fingers, toes and hearts crossed that teenagers get onboard with it over the coming months. #TribeGoals

More information on TechCrunch.

Yaaaaaay!!! Instagram makes easy account switching officially official

First there were rumors by users that multiple account switching was being tested, now Instagram has made it official – their most requested feature is a finally a thing. The company announced the feature in a blog post writing: “Starting this week, you can quickly and easily switch between multiple accounts on Instagram. Go to your profile settings to add an additional account. From there, tap your user name at the top of your profile to switch between accounts. Once you have multiple accounts added, you’ll see your profile photo appear in places throughout the app so you can always tell which one you’re using at the moment.”

More information on Social Times

SelfieMark launches photo-sharing polling app on iOS and Android

SelfieMark – an app that allows users to poll their peers in side-by-side image comparisons – has launched its photo-sharing app on iOS and Android.

The app was designed to allow users to receive feedback from their followers before making decisions (e.g., does my butt look bigger in these jeans or these jeans?)

With this app, users can take photos and import images, then create an image poll using two photos, as well as share individual images to their feed. Before posting, users can give their image/s a description, and tag them with hashtags, locations or usernames.

Skype partners with Sir Paul McCartney to create 10 Valentine’s Day ‘Mojis’

Happy Valentine’s Day, peeps. If you’re on Skype today, get involved in the love day moji madness and send your crush (or your grandma) a flirting banana that comes with and accompanying music.

The banana and its nine other romantic cohorts, are the result of a project the Microsoft-owned Skype launched with Sir Paul McCartney last week.

The new mojis – which can best be described as GIFs with sound (sound created by the man McCartney himself) – all focus on love, just in time for V Day. During the recent press event, Skype noted that its users have now sent over half a billion mojis – and who knows what that number’ll be after today!

It’s happening, people… Twitter’s algorithmic timeline is rolling out around the world

After years of debate, and months of complaints and user testing, the inevitable day has arrived – Twitter has launched its new timeline. Based on the algorithms that power the company’s “while you were away” feature, the changes will mean highly ranked tweets will show up at the top of users’ timelines in reverse-chronological order, and the rest of their timelines will appear underneath as usual. As of now, the controversial new timeline will not be enabled by default, but in the coming weeks Twitter says it plans to switch the new timeline on for all users, though if they don’t like it, they can turn it off.

Anchor launches to take radio to the next level

The New York-based Anchor – launched recently for iOS – is introducing the next generation of broadcasting. The company’s two co-founders hatched their plan over a shared love of radio and aim to provide an easier way to record and transmit interactive audio content. To put it simply, the app turns everyone into their own anchor or newscaster.

WNYC’s Delaney Simmons says: “Anchor gives us another way to reach listeners with the stories we’re interested in, hear from people around the world and connect with new audiences.”

Vine’s latest update lets you view a profile’s posts based on popularity

Vine has listened to its users’ cries and made some much-requested updates to its Android and iOS apps. These updates are designed to give users more control over how they view and share Vines. The most notable update allows users to customize the order in which Vines appear on a profile page. To be specific – when viewing an account page, users can tap the icon next to ‘Posts’ to sort their view to the newest, oldest or most popular Vines on the account.

Other additions include the ability for Android users to edit captions, and for users on iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus to have access to 3D Touch shortcuts.

More information on Vine Blog.

Twitter promises to make replies and other features less confusing

Last week, on the same day that Twitter reported disappointing earnings, the company admitted that one of its core functions – having a conversation with someone – is confusing and needs to be revamped.

In a letter to shareholders, Twitter explained: “We are going to fix the broken windows and confusing parts, like the .@name syntax and @reply rules, that we know inhibit usage and drive people away.” Twitter says it’s also going to improve how it acclimates new users to the service, speed up the act of tweeting, and make it easier to be “more expressive” with text, photos and videos (whatever that means).

More information on The Verge.

Facebook tests SMS integration in Messenger and launches support for multiple accounts

Messenger hates to see us go, so much so that, following reports from users of seeing something like an SMS Settings pane, Facebook has announced that it’s testing a way for users to read, receive and respond to their SMS-based conversations in its Messenger application for mobile devices. The feature would be optional if broadly rolled out, and could help shift users away from their default texting application and see them increasing their time spent in Facebook Messenger instead. Also new is added support for using Messenger with multiple accounts – a feature designed for shared devices.

Instagram now shows how many times your videos have been viewed

Following in Facebook’s footsteps, Instagram have worked it so that you’ll now be able to see how many times an Instagram video has been viewed among the pool of the app’s more than 400 million users.

These new view counts, which will appear below video posts where ‘likes’ would normally appear, are being rolled out today

You can tap the view count to see the number of likes for each video, but the company says it’s giving priority to views because “it’s the best way to show how the community is engaging with video.”

Facebook adds automated captioning tool for video ads

It was a week for feature announcements by Facebook last week, the most prominent being an automated captioning tool. This tool is aimed at improving the experience for Facebook users who view video ads and other videos with the sound off, and it generates captions for video ads, which can be reviewed, edited and saved by advertisers via the network’s ads create tool. Facebook said that 80% of users react negatively toward both Facebook and advertisers when they come across loud video ads in their News Feed. Research also shows that captions can help advertisers increase viewing times for their video ads by an average of 12%.

The week in social: Twitter, Vine, Instagram and Facebook – the good, the bad and the timeline