The week in social: Snapchat stickers, Foursquare bot, and Spotify on Twitter

Twitter plans to make changes to its 140 character limit

Rumor and possible changes have been circulating around Twitter’s 140 character limit for over a year, but a new blog post from the company sheds light on probable upcoming changes. The updates described include an “@” name no longer counting to 140 character limit, and linked or attached media no longer counting. Additional updates includes no long having to put a “.” before an “@” to broadcast a discussion more widely, and the ability for users to retweet or quote tweet themselves. Although an exact time frame has not been confirmed, the updates are supposed to roll out over the coming months.

More information on Twitter Blog.

Facebook live now provides engagement graphs

A common problem facing consumers of online videos is how to find the most entertaining, the funniest, or the most special moment of the video. Facebook is aiming to help change that with its Live video engagement graphs. When a user watches a live video, they can now see at what points it garnered the most likes and overall engagements, so if they want to, they can skip to those portions (if its a broadcast that has aired and been previously saved).

Periscope now saves broadcast by default

Periscope recently announced the ability to save broadcasts as part of a wide beta program where users could simply add #save to their broadcast title to have it be saved indefinitely. In a tweet earlier this week, Periscope announced through their Twitter account that broadcasts would be saved by default. No other details were provided around the post, however the previous blog detailed that it was a feature highly in demand by users who wanted a way to save what they created.

More information on Twitter.

Snapchat adding new stickers to posts

As Snapchat’s popularity continues to expand, the ways users want to express themselves continues to grow. In part to help address this, Snapchat has introduced stickers that can be added to snaps, outside of the already available unicode based emojis. Stickers have been available for conversations previously, but this is the first time they can be used for ephemeral posts. Users can add stickers to their snaps by clicking on the post-it note style button on the top of their user interface.

Slack reaches 3 million users

Slack, the multi-platform messaging service designed to help team collaborate more effectively, has just reached a new milestone, growing to 3 million daily active users. Among those, up to 2 million are connected to the service simultaneously. The service is growing quickly, reaching the milestone of 1 million users around the same time last year, with 1 million simultaneously connected users as of last October. An infographic provided by the company in a blog post also noted that 77 of the Fortune 100 companies presently use the service.

Twitter no longer supporting Buy Button and Product Pages

Twitter is taking the resources on its commerce team and moving them onto other product, thereby halting development on the Buy Button, and its applications, a function supporting social commerce on the platform. According to reports, members of that team had already left Twitter, and those who were left joined teams for customer service and dynamic product ads development. Sources familiar with Twitter’s commerce team quoted to Buzzfeed News that users are not buying products on social presently, and that most purchasing is happening on mobile web. Twitter responded to a request for comment by saying that they are increasing their investment in commerce by further developing the dynamic product ads given strong initial response.

More information on Buzzfeed News.

YouTube launches event pages as part of YouTube Gaming

Positioned as a key competitor to Twitch, YouTube Gaming is expanding with new events based coverage, starting with coverage of this year’s upcoming E3, a conference focused on developments and announcements within the gaming space. Events pages, according to a blog post from YouTube, will function as individual destinations for key moments in gaming throughout the year. For E3, the events page will give users access to videos, streams, opportunities to live chat with other fans, and more. Coverage for the event will begin on June 12th.

Foursquare introduces a predictive bot

Foursquare’s latest effort to help users decide what to eat and where to go has seen the creation of a bot that provides predictive solutions via text, called Marsbot. Carefully positioned as not being a chat bot, which offers responses to queries, Marsbot is meant to be proactive, offering suggestions based on where a user previously has been according to their Foursquare account, and also their current location. Marsbot is currently only available in New York City and San Francisco for iPhone users, but there are plans to expand it to more users in a greater amount of places in the near future.

More information on Foursquare Blog.

Instagram expands its partner program to include media buying specialty

Last year, Instagram introduced its partner program, a way of helping connect advertisers with providers of services that could help enhance the effectiveness of ads on the platform. The program allowed agencies and organizations to apply with one of several different specialties. Earlier this week, the company introduced a new specialty: Media Buying. Presently the specialty is available only within the US. This is not indicative of particular organizations having unique skills, but more their direct official linkage to Instagram. The partner program currently has 50 organizations on board and is continuing to grow.

More information on Instagram Blog.

Twitter improves audio cards to feature Spotify support

As an enhancement to Twitter’s audio experience, users are now able to tweet a link to a Spotify track, and anyone who sees the post can play the track directly within their feed. The new capability was shared by Twitter, and no additional context was provided, however this is certainly not Twitter’s first foray into music support, with other features such as #TwitterMusic coming and going in recent years.

More information on Twitter.