Week in social: Twitter timeline, Instagram shopping, and Facebook's Rosetta

In case you missed it… Twitter is bringing back the reverse chronological timeline ?

The Twitterverse screamed, it cried, it threw a tantrum in the freezer aisle, it tugged tearfully at its Mom’s hem, and it tweeted its contempt for the two-year-old but still wildly unpopular curated timeline. And it seems to have worked. In a series of extremely well-received tweets on Monday, Twitter Support let the fans know that it was working on new ways to give users more control over their Timelines. It’s giving users the opportunity to turn off the “Show the best Tweets first” setting. “We’re working on providing you with an easily accessible way to switch between a timeline of Tweets that are most relevant for you and a timeline of the latest Tweets.” Twitter users will see the feature drop in the coming weeks. Enjoy, and have a reverse chronological day!

#Instagram #may #put #an #end #to #overhashing

When it’s on your plate at breakfast and with a side of eggs and a mimosa to wash it down, the more hash the merrier! But when it comes to “overhashing” on Instagram, it seems that even the social network itself might not be a fan. Among a handful of other new features, Instagram looks to be floating a separate interface for adding hashtags to posts. The feature isn’t released yet, nor has it been confirmed it’s even in testing (they refused to comment), but a tipster for TechCrunch found the designated hashtag selector prototype in the Instagram Android app’s code. Basically, the feature looks to be a dedicated “Add Hashtags” option underneath the caption composer and people tagger. Its introduction would encourage people to be more deliberate about their hashtags rather than just slapping a ton of them at the end of a post or in a comment. This would not only make the user experience more pleasant, but, in feeding the algorithm, it’d help make finding and following hashtags more meaningful. Raise your mimosas to that!

Facebook is helping us get to know its Rosetta a little betta

Meet Rosetta, Facebook’s custom-build large-scale machine learning system. Its mission is one we’ve all tried and failed to complete in our late-night scrolling sessions: watching all of the videos and viewing all of the memes on Facebook and Instagram. Rosetta’s job is to extract text from more than a billion public Facebook and Instagram images and videos (in a number of languages) and input it into a text recognition model that’s been trained to understand the context of the image and picture together (the social network says it is not used to scan images that users share privately on their timelines or in direct messages). Rosetta’s ultimate goal is to help Facebook police its channels to minimize harmful and offensive content, though a Facebook software engineer says that it is not yet perfect. “In the context of proactively detecting hate speech and other policy-violating content, meme-style images are the more complex AI challenge.”

Read more about how Facebook trains Rosetta on Facebook Code

Snapchat taps into UGC with curated Our Stories

Snapchat snaps on with its latest offering, pairing up with 20 partners including CNN, Cosmopolitan, Lad Bible, and NowThis to expand its Our Stories offering. The new move means that partners will be able to create curated slideshows of Snaps about whatever they like. They’ll be accessible from Snapchat Discover, as well as the publishers’ own feeds. Monetization is already built into the new feature, with the platform splitting revenue with publishers from ads run in the Our Stories they curate. While the dollar signs won’t extend directly from Snap to independent creators, the fact that they’re being connected with brand sponsors is a definite step in the right direction.

Instagram now lets users shop from the comfort of Stories

What started as in-feed shopping capabilities on Instagram has now been extended to Stories. The idea was trialed back in June, giving advertisers the power to ‘tag’ images and videos with links directing viewers to e-commerce sites. Now it’s officially rolling out globally, expanding retail temptation to the 400 million daily Stories users. The feature has inspired brands like fashion giant Zalando to offer ‘Stories-only’ deals with their influencers, their PR team saying: “A lot of what’s going out on Stories feels more genuine. It’s not as polished or as ‘fake’, it feels more real and that’s why customers want to shop there. They feel a lot more connected and the shopping experience is a lot more integrated. Our Instagram Stories spend is going up.” Oh, and Instagram is also launching a personalized ‘shopping channel’ within its Explore section, so there’s that, too.

Pinterest encourages influencer marketing with new API

Recently, everybody’s favorite inspirational platform, Pinterest, revealed it has more than 250 million active users contributing to its 175-billion-and-growing pins. It’s no surprise then that it’s now supporting brands with their influencer ventures on the platform by providing more resources for campaign measurement, expanding its content marketing API to third-party influencer marketing platforms for the very first time. According to CNBC, Pinterest is apparently planning an initial public offering for next year, and this move no doubt plays into that by bringing more revenue and engagement to the platform.