The week in social: Hangouts, MSTY, and Facebook Notes

New Vlogger guidelines set for UK partnerships

New guidelines for vloggers entering partnerships with brands have been published for the first time in the UK. The guidance issued by The Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) follows the landmark Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruling last year in which they said several vlogs praising Oreo biscuits had not been clearly marked. The CAP guidelines discuss several scenarios in which text clarifying that content is sponsored, or that a product placement arrangement is in place, might be added to videos.

See the full guidelines at CAP.

#BloggerBlackMail

A food blogger and the owner of a bakery have been at the centre of the latest Twitter storm over a dispute surrounding free macaroons. The bakery claimed they were blackmailed after a blogger, who had been offered some free samples in return for writing a review, demanded more from the bakery in exchange for her efforts and then posted a negative review when they refused. There’s been a lot of back and forth on Twitter this week about who’s right and who’s wrong with a general consensus that both sides were at fault in some way or another.

Google Hangouts get a new stand-alone homepage

In the latest of a series of moves to downsize and restructure the struggling Google+ social network, Google have announced that Hangouts will now have their own dedicated homepage. The biggest resulting change is that users will no longer have to log in to Gmail and Google+ to access Hangouts. The new Hangouts also feature ‘an inspiring image to get you through the day,’ with images pulled from Google+.

New Music Messaging App, MSTY

A new app which aims to combine the best parts of Spotify and Snapchat, MSTY (‘My Song To You’), has launched worldwide giving users a new way to communicate with friends by combining music with text and photos. At launch, the app offers thousands of 30-second MSTY-curated song clips, with plans to add hundreds more each week. Once users have picked a song, they can attach a photo and type a short phrase on the image to complete the message. The London-based start-up boasts it’s the first messaging service to partner with Apple Music, Universal, Sony, and Warner. The company hopes that musical-greeting IMs will appeal to a wider audience than other messaging apps.

LinkedIn launches Lookup

LinkedIn has launched a new standalone iOS app called LinkedIn Lookup in a bid to help users make better use of their co-workers’ skills. The company conducted research that suggested many corporate employees feel they could do a better job if they knew how to find out who else in the company had specific skills, and that most resorted to looking at LinkedIn rather than their own company’s intranet listings. The new app allows you to search for co-workers by name, title, current or past experience, education and specific skills. Co-workers can message each other, even if they haven’t downloaded Lookup and messages sent to LinkedIn Inboxes via Lookup don’t count towards the number of InMails users receive each month.

Most popular emoji in the US revealed

With 74% of Americans now using emoji every single day, SwiftKey (creators of a popular iOS and Android keyboard app which learns and predicts users’ favourite words) have released data analysing the use of more than one billion emoji to determine the most and least popular emoji in each U.S. state.

Facebook overtakes Google as a traffic source for news

Facebook is starting to drive more traffic to digital media websites than Google according to new data from Parse.ly, an analytics firm which collects data for about 400 digital publishers including Conde Nast, Reuters, Mashable, and The Atlantic. Google is still the most-viewed website in the world. But when it comes to driving traffic to media sites, Facebook is now the clear winner. Facebook accounted for nearly 43% of traffic to Parse.ly’s network of media sites; generating 6 billion page views and over 1 billion unique visitors. Google, meanwhile, drove a mere 38% of traffic.

Facebook gives Notes a visual overhaul

Facebook is rolling out a substantial update to Facebook Notes, the area of the site where users can write extended entries about whatever they want. The new Notes will allow users to add cover photos, resize pictures and add links or hashtags within posts. The move is thought to be a bid to compete with other popular blogging sites including Medium and Tumblr.

More information on Social Times.

Twitter unveils new name for ad platform

Twitter has renamed their Twitter Publisher Network as the ‘Twitter Audience Platform’. Twitter’s senior director of revenue products, Ameet Ranadive, told Tech Crunch that the network now reaches 700 million people, and it’s getting a new name to better reflect the reasons that advertisers like it. The rebrand is said to include several new features for advertisers looking to launch their campaigns beyond Twitter and is focused around audience and leveraging the unique data and signals that Twitter has.

More information on TechCrunch.

Twitter share price slips below IPO value for the first time ever

Twitter shares crashed below the price they were originally floated at for the first time this week as investors grow increasingly concerned about recent financial results and growth rates for monthly active users. Twitter’s inferiority to Facebook from a revenue generating perspective is still a huge alarm bell, with Facebook generating 71% more revenue per active user than Twitter in the three months to 30 June.