Here’s this week’s round-up of social media (& tech) news. Come by each week for what I hope to be a fun & informative blog post on social stories that caught my eye throughout the week!

(I’ve missed the last two weeks so there feels like there’s a LOT of Twitter news!)

• Oooo!! Twitter now lets you film in landscape mode for its Twitter Videos feature! Thank god. Vertical video is the worst… (and yet a necessary evil if using other social networking apps that allow video)

• Twitter’s ‘favourite’ function could look a lot more like Instagram’s as it tests using hearts instead of stars to show favourited tweets.

• Following Facebook, Twitter now autoplays videos and GIFs in your timeline aimed at keeping “users more informed” but also a plus for advertisers.

• Twitter is incredible for watching news unfold. The company knows that, and now it’s working on something called Project Lightning which gives users the ability to follow an event instead of certain people or hashtags.

• In the fight against online harassment, Twitter now lets you block several people at once by sharing lists of accounts they have blocked, so others can block them too.

• Not sure what impact this will have but Twitter CEO Dick Costolo will step down on July 1 and Twitter’s original co-founder Jack Dorsey will step back in as interim CEO. There’s been lots of pressure on Twitter to successfully monetize since it went on the stock market.

• Instagram has launched a newly redesigned desktop layout that looks more similar to the mobile, cleans up the page and makes photos a lot bigger. I like it a lot.

• This is really interesting… an artist is making $100,000 a pop off of other people’s Instagram photos, but because they are screenshots of images, with just a minor enough edit that it falls into fair use.

• Lol. This is so weird. Snapchat’s CEO explains Snapchat in a dimly-lit, low-res video. Still an interesting take from the man behind the platform though. Pictures are being used for talking – not necessarily for memory-keeping.

• YouTube has launched a new project called Newswire, a service that curates and verifies eyewitness video of breaking news. Makes a lot of sense given all the breaking news videos being uploaded today.

• Take these how you will, but here are 5 predictions for the future of social media, including social media will be Chinese, social media will be under your skin, social media as we know it will no longer exist, and more.

• Chevy just issued a press release that is made entirely of emojis. #ChevyGoesEmoji. It’s…. weird… lol.
• The use of social media in rural India has grown 100% in the past year, with most people accessing the Internet because they want access to social media platforms.

• For some reason, the founder of MySpace’s two year old selfie is getting attention this week. What’s amazing to me is that he is retired now (pretty much) and is travelling the world taking incredible images and posting it on his Instagram account.
• Did you see this week’s Cat Saturday photos?! My favourites are 2, 3, 5, 9, 11, 22, 23, 26, and 30!

Thoughts on these stories? Tweet @ me or leave a comment below!

Linda

Follow @lindork