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!

• Facebook is switching up its News Feed Preferences (again), this time with you in mind. Users can now choose which people or pages they see first (or ones they don’t want to see at all). Techcrunch puts it best “expect brands to campaign for you to add them to your See First section so you never miss their posts.”

• Nice, subtle change: Facebook’s ‘friends’ icon now prominently faetures a woman. Interesting read on the reasoning behind and the impact the change will have!

• Facebook now lets you detach a video from your newsfeed and move it anywhere so you can still scroll the rest of your news feed while watching the video.

• Meerkat is stepping up its live streaming game: Instead of just letting users stream what they see to others, Meerkat’s Cameo is now letting users invite their viewers to take over their live streams – for 60 seconds at a time.

• Lol um. I have no idea what this is (except ridiculous). The Pan Am Games says you cannot link to their website without permission (or else they’ll sue you). They are confused by this Internet thingy. (They later revised their document and said you couldn’t take content from the site and re-post without their permission).

• YouTube’s biggest star PewDiePie (who makes over $7.4 million from his YouTube videos annually) was getting a lot of hate about how he doesn’t deserve to make that much money from his videos. He responded to those critics in a new video. Good for him! I think it’s amazing he’s been able to craft out this job for himself just by doing something he loved to do. We could all learn from that.

• Apparently there is a WhatsApp for Web and it’s recently been updated with a bunch of new features making it closer to the mobile app.

• You can now add your birthday to your Twitter Profile, and then Twitter will celebrate your birthday by releasing animated balloons on your profile. Lol. Mine is coming up!

• This read on the CEO of Reddit stepping down after the reddit revolt and also her take on women in the tech industry is super interesting.

• Apple Music was really only just rolled out but there are reports Facebook is working on a ‘Music’ streaming service to rival Spotify and Apple.

• There’s growing anger over Instagram’s double standard – removing photos that feature female nipples but keeping photos with male nipples (and bums). So far it looks like Instagram is sticking by its male preferences.

• Social media is being blamed for China’s rising divorce rate. Lol. Couples are reporting the presence of social media leads to temptation that can be a “destablising distraction for some marriages, and fatal for others.”
• Did you see all of the #ComingJuly13 / downtown art / activity on social media? It was revealed to be a teaser for the new Ice District (downtown arena district).

• This is neat: Edmonton Tourism launched a “Twitter vending machine” to get potential tourists excited about visiting our city! I hope they bring it out to Edmonton events!

• Did you see this week’s Cat Saturday photos?! My favourites are 3, 4, 7, 12, 14, 16, and 22!!

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

Linda

Follow @lindork