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Social Media Knight

Fighting our way into the social media realm

Research

Facebook to develop Instagram-style Close Friends features

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Facebook’s Favorites would let you manually designate certain friends to be in your inner circle. Then, whenever you have a Story or camera post you’d like to share using Messenger, you could send it to this list. It’s a middle ground between letting all your friends see content that’s posted on your Facebook Story, or else sending it privately to individuals via direct message. However, unlike Instagram, Facebook says the feature isn’t a way of restricting who sees your actual Facebook Story.

Favorites appear to be an attempt to encourage people to share more on Facebook, without worrying about a ballooning list of casual acquaintances accumulated over the years. It’s a problem that we were writing about way back in 2014 and, if my own Facebook friends list is any indication, the problem has only gotten worse in the years since.

The feature also aligns with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s attempts to pivot the company’s social networks into a more privacy-focused communications platform that’s the digital equivalent of a living room rather than a town square.

By Jon Porter

See Full Story at www.theverge.com

Is Gender Transitions a new trend in Pinterest?

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In May 2018, the Pinterest insights team, which tracks how people use the platform, started noticing a remarkable trend. It wasn’t an influx of dads pinning spiders made out of Oreos. No, people were using the platform to search for information about “transgender transitions”—a lot of people.

Between May 2018 and August 2019, searches for the term spiked by 3919%, says Chuin Phang, inclusion programs manager at Pinterest.

“And this was not a lone incident,” Phang tells NewNowNext. “There were other types of searches. We’ve seen an increase in things like name pronoun changes, hormone therapy, transgender-related style searches, supporting loved ones who are transitioning.”

Transgender captions have jumped by 621%, according to the company, and searches for “nonbinary fashion plus size” have gone up by 196%, with millions of users searching for things like name changes and gender-affirming surgeries. Top trans-related searches on Pinterest include “transgender quotes inspiration,” “transgender pride,” “transgender facts,” and “transgender art,” the company says.

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See Full Story at www.newnownext.com

Facebook facial recognition aim to end malicious bots

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In order to keep its social network free of malicious bots, Facebook keeps trying out new tactics.In its latest test, it’s deploying facial recognition tech to spot fake profiles.

The feature, spotted by app researcher Jane Manchun Wong, asks you to take a video selfie and turn your head from side to side in order to verify that you’re not a bot.

The text in app screenshots posted by Wong reads, “We need a short video of you turning your head in different directions. This helps us confirm your identity and check you’re a real person.”

There’s no word on when this feature will roll out, or when it’ll be used. Also, there’s clarity at the moment on how Facebook will store and use this data.

See Full Story at thenextweb.com

Useful things Youtube could do that you didn’t know

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Read on, and get ready to hit Play on a whole new way to experience YouTube.

PLAYBACK POWER

1. Want to hop around in a video you’re watching? Press a number key on your keyboard while any video is playing on the YouTube website. That’ll take you to a corresponding percent in the video’s timeline—50% into the video if you hit “5,” 80% if you hit “8,” and so on. Hitting “0” will take you back to the video’s start.

2. If you’d rather move around in a video by a specific amount of seconds, remember these super-handy shortcuts: Pressing “J” while a video is playing will rewind by 10 seconds while pressing “L” will fast-forward by that same amount.

3. For even finer control, pause a video on the YouTube website and then press the comma or period key on your computer’s keyboard. That’ll move your video back or forward by a single frame, respectively.

4. Craving a similar sort of speedy skipping power in YouTube’s mobile app? You’ve got it: Double-tap the left or right side of a video while it’s playing to instantly skip back or ahead by 10 seconds. If you keep tapping, the increment will increase by 10 seconds with every extra touch.

5. Does 10 seconds seem like too much? Or maybe not enough? No worries: You can customize the length of YouTube’s fast-skip shortcut to make it work with however much time your video-adoring heart desires. Just tap your profile picture in the upper-right corner of the screen, then select “Settings followed by “General” and look for the “Double-tap to seek” option.

BY JR RAPHAEL

See Full Story at www.fastcompany.com

LinkedIn new assessment tool to test job seekers skills

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LinkedIn has announced a new skills assessment tool that allows job seekers to find out how proficient they are in their area of specialty. LinkedIn Skill Assessments validates job seekers’ proficiency and marks their profile so they’ll stand out to recruiters.

Skill assessments are constructed through what LinkedIn described as a “rigorous content creation and review process” in a partnership with subject matter and LinkedIn Learning industry experts. Once candidates complete an assessment, a badge is displayed on their profile in LinkedIn Jobs and LinkedIn Recruiter so recruiters can quickly identify skill proficiencies. LinkedIn said it will be rolling out various assessments that applicants can choose from, including some for software like Adobe Photoshop or coding languages like C++.

The announcement comes after LinkedIn research found that 83% of surveyed managers agreed that skills and credentials are “becoming more important” for recruiting, and 77% said that “it’s hard to know” which skills candidates actually have without some sort of assessment.

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See Full Story at www.hrdive.com

Facebook now considering hiding its “likes” count

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Facebook is playing with the idea of hiding the public “like” feature that appears underneath user’s posts. Engineer Jane Manchun Wong suspected this endeavor while looking through and testing Facebook’s code — the company has since followed up and confirmed the experiment.

A Facebook spokesperson said in an email, “We are considering hiding like counts from Facebook.” The company’s higher-ups believe that, by hiding the like counter, they’ll discourage self-censorship and curb unhealthy envious behavior that could lead to stress and mental health issues.

Instagram and a number of other social media sites are either actively testing or considering implementing a similar initiative.

By MIKE COLAGROSSI

See Full Story at bigthink.com

Unlinking your instagram account from facebook? It’s not how it works

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Like other platforms shown under the Linked Accounts menu on Instagram, the option to link your Facebook profile is ostensibly disabled by default. Users must tap the app’s grayed out logo and sign in before Instagram displays the two as connected. Once two profiles are connected, an Unlink Account option appears in Instagram settings. Clicking there brings up a warning: “Unlinking makes it harder to get access to your Instagram account if you get locked out.”

Common sense suggests that if you unlink a Facebook account from your Instagram profile, you’ve unlinked that Facebook account from your Instagram profile. But like many things Facebook, common sense does not always apply here. Clicking on Unlink Account does not actually unlink a Facebook account from Instagram, a Facebook spokesperson told WIRED, because it isn’t possible to separate the two. Even if a user never explicitly linked their Facebook and Instagram profiles, they are intrinsically connected—Finstagrams be damned—and will continue to be, regardless of how many times you mash Unlink Account.

See Full Story at www.wired.com

Facebook to test Premium Video Subscription

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Facebook’s video-subscription test is meant to springboard off Watch, the free, ad-supported episodic platform it originally launched two years ago. Watch had 140 million daily users worldwide as of June, with thousands of shows including Facebook-funded originals like Jada Pinkett Smith’s “Red Table Talk” and a reboot of MTV’s “The Real World.”

Part of the theory behind Facebook’s SVOD test is that subscription services with strong fan communities will be able to take advantage of social features to drive engagement. Subscribers will be able to join discussion groups to talk about recent episodes and participate in Facebook’s Watch Parties, which let multiple users watch videos concurrently and chat in real-time.

Tastemade has nearly 31 million followers on its main Facebook page, while IAC’s College Humor has more than 9 million fans and MotorTrend has more than 3 million fans (and its popular show “Roadkill” counts nearly 1.5 million). BritBox has the smallest fanbase of the group with fewer than 200,000 followers.

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See Full Story at variety.com

You’re not alone: Facebook and Instagram really experiencing outage these days

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If it seems like error messages have been popping up a lot more frequently on social media sites, you’re not imagining things. Our favourite outlets for procrastination really do appear to be going through a rough patch, and disgruntled internet users have been leapfrogging between platforms to complain.

Now we have some evidence to back up these hunches. According to data from the last 36 months that Ookla’s Downdetector provided to Slate, it appears that outage times for Facebook and its subsidiary platform Instagram did spike in June and July. (Downdetector is a site that provides real-time updates of outages based on user reports.) Instagram, notably, had a major outage for about 12 hours from July 16 to July 17.

By AARON MAK

See Full Story at slate.com