Friday Social: Facebook profile tags, Twitter’s heart and #curvy
- Social Media
Our #FridaySocial is a weekly round-up of the key social media news stories from the previous seven days. Let us know your thoughts in the comments or via Twitter – @Umpf / @EllieHallsworth
1. Twitter testing a ‘heart’ icon
Some Android users this week noticed that Twitter had swapped out its usual Favourites star for a heart.
Wait… favorites are now hearts in the Twitter android app, over stars? Confused feelings. Love is more commitment than Favorite.
— Joshua McGrath (@DopplerInteract) June 17, 2015
As this was not available for everyone, The Next Web reached out to Twitter who confirmed that they were indeed running an experiment for now.
2. Instagram’s #curvy debate
Instagram previously banned the search term #curvy because, according to a spokesperson, it was being used to share images and videos that violated Instagram’s community guidelines around nudity. Unsurprisingly this caused a huge backlash from body confidence campaigners.
This decision has this week been overturned, with the company releasing the following statement
“We want people to be able to express themselves, and hashtags are a great way to do that. At the same time, we have a responsibility to act when we see hashtags being used to spread inappropriate content to our community. In the case of #curvy, we don’t like putting restrictions around a term that many people use in very positive ways, so we have decided to unblock the hashtag while taking steps to ensure that it’s not used as a vehicle for bad content.”
Previously Instagram has had to ban innocuous words such as #soles and #eggplant.
3. Google+, it’s time to breakup
Google previously required anyone who creates a YouTube channel to also have a Google+ profile, which, let’s say, didn’t go down well.
In a blog post this week, Google announced that it will be making some important changes over the next few months, starting with splitting up YouTube from Google+. The company said the decision was made after agreeing with feedback that “it doesn’t make sense for your Google+ profile to be your identity in all the other Google products you use”.
It’s unclear what other Google products Google+ will be lifted from, but more restrictions will be removed in the next few months.
4. Facebook profile tags
Facebook is currently testing a new feature that lets users tag friends with a word and phrase that describes their personality or interests. Created by a small team as part of a Facebook hackathon, this feature is currently only available to a small pool of users in New Zealand. Users can visit a friend’s profile page and tag them with a free-form word, phrase or even emoji, which will then be sent for approval by that friend.
A spokesperson for Facebook said “Profile tags are a creative tool that lets you and your friends add tags to your profile to highlight the things that describe you and what you’re into. You can control what tags are shown on your own profile.”
5. Retrace your steps, virtually
You can now virtually retrace your every step using a new feature from Google Maps; ‘Your Timeline’. Currently rolled out for Android users and on desktop. If you’re a desktop user, click right here to see the places you’ve been, the routes you’ve travelled and your ‘most visited’ places.
As long as you’ve enabled your location history within Google, you’ll be able to see your entire movements. If not, simply click ‘enable location history’.
It’s worth noting here that this feature isn’t public, and only you can see the information. Panic over.
