Friday Social: Goodbye MSN Messenger, The Bank of Facebook and more!

  • 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 /@tomscott1

1. Reddit launches standalone app for AMA

AMA or ‘ask me anything’ for those not familiar with the acronym is a hugely popular thread on Reddit, with many high profile celebrities taking to the platform to answer fan questions, Barack Obama has even taken part in one! The problem is that Reddit is one of the most active sites on the internet (it had 56 billion page views in 2013) this means interviews can become buried under an avalanche of new content. This new app will allow you to search through just the AMAs and filter out a lot of the noise created by other topics.

2. YouTube Fan Funding

A new feature on YouTube will allow you to donate to an account holder, and will initially be available in the US, Australia, Japan, and Mexico. Google claims that this is currently being tested by a very small amount of users, but they hope to roll it out to a wider audience if it is successful. Side note: Google takes a 5% rake of the donation.

3. Goodbye MSN Messenger

For anyone that remembers sending a nudge, lying about your webcam not working and getting disconnected when your mum picked up the phone, this will be sad news. MSN Messenger is being completely switched off on 31st October. The messenger service was first launched in 1999 and may not be iconic to many readers but to children of the noughties it was an integral part of childhood. Microsoft is pushing users to Skype, which it bought back in 2011 for £5.2bn. It is keen to build its user base and is even offering $2 incentive for those who switch over!

RIP MSN Messenger you will be missed.

4. Social Media Sitcom

To mark the launch of  ‘The Sims 4’, EA is launching a real time, social media sitcom. Developed by MediaCom Beyond Advertising in collaboration with the content agency The Wagon, the story will focus on two men, a woman they are interested in, and an interfering friend.

Twitter accounts have been set up for each character (@LavelyLavinia, @GentlemanAndSch,@jinxisaspell and @SouljaRoi).  You will be able to see a full version of the story on Tumblr.

5. Facebook banking

We have written previously about Facebook’s journey into banking and mobile payments {https://umpf.co.uk/blog/social-media/friday-social-instakea-emojli-vine-loop/}. An eagle eyed writer at Bank Innovation has discovered a new Facebook patent. This patent is for a personal financial management tool, much like existing platforms such as Money Dashboard and Mint. After the user has imported account information from their bank, Facebook will sort this in to categories such as entertainment, food and clothes. The patent application also describes a comparison functionality, this, it is presumed, will compare your spending habits against your friends or others who are in a similar location and demographic to you. The key here though, as it always is with Facebook, is the ability to sell this data to advertisers; they would be able to target users purchase history which would be extremely valuable data. An interesting concept, would you be comfortable using Facebook as a money management tool? Let us know in the comments!

6. Weekly Shop on YouTube

ASDA is currently experimenting with ‘shopable’ videos and online advertisments, the supermarket is currently running trials on videos posted to its Mum’s Eye View channel.  The videos allow ASDA to display a list of products (which also feature in the video) next to the video. Clicking on these products would encourage you to add them to your basket and checkout, but crucially this is all done without leaving YouTube.

7. Snapchat filters in London

Snapchat users in Los Angeles and New York have been able to use location-specific filters for some time now. UK users rejoice: London is the latest addition. There are 30 locations to find in London, we don’t know where they are so you will have to go find them yourself!

8. Twitter takes another step towards being Facebook

Twitter and Facebook seem to be fighting a never-ending battle to steal each other’s best features. Twitter has previously introduced more detailed profile pages which were remarkably similar to Facebook profiles and has started pushing content in to the newsfeed from users you don’t follow. The next big change is rumoured to be a Twitter Newsfeed which is controlled by an algorithm, like Facebook. It is unclear if this will be an option available to users or something which will be unavoidable. However it is a huge move away from the current waterfall system which shows tweets in a chronological order only.

 And finally…

Check out this nice roundup from Twitter on how brands joined in on the football transfer deadline day chaos.

https://blog.twitter.com/en-gb/2014/how-ten-brands-joined-the-transferdeadlineday-conversation