Friday Social: Street View, Vine’s Mini Festivals and your social To Do list
- Social Media
Our #FridaySocial is a weekly round-up of the key social media news stories from the previous seven days.
1. Google Maps launches airports and railway stations
Google Street View has been updated to include a range of international airports and train stations, which is handy for those who want to plan a trip to an unfamiliar place. As of Tuesday this week, Google Maps now includes 16 airports, over 50 train stations, a cable car station in Hong Kong and the inside of an Emirate Airbus A380 at Dubai International Airport.
The interactive map below shows exactly where these new locations are situated. Right now, there are plenty of gaps, but as Google’s coverage spreads to new locations and regions, we can expect this to become a more comprehensive and useful tool.
2. Twitter experiments with predicting viral tweets
According to The Next Web, it appears that Twitter is beginning to experiment to see if it can predict the next viral tweets. @MagicStats is a mysterious (and protected) new Twitter account that, from the bio, claims to “favourite the best tweets I see in real time”. Despite the account being locked, TNW has confirmed that: “In both instanced where @MagicStats favourite our tweets, they received well over 100 retweets within a few hours.” Without being 100 per cent certain that this is the real deal, this will certainly be an interesting one to watch.
3. Lights, Vine, Action! Vine’s weekly Mini Festivals
Vine has launched a weekly Vine Mini Festival, which will include weekly themes chosen and shared on the Vine blog and Twitter account, which will serve as weekly motivation for users to create a short masterpiece to share with the Vine community. Users will be invited to include each week’s unique hashtag and some of the best entries will be revined and featured on the Vine blog. First up, the topical #ThankfulFor. Keep an eye out for the best submissions in the coming days here.
4. Facebook’s ‘Save for Later’ Feature
The regular Facebook user is connected to a wide range of like-minded friends, therefore it’s not surprising that interesting articles will often pop up in the newsfeed. Described by Zuckerberg as your very own ‘personalised newspaper’, Facebook is now testing a more advanced ‘save for later’ feature, that looks to be nearing a wide release. Useful if you don’t have time to click and read all about what your favourite pie says about you or what K-Mids was wearing this week, you will now be able to click a button with a bookmark icon. Set apart from standard reading lists we’ve seen before, this Facebook feature will allow you to save any newsfeed item, from photos of last Friday night to status updates. Call it your social To Do list.
5. What happens when you put your photo online…
In viral news, a fifth grade teacher took to the internet this week to show her students what happens when you put your photo online. In 24 hours alone, this photo had been shared more than 13,000 times on Facebook. The photo also made it to Reddit, where users drew upon some creativity in a bid to help her experiment continue. The result? An impressive suite of Nicolas Cage Photoshop masterpieces and a lesson in internet security well taught.
