As if the social network with the biggest variety of ways to post a piece of content was king, Instagram's released another new feature. This new system allows creators to take clips from their IGTV videos to post to the main news feed. Instagram said they did this so that "you can preview IGTV videos in your feed."
The newest update to WhatsApp seems to be moving the messaging service closer to that of its associated brand partners. In an effort to curb the misuse of the platform around the world, the app will soon have a limit of five forwards for every unique message. At this moment it's not clear how lenient the algorithm for this limit will be. For example, what if I changed just one letter - is that a different message?
The proof is in the pudding when it comes to suggested end-to-end encryption of a single messaging system between Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Today a statement from Facebook suggests that they're "working on making more of our messaging products end-to-end encrypted and considering ways to make it easier to reach friends and family across networks." But it's not that sentence that's important - it's the one that comes right after it that tells me what I suspect is probably true.
Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram messaging will be joined together, as the social network pulls together the various apps and services it owns. The shift will present a considerable architectural challenge for Facebook engineers, though the expectation is that - at least initially - end-users won't necessarily see any difference.
In addition to meddling with elections, helping spread fake news, and violating user privacy, Facebook has also been repeatedly accused of either being a venue for inciting dissent or not doing enough to give users a voice. It seems that Facebook will be answering both with just a single new feature: Community Actions. At its most basic, it will become the social network’s own version of a petition platform, letting supporters discuss and gather other Facebook users to their causes, causes that could give Facebook even more headaches than it already has.
Tech companies love redefining words. Network carriers, for example, have made “unlimited” mean “limited” and Twitter has apparently turned “private” into “public”. Granted, the social networking giant pins the blame on a bug that affected only their Android-using population, but more than the worrying nature of the bug itself, it’s the fact that the bug has been active for years that should be cause for concern. And the fact that Twitter isn’t even aware of the scope of the bug isn’t reassuring either.
A new Slack Logo appeared this week, courtesy of a design language made to take on the future. The new logo is simpler, the new logo is more flat, the new logo is far more versatile. According to Slack PR, "A good reason to change a logo is that it’s not doing the job you want it to do—and because a simpler, more distinctive evolution of it could do that job better."
The word “timeline” itself suggests something chronological in nature. Back when social networks were simpler and less assuming, that was definitely the case. These days, however, they have redefined timelines to be anything but chronological, forcing you to see something that may have happened days ago just because it’s trending. Twitter is, fortunately, giving users back the ability to decide what they want to see first, but its wording makes it clear what its preference really is.
A recent survey with Tapatalk suggested that the end of social networking may be near - or at least it may be the end of trust in said networks. Before you drop too deep into the findings, remember here that Tapatalk is a Forum-centric business - because of this, they've got a pretty good reason to suggest forums are on the uptake. Assuming they're completely on-the-level, the survey's results are pretty gosh-darned interesting, and unexpected.
![Instagram changed your feed, and users are seriously unhappy [Update: Rolled back]](https://c.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/instagram-0-1280x720.jpg)
Instagram has updated its app with a new way to scroll through photos, and users are seriously unimpressed. Gone is the familiar scrolling UI that Instagram has used from the start, with friends' photos and videos posted in a long timeline. In its place is a whole lot of tapping to move through the feed.
Facebook has launched a tool allowing users to check if they were among the 6.8 million people whose private photos may have been exposed to third-party apps, the latest in the social network's ongoing series of data lapses. News of the security goof broke last week, with Facebook admitting that its photo API had been giving much greater access to user images than intended - including even photos that had never been shared.
Facebook has probably become one of the most suspected, even hated, tech companies of late. It may have even managed to surpass Google to some extent. But the infamy and exodus that Facebook is now being subjected to is really just the height of a trend that has been happening lately. YouTube stars are burning out or exploding in spectacularly distasteful ways. Twitter’s 280-character expansion got the cold shoulder reception. Tumblr dug its own grave in trying to impress Apple. And Instagram and Snapchat seem to be locked into copying each other. The fire that drove social media’s growth has seemingly been reduced to smoldering embers and users are either jumping ship to other networks or quitting outright. But it’s not for the reasons that you might think.