Twitter is getting a bit of a redesign across a number of different versions today. Though this redesign isn't anything drastic - you'll still know Twitter when see it, in other words - it does make quite a few quality of life improvements across the board. These new features and tweaks are coming to iOS, Android, TweetDeck, and Twitter Lite, though you may not see them right away.
Twitter has toyed with the idea of offering some kind of premium, possibly subscription, option for its platform, company CEO Jack Dorsey has revealed. Though the company isn't ready to introduce such a service, it seems the option is still very much in play and may be something users see introduced at some point in the future. Dorsey talked about the idea during Twitter's shareholder meeting yesterday.
Vine may be dead, but it's still managing to cause headaches for some former users, with warnings that some registered email addresses were inadvertently exposed. Twitter, Vine's owner, announced it was pulling the plug on the six-second video clip social network back in October 2016, though it still maintains an online archive of all the publicly shared footage. It's that Vine Archive that is causing headaches now.
You may be the product when you're using Twitter, but the social network is adding new privacy and advertising settings to help those tweeting adjust who gets their data. Launched today, and joined by an updated Privacy Policy, the suite of new tools will roll out to Twitter users over the next few days. It also allows some insight into what Twitter has decided your interests are.
Twitter and the NFL have a history together, one that used to provide Twitter users with live streaming NFL games for free. The two entities have announced yet another partnership, one that will revolve around a live show that Twitter will then offer to its own users weekly. There's one big difference between this new partnership and the ones from days gone by, however: there won't be any free live streaming football games, with the NFL instead providing video clips, pre-game coverage, and a 30-minute 'live digital show.'
Just live streaming these days is no longer enough. People seem to be hyping up 360-degree live streaming, whether or not there are enough people with the devices to properly enjoy them. Of course, that's no reason not to let social media broadcasters do what they want or need to do, which is why Periscope introduced Live 360 video late last year. Now after months of limited testing, Twitter has opened the floodgates to iOS and Android users at long last.
If you've been following the Nuggs for Carter saga on Twitter (and let's be honest: it's been hard to ignore), then you might like to know that it appears to be done today. The whole ordeal kicked off when Carter Wilkerson asked Wendy's how many retweets he'd need to win a free year of chicken nuggets. Wendy's reply offered a magic number of 18 million, sparking one of the biggest social media stories of the year thus far.
Today we're having a peek at the latest step-by-step process a person would have to take on Android or iOS to post a GIF on Instagram. Strictly speaking, there are no ".GIF" files on Instagram at the moment - any that are, aren't animated. There is a way to deliver the moving image picture that is the GIF to Instagram, however, in the form of a tiny converted video clip.
Roku has announced the launch of the Twitter live streaming video channel, enabling users to watch videos hosted on the service. The Twitter channel, as with its video app for other platforms, presents both the video and a relevant tweet stream, giving viewers the best of both worlds. This represents a big launch for Roku, bringing an often requested video service to the popular streaming set top boxes and sticks. This video app has already been available on Apple TV and Android TV, among others.
Fake news, meet real news. Social media has recently come under fire for its role in the spread of fake news, and various networks have tried to address the problem in different ways. Twitter seems to have opted to fight fake news by increasing the amount of its real news content. That will be via a soon to be announced partnership with Bloomberg, which, among other things, is expected ti bring in the ad revenues Twitter is in dire need of.
The folks at Instagram have announced that they've hit a major milestone in the brief history of their existence. They've racked up a cool 700-million monthly active users, with growth between 600M and 700M happening at a rate greater than any other 100M span they had before. Of course there were other major events in the history of this photo-based app, but none so supermassive as their most recent set of four months.
Twitter today released a letter to shareholders documenting the progress it made in Q1 2017. Unfortunately for Twitter, the letter doesn't hold many surprises for those who have been following its business side for a while now. The good news is that things like daily active users are up year-over-year, but the bad news is that Twitter is still having a hard time making money from those users.
