Social Tech Weekly – Feb 6, 2017
Registration for Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference officially opens as Chan Zuckerberg Initiative donates $3.6 M to the Bay Area’s housing crisis. Also making waves this week is Amazon’s Alexa widening its reach with the device’s voice service available to Germany and the UK. It is, however, not the best week Twitter’s seen in the stock market. Let's begin this week's show down, shall we?
Easy as 1,2,3: PayPal payment on Slack
Carrying cash, going to ATMs, and card usage will soon become a bother with the mobile payment revelation. The newest kid on the block is a collaboration between PayPal and Slack. Money is transferred with a sentence as simple as ‘/PayPal send $5 to @Jennifer’. This comes after Slack winning best startup of the year at the Crunchies. Is this just a glimpse of cool features the company has planned?
Put a leash on it: Twitter’s extra measures on harmful content
Social platforms have been tightening regulations on inappropriate content and Twitter is cracking down on bullies spreading harassment and abuse on the network. Twitter will face this issue by stopping people who have been permanently suspended from ever entering the network; introducing a safe search feature; and putting most relevant and quality replies to the forefront, which keeps potentially abusive tweets lower on the ladder.
G’day!: Facebook gets a weather tool, tightens ad policies
Facebook steps up its game with new ad policies on user targeting to put a stop to advertisers discriminating profiles of their audience. Factors such as age, gender, race, location to name a few, should create fair play for all. Also new with the giant network is a weather tool in its app that will provide you quick weather summaries with a neat feature to set notifications for weather alerts- gone are the days you’re without an umbrella when it’s going to pour nor your sunblock when it’s scorching hot out.
That was easy: Pinterest does visual search
Pinterest’s new features will make things a lot more exciting on the platform. The visual search will scan your pictures and directly search for pins with similar items featured on them. The feature is introduced as a means to make things more user friendly, taking a bit of human initiative out of the equation by carrying out the searches for you. Impulse purchasing, here we come!
Keeping it real: Google’s WebVR for Chrome
We can now discover VR content easily using Google Chrome. The big G has officially made the feature available. Companies and content creators will now be able to create VR experiences using WebVR, which also allows websites to host 360 degree view videos- Daydream headset is, of course, supported, with plans to support additional headsets in near future. Viva la VR.
Media Optimized @ meo.social