Social Tech Weekly – Jan 16, 2017

Europe experiences an active week with social tech with UK increasing the prices of apps up 25% due to the weak Pound and Germany taking extra measures to eliminate fake news on Facebook. Speaking of Facebook the mega platform is charging in full support of VR with Zuck announcing in court that the company will likely invest more than $250m in the sector.

Tweeting a different tune: Twitter ditches Vine for Vine Camera, phases out commerce

Twitter has shut down Vine, putting itself instead on the pedestal as a social network for short videos. Rebranding the former Vine app to Vine Camera, all videos recorded will be shorter than 6.5 seconds. Twitter has already turned off all sharing, liking, commenting activity on Vine- download your videos before the official close, Vine users! In other news the social network featuring the iconic blue bird is slowly getting rid of its commerce operation and stepping away from the sector. You will see ‘Buy’ buttons decreasing although the platform will continue to offer donation transactions to charitable causes. It seems Twitter is also stepping up their game in getting more visuals circulating the network by encouraging users to post a tweet when they’ve updated their profile pictures.

In God we trust- all others must bring data: LinkedIn partners with DataSift

LinkedIn wants to know what its community is buzzing about and has called upon DataSift findings to target their ads more effectively. DataSift was founded in 2007 by Nick Halstead and produces what the company calls, ‘human data’- human generated information shared across social networks. DataSift has the other big social names under its portfolio from Facebook to Twitter to Instagram to YouTube. LinkedIn hopes that the partnership will mean better and more active marketing in their network.

Takin’ it up an app: Google takes on Fabric, Twitter’s app development platform

Google is taking in Fabric under its Google Developer Products Group- how much they are paying to acquire Fabric has so far not been disclosed. Fabric is meant to join in and work with the company’s Firebase application development platform team. Fabric has under its hat something called Twitter Kit for distributing mobile applications, and users will also be able to log in to their apps via Twitter. More than 580,000 app developers have downloaded Fabric, proving the platform to be a formidable one.

New face: LinkedIn’s new desktop features includes chatbots

The desktop version of LinkedIn is de-cluttering and will bring you chatbots, a search bar and improved communication abilities. In this version users will find navigation a lot more convenient. Chats are easily accessible now between users along with chatbots that will encourage conversation by suggesting topics and so on. The social business network is clearly making a play for users to be more engaged and invested in their activities on it.

Crossing over: Snapchat’s looking at your offline purchases

Snapchat is collaborating with Oracle Data Cloud, an offline data provider that will pass on data to Snapchat pertaining to your offline purchases. This is so Snapchat can better determine which ads should be presented to their users on the platform. Oracle states it has information on more than 110 million households, $2 trillion in consumer spending and more than 1500 brands, and collects data through a variety of methods. Oracle’s other partnerships include Pinterest and YouTube.  

Media Optimized @ meo.social