Weekly wrap: what’s hot in digital
This week we take a look at the end of Google Authorship in search, Twitter’s refreshed analytics dashboard and Instagram’s new high-quality time-lapse app.
Google Drops Authorship markup from Search
Google ditched photo authorship not too long ago and have now done away with it entirely. Authorship was Google’s feature of connecting the author of content with their Google+ profile in search results. It looked like this:
image via searchenginejournal.com
John Mueller a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google gave the following reasoning for stopping authorship:
“We’ve gotten lots of useful feedback from all kinds of webmasters and users, and we’ve tweaked, updated, and honed recognition and displaying of authorship information. Unfortunately, we’ve also observed that this information isn’t as useful to our users as we’d hoped, and can even distract from those results. With this in mind, we’ve made the difficult decision to stop showing authorship in search results.”
Various other reasons for the change have been suggested;
- that it was difficult to setup, therefore not widely used
- that it had a negative effect on Pay Per Click Ads
- Google’s testing showed it didn’t dramatically effect search results
Twitter launches Tweet Activity Dashboard
Twitter has recently introduced the Tweet Activity Dashboard to help users learn more about their tweets.
According to the Twitter blog users will be able to:
1. See how people engage with your Tweets in real time.
2. Compare your Tweet activity month over month and see how your Tweets trend over time.
3. Click on any Tweet to get a detailed view of the number of retweets, replies, favourites, follows or clicks it receives.
4. Download your Tweet metrics
This feature will no doubt be useful for companies to get a better understanding of how their followers interact with them on Twitter as well giving insights into ways to improve their social activities.
Instagram introduces Hyperlapse
Hyperlapse an app that helps to capture high-quality time lapse videos using inbuilt stabilization technology. Until now this technology had only been available for high performance equipment. Here is a video showing how it works:
Stabilization for Hyperlapse from Instagram from Instagram on Vimeo.