Weekly Digital Wrap: 30th March 2015
In this week's digital wrap, Instagram's collage App 'Layout', the latest Facebook developments from F82015 and Twitter's new live-streaming App 'Periscope'
Instagram introduces a Collage App
Instagram has introduced Layout, a standalone App for creating collages of photos by easily combining multiple images into one photo.
Facebook updates it's video sharing features
Facebook has updated the API that allows users to share video on their page. The upgrades are designed to enable users to better reach their target audience. The improvements are as follows:
New API Features
Control:
– Restrict the audience of a video by age, gender, and location
– Publish directly to a Page without distributing in News Feed
– Set an expiration date for a video and retain insights after takedown (currently in beta)
– Manage featured videos and playlists for a Page
Customization:
– Add custom thumbnails for videos
– Enable subtitles in multiple locales
Other improvements:
– Ensure faster, more reliable uploads with resumable uploading
– Subscribe to real-time updates during video encoding process
Facebook Messenger to integrate directly with Apps
At F8, Facebook's Developer Conference, they announced the ability for developers to easily create Apps for its Messenger platform. With more than 40 new apps, people can enhance their conversations with GIFs, photos, videos, audio clips and more directly within the Messenger platform.
They also previewed the release of Businesses on Messenger where "people can have rich and personal conversations with businesses. For example, after purchasing something from a website, people can choose to receive updates in Messenger and continue their conversation with the business in the app."
Facebook Embedded Video Player
And you can now easily embed any public Facebook video to your website. By clicking the the Embed Video button at the top right of the video you can grab the code to use for embedding on your website.
Twitter Launches Periscope for live-streaming
Fresh on the heels of Meerkat launching their live-streaming app, Twitter has released it's own streaming app Periscope. No doubt this release was directly related to Twitter's decision to block Meerkat's auto-Tweet feature a couple of weeks back.
Periscope allows users to live-broadcast video from their mobile and directly post to Twitter. Users can add a title to the broadcast and decide which followers to broadcast to.
Digital Articles of Interest
Google Working on Way to Pay Bills Directly Inside Gmail via Re/Code
Toward Viewability: You Can't Count What You Haven't Measured via Think With Google
Kiwis take augmented reality to Texas to encourage immigration via Idealog
Digital Marketing Metrics the Experts Measure (And Why You Should Too) via Social Media Today
The Science behind Landing Page Designs via Awwwards.com