Here is a quick roundup of some of the latest happenings in the social media world.
This week, Facebook partnered with Save.org (Suicide Awareness Voices of Education), to study the activity of suicide victims on the social network. The goal is to better identify and understand the warning signs of suicide attempts.
The company also started experimenting with a new tool for Fan Page owners and administrators. Located at the top of their news feed, it lets them keep track of their active ads and campaigns, as well as the number of likes generated on that day or during the current month.
Google Drive users now have new options for Slides. They can create, edit, comment and present their slideshows without the need for an internet connection. Changes will be automatically updated when they are back online.
“If you already have offline editing for Docs enabled, you don’t have to change anything to work with Slides offline,” says software engineer Michael Frederick on the Official Google Enterprise Blog. “If not, you can turn it on for Slides (and Docs) by following these instructions. Note that to work offline you’ll need to be using Chrome or ChromeOS. And for those of you who use Google Sheets, we’re working to make offline spreadsheets available as well -- stay tuned.”
The company also updated the Google+ Followers widget for Blogger. Preview has been added, allowing users to see what the widget looks like before adding it to their blogs. The widget can also be resized and set for different blog background colors.
Quora is expanding its horizon. The team behind the Q&A platform announced on Wednesday the launch of its new blogging service. Members can create their blogs in a few seconds and take advantage of Quora’s “viral distribution and the same engagement through votes and comments.”
The power of Quora distribution is driven by the relationship between topics and feed:
- On Quora, each question, answer, and blog post is categorized by relevant topics. There are over 300,000 topics to choose from.
- Each Quora topic is followed by readers -- hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people.
- The topics that you follow determine what you see in your Quora feed.
- For writers, this means that anyone who shares your topic interest may see your writing, no matter how many people follow you personally.
This is different than other platforms where your audience is dependent on how many people follow you personally.
In addition, because of the way that Quora works (i.e., feed, search, the topic system, other distribution channels), your old posts and answers remain discoverable and re-discoverable as Quora's audience grows.”
(Source: Quora Blog)
Quora for iPhone 2.2 was also released on the same day.
On Thursday, Twitter unveiled a new mobile app for iPhone and iPod Touch. Vine, which had been acquired by the company in October 2012, allows users to capture and share short (six seconds) looping videos.
“Posts on Vine are about abbreviation — the shortened form of something larger,” says Dom Hofmann, Vine’s co-founder and GM, on the official blog of the startup. “They're little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life. They're quirky, and we think that's part of what makes them so special.”
The app is free and can be downloaded from the App Store.
Do you use Posterous for your blog? If so, it might be time to back up your content and choose another service. The Twitter-owned platform seems to have stopped accepting new sign-ups.
WordPress announced on Friday that its 3.6 version would be available in the Spring. The focus of this new version is on content editing, with special attention paid to autosaving, revisions, editorial workflows, editing, and post formats. The plan is also to improve the user interface for custom menus.
Other social media news
The team behind interactive storytelling tool Meograph released three new features this week: precision video selection, map drag-n-drop and longer narration.
RebelMouse users can now add navigation to their sites with Rebel Nav. With this tool, they can create RebelMouse pages for specific topics or tags found in @mentions, hashtags, and tags they added to posts. They also have the ability to redirect those pages to any outside URL (e.g., a blog).
The Content & Feeds tab in the dashboard has also been updated. Users can filter Twitter feeds by username and hashtag, connect additional Instagram accounts and hashtags, and set RSS feeds to publish or go to draft.
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