In the last, festive week of social media news, Instagram surprises us all with a new feature, a company release an app that turns likes into money and Facebook tries to get rid of the catfishes that plague the social site for good.
Instagram’s Christmas Surprise
Instagram has released a commenting feature that can only be accessed after five seconds of looking at the post. The social site is renowned for testing new features on users before deciding whether to add them or not, but this one seems to have gone unnoticed and wasn’t even announced before being rolled out! An ‘Add a Comment’ box now appears at the bottom where users can leave their feedback or message on a photo. Although, it’s a minor update, this means serious business for those that want engagement on their posts. It seems Instagram is upping its game among the social marketing giants.
Likes for Crypto-Cash
In the bid to move social media away from small moments of personal gratification, Selfllery have announced their app that turns your likes into cryptocurrency. The app – Selfllery – gives you a token every time you receive a like that can be redeemed in the app’s store or donated to charity! People are rewarded for their visual content and the more active a user is, the more the likes and tokens are worth! The currency is awarded immediately through the app’s involvement with the new technology blockchain and by May next year rewarded users can spend their money in the online market.
Facebook’s Facial Recognition
Have you ever seen your profile picture being used by another Facebook account? It has happened to more people than you’d think and the social media giant is finally taking action against the copycats. The same facial recognition that helps you quickly tag your friends in photos is being updated and moulded so that if your face is found in someone’s photo, you’ll get a notification about it. Therefore, if an account has your photos under their name, you will be able to see it, but only if they’ve chosen to publicly share the image. Eventually Facebook will roll out an improvement of the feature that finds your face in images that aren’t tagged and notify you. This is another serious move to the well-being of its user, with Facebook improving more of its features to help the privacy of users, including an option to ignore another person’s messages, instead of noticeably blocking the person altogether.
