15 Aug Twitter Moments Opens Up and Facebook Blocks Ad Blockers | Social You Should Know
Twitter Moments opens up to more creators and Facebook has a new strategy to block ad blocking technology on desktop. All that and more in this week’s Social You Should Know.
Twitter Moments Opens Up to More Creators
Twitter’s Moments, which uses curated tweets, videos and images to tell stories, has traditionally been produced by Twitter’s in-house team or select publishers. It launched about a year ago and can be found by clicking on the lightning bolt when a user opens up the platform. Twitter is now going to let a broader group of influential people and brands create Moments and the plan is to eventually allow all users to create stories. Seems like the trend these days, telling stories that is. If you recall, just last week, Instagram launched their “Stories” product which is strikingly similar to Snapchat Stories. Check out new Twitter Moments from influential people like Michelle Lee, Editor in Chief of Allure magazine and Olympic gymnast, Simone Biles.
Facebook Blocks Ad Blockers
Facebook has found a way to render all ad blocking technology useless on its desktop website and it has a good reason to do so. According to an article on the subject in The New York Times, Facebook’s ad revenue in 2015 came in just short of a cool $18 billion (gulp, billion) that generated $3.69 billion in profit. Facebook has employed technology site wide on desktop preventing blockers from distinguishing between ad and non-ad content, rendering ad blocking technology useless since all content would load. In conjunction with this, and in an effort to give users more control over their ad experience, Facebook also announced updates to the ad preferences tool. User preferences won’t completely extinguish ads, but it’s more than most sites offer. Thanks for throwing users a bone, Facebook.
Instagram Testing a New Feature
Is a “Save Draft” feature coming to Instagram? Maybe one day. But for now, it’s just in testing. For reference, this feature works when a user tries to go backwards in the app. Instead of losing their work, they are given a message which reminds them their work will be discarded if they continue or it offers the option to “Save Draft”. According to Tech Crunch, some users reported seeing this feature on Instagram in July and recently conversations about it online have reignited, signaling a possible roll out. But Instagram has confirmed it’s just an experiment for the time being. Hopefully it does roll out in the not-so-distant future as sentiment thus far has been very positive.
