Check out this week’s summary of all the latest social media news, including lots of changes and new features for Facebook and Twitter:
- Facebook Paper app teams with TED for content – last week Facebook announced a partnernship with the Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference, bringing TED-related content to the Paper app (re/code)
- Facebook lets you test its Android Messenger app early – Facebook is letting users of its Messenger for Android app test early versions of the product after joining its beta program via the Google Play store (re/code)
- Facebook unveils Hack, a new programming language for writing code faster – in an attempt to speed up writing and testing code, Facebook built a new programming language called Hack; it’s been in use for a year at Facebook, but was released last Thursday as open source (GigaOM)
- Twitter launches easy tool that finds your first Tweet – in celebration of its 8th birthday, last week Twitter launched #FirstTweet, which helps users find the first message they ever sent on the site (TIME)
- Twitter rolls out easier, faster video playback – it just got easier for Twitter users to watch videos; a new platform for hosting video on Twitter gives iPhone and Android phone users previews of video clips in their feeds, and allows them to play clips with a single click (NY Times)
- Twitter kills its music app, which never got much play – last week Twitter announced that it’s shutting down the mobile music app (a music discovery service) that it launched last year (PC World)
- Twitter gives up on encrypting direct messages, at least for now – Twitter had been working on encrypting direct messages to prevent “unauthorized snooping,” but then dropped the project earlier this year (The Verge)
- Twitter adds Tweet view counts to iOS app – Twitter is experimenting with a new feature that will allow users to see how many times their individual tweets were viewed by others; for now the feature is only showing up on the iOS app (PC Mag)
Any social media updates that we missed? Let us know in the comments below.
