Welcome to another edition of this week on social media where we round up some of the top stories in the world of social media.
Facebook to relaunch 3D posts
Kicking of this week with the social media giant Facebook, and there is news that Facebook will be relaunching its 3D posts. This makes sense considering that VR is a big part of Facebook’s future plans and 3D is kind of a first step towards it.
The company recently introduced 3D posts, letting people see and interact with 3D digital objects directly in the News Feed. Today, Facebook is rolling out support for the industry-standard glTF 2.0 file format for Facebook 3D posts. This means more textures, lighting, and realistic rendering techniques, for creators.
With glTF 2.0 support, it’s not only easier for creators to share their 3D designs on Facebook. It’s also easier than ever for users to share the posts across more platforms.
The new Graph API endpoints come with 3D Post support so developers can build seamless 3D sharing into any app – letting people share interactive objects or scenes directly to Facebook with just a click.
Google launches AMP, it’s version of stories
Google is the latest tech company to jump on the ‘Stories’ bandwagon, as it’s “AMP-ing up” its Accelerated Mobile Pages feature with its own version of Stories. The new format, AMP Stories allows publishers to combine text, images, videos, and graphics in single posts that can be indexed and surfaced in search. As a format, AMP Stories was built for mobile – as content is fast-loading, just like other AMP-ecosystem formats – but Google has also added support for desktop, allowing users to view and share content on different devices.
In a recent blog post, Google AMP’s Product manager, Rudy Galfi, explained that AMP Stories will not have advertising from the outset, Google wants to allow publishers to be able to advertise within their content. More importantly, publishers will be able to keep 100% of the ad revenue from the feature. Recognising that advertising is a big part of any publisher’s monetisation strategy, Galfi explained that “Advertising is very important. Really great reporting and journalism needs to be funded somehow.”
Twitter pulls support on its Mac app
Twitter has announced that it is killing support for the app in about a month’s time. The company has already pulled the app from the Apple App Store and the web.
A Tweet on February 17 said that the app won’t be supported in 30 days, so don’t expect to be using it beyond mid-March 2018. It’s possible that the app won’t be missed anyway, as it received an average score of 1.7 out of 5 on the App Store for its lacklustre support. The app frustrated users, as it has been clear for some time that Twitter hasn’t put much effort into keeping it alive. Twitter even outsourced its updates to an external software house back in 2015.
Snapchat copies Instagram with animated gifs
A few weeks ago, Instagram announced a partnership with GIPHY that brought animated GIF stickers to Stories. The feature has now also appeared on Snapchat, following a similar partnership deal with GIPHY. As of Tuesday this week, Snapchat users will be able to use almost an unlimited amount of animated GIF stickers in their Stories, courtesy of the biggest GIF library on the Internet.
The new animated stickers can be found in Snapchat‘s Sticker Picker by tapping the sticker icon, and searching the GIPHY library. Users can of course also use any of the original Snapchat stickers if they want. The stickers from GIPHY retain all the same characteristics as Snapchat’s own – i.e. the ability to add more than one, scale, or delete stickers.
That’s it for this week do come back next week for more top stories from the world of social media.