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Tumblr Belatedly Adds @Mention Alerts, Long After Other Social Sites (ReadWrite)
Tumblr wants to make sure you know when you’re mentioned by friends on the Yahoo-owned blogging service. For at least four months, users have been able to use the @-sign to autocomplete friends’ Tumblr usernames and automatically link to their blogs. The new wrinkle in the feature is that now when you’re mentioned, Tumblr notifies you on your Activity page. CNET The company made the announcement Tuesday with a Tumblr-appropriate GIF depiction of how the new mention feature works. The mentions addition comes a day after the network battled with hours of errors that affected a number of users. Mashable Although user notifications are brand new on the site, mentions were a hidden feature or “Easter Egg” on the site beforehand. The move is a part of a greater effort to turn the platform into more of a social network. The Verge Instagram notably also added the ability to tag users in posts this past year — a move that makes it easier to browse photos organized by person, but which arguably also provides one more online identity to monitor and curate. Tumblr, however, won’t likely encounter any blowback for its implementation of people-tagging. TechCrunch The company says notifications will now appear for others both in-stream on the main Dashboard as well as on the “Activity” page, where users today see things like follows, likes, reblogs and more.
Journalists Criticize Woman for Live-Tweeting Her Cancer Experience, Incur Internet Wrath (AllTwitter)
Husband and wife journalists Bill Keller of The New York Times and Emma Keller of The Guardian published recent opinion pieces that took issue with one Lisa Bonchek Adams, a sufferer of stage four breast cancer who has been tweeting and blogging about her experience with the illness. Both articles questioned Adams’s “decision to live her cancer onstage,” as Bill Keller puts it. Twitter’s, and the Internet’s at large, response to the Kellers? How dare you.
Visually Announces $8.1 Million Funding Round (SocialTimes)
Tuesday, the infographic marketplace Visually announced it has raised $8.1 million in a Series A financing round, led by Crosslink Ventures. The site has seen 10-fold growth since launching its Project Center in June of last year.
Move Over, Nightly News: Snapchat, Instagram and Vine are Here (The Daily Dot)
As the pace that we consume media and information continues to quicken, traditional news media is looking at new, shorter formats for getting stories out there. “There’s a very large audience that’s accustomed to these very short videos,” Lerer Ventures partner Eric Hippeau told Bloomberg News.
Facebook Sponsored Stories are Dead: The Rise of Ubiquitous Social Context (AllFacebook)
While Facebook states, “Marketers will no longer be able to purchase sponsored stories separately,” of equal note is that actions taken by friends and fans will be baked into all other ad formats across Facebook as a part of this change. Facebook announced, “Stories about social actions your friends have taken, such as liking a page or checking in to a restaurant, [are] now eligible to appear next to all ads shown to friends on Facebook.”
Facebook’s News Feed Changes Will Require New Marketing Strategies (AdAge)
In related news, the news that Facebook is changing its news feed algorithm to deliver more “news” has marketers worried about maintaining reach and frequency on the platform. The changes — especially noticeable on mobile — make Facebook more Twitter-like, giving much more weight to links from outside the site, rather than the personal updates that many have associated with Facebook.
Google Hangout Face Tracking App Will Tell You When to Smile More (AppNewser)
Part art project, part computing experiment, the US+ Google Hangout app from artists and programmers Lauren McCarthy and Kyle McDonald is an artificial intelligence facial recognition app designed to help you improve your video chat skills. It’s a personal, real-time coach for all of your video chats if you don’t mind giving up your privacy to a machine analyzing your speech and body patterns.
Facebook Could Launch its Flipboard-Like News Reader This Month (Re/code)
After years of experimentation, cancellations and redesigns, Facebook looks like it is finally going to launch in the coming weeks a news reading service built for mobile devices. The product is known as “Paper,” according to a source familiar with the matter, and it is similar to Flipboard, a buzzy mobile-focused news reading app.
New York City School Officials Release Social Media Guidelines (ABC)
New York City’s Department of Education has issued a new code of conduct to protect students online. That’s because with more and more people establishing Facebook and social media pages, some universities and new employers are scrutinizing the pages.
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