This week, we’re visiting the ever-evolving Twitterscape, exploring the surge in Mastodon members, and revealing the embarrassing photos on our iCloud.
Musk’s erratic “leadership” continues to cause chaos
Monday: a potential Twitter paywall. Wednesday: verification confusion where a new badge, consisting of a grey check mark and the word “official” under handles began appeared, but vanished hours later. The latest drama: Musk’s fumbled town hall with advertisers and a wave of blue checkmark “verified” impersonators 🫠
Mastodon or mega-don? The social site is growing…
In the wake of Twitter’s takeover by Elon Musk, the decentralised social media site Mastodon has seen a record number of sign-ups, with 233K new users in the last week alone. However, Mastodon’s infrastructure has been struggling to accommodate the influx of these new users.
Meta’s doubling down on their NFT push 📲
A select group of creators in the US now have the ability to not only display NFTs on their Instagram profiles, but to also mint and sell them to their followers. Meta is currently testing their end-to-end digital collectibles toolkit on the Polygon blockchain, and even expanding it to include support for video digital collectibles.
What’s in your camera roll? 👀
Picture this: someone finds your phone and threatens to leak all your photos unless you give them £5,000. What would you do? Panic and pay or let them share your pictures with the world? This trend has been all over our feeds this week! Most creators have decided to take matters into their own hands, using this audio to share the photos themselves. We’ve seen some weird and wonderful contributions, from the user who captures every time they turn their straighteners off, to the king of Christmas himself, Santa Claus, exposing his camera roll. Another take on the trend is those who choose to part with their money instead. Can you blame them? We wouldn’t want someone leaking our text messages either… Our favourite videos from this trend? The people who exclusively take pictures of their pets.
Wanna go live together?
YouTube will soon be rolling out ‘Go Live Together’, so creators can go live with another user. This could be a great opportunity for your brand to host a Q&A or team up with a creator. Twitch’s latest launch, ‘Guest Star’, though similar to YouTube’s, will actually allow up to 5 creators and fans to go live together.
Amazon Fashion’s new AR shopping experience 🕶
Integrating Snap’s AR Shopping Lenses into Amazon Fashion’s asset library will allow people to virtually try-on thousands of eyewear brands. It will also enable brands to quickly build and update the lenses providing shoppers with accurate product details and availability.
Are chat communities the future of social media?
As the landscape of major social networks continues to evolve (👀 at you, Twitter and Meta), users are looking for new ways to socialise online. Enter community chats such as WhatsApp Communities and Substack Chat, which has been described as ‘your own private social network where you make the rules,’ not Elon.
