Facebook is testing video with autoplay sound (TechCrunch, 8/23/16)

Oh come on, like you weren’t assuming this was going to happen at some point in the very near future. This is absolutely being pushed by advertisers, who are likely willing to pay just a little bit more for the sound to be on as soon as a video enters your eyeline. As I’ve said before, Facebook learned nothing from MySpace and is making all the same UX mistakes its predecessor did.

Pinterest Buys Instapaper, the Popular ‘Read Later’ App (Wired, 8/23/16)

Strip out all the hoopla about shopping habits and such and Pinterest is, at its core, a link-saving app, the next evolution of delicious and others. It has its own functionality that’s more geared to saving and sharing news stories as opposed to waffle recipes or costume designs and the acquisition of Instapaper (I use competitor Pocket myself) should help those along, opening up even more user data.

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Helping users easily access content on mobile (Google Webmaster Blog, 8/23/16)

That sound you heard was thousands of publishers crying out at once. Half the interstitials I come across these days are for a publication’s own email newsletter, so they’re going to have to bring their ads into compliance if they don’t want to get dinged.

Buzzfeed Divides Its News and Entertainment Divisions in Company-Wide Reorganization (Vanity Fair, 8/23/16)

Yes, the shift to video is scary to those who write. There’s a lot of speculation about what this means in terms of the company as a whole but the repercussions of the divisions won’t likely be felt for a while. More here.

Facebook suspends Domain Insights, changing rules of the road for new publishers (Digiday, 8/22/16)

Yeah, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion someone mentions in the story, which is that by cutting off access to metrics around how site content is performing on Facebook, the social network is saying publishers need to post natively there if they want those sorts of insights.

Twitter’s new button lets you accept private messages from your website (TechCrunch, 8/24/16)

Still waiting on Twitter to roll out messaging as a stand-alone app, though, which would make management of DMs that much easier.

Inside Backstage: YouTube’s plan to bring photos, polls, and text to the video service (VentureBeat, 8/24/16)

Interesting move by YouTube to try and provide some additional value for creators who want to reinforce connections with the subscriber bases they’ve spent years building up. Considering the one big thing that keeps coming up when asked why some are leaving for Snapchat is “ability to share different stuff” this makes a lot of sense. But it will only keep making sense as long as the viewer base remains loyal to the YouTube channel and doesn’t actively begin to push creators to other platforms.

One thought on “Facebook Autoplay Videos, Google SEO Changes and More: Quick Takes for 8/24/16

  1. A-ha moment while reading your summaries. You call Pinterest a ‘link-sharing app’. A couple days ago I blogged about if Pinterest was making a move to take over some of Evernote’s territory of being an archive. But now I realize that Pinterest is a link-sharing app, not an article-saving app, thus it won’t really encroach on Evernote.

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