Shake Hands @Yandex + @Facebook #Explore

Google is an important entity of this century. I would rather say Google has become a basic necessity for all who want to know anything about everything. Without Google its difficult to imagine such a vast knowledge sphere around us. What Google does, is, it gives me the most relevant answers for my query/search. I cannot live without it. 

But what if their’s something more powerful than Google!

Well we don’t have to go out of this universe to search something of that much power and popularity . In Fact it’s right here on our planet. RIght below is the place where Google is lacking behind and is the second search engine based on its use.

photo courtesy : Ohmega1982/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

 

You are right ! Its Russia. 

In Russia, Google is the second search engine following by the king of this vertical, Yandex, which has a  60% popularity rate in this country.

 Due to this popularity, Yandex has collaborated with Facebook so that the big search engine of Russia can return better results to the users. According to this deal, Yandex has got a full access to the public data of the Facebook user’s . The data will include all the posts, comments, shares, likes , etc , leaving the private set of user’s data confidential to Facebook, thus not giving the access to the private user’s data to Yandex.

 

This deal is also important for Facebook Inc. so as to increase its reach and scope in Russia. Due to many competitors of Facebook in Russia,namely VK, Facebook is also lacking behind in the social media traffic generation in the country. 

Thus this collaboration will expand the horizons for both Yandex and Facebook for building a strong market in Russia for social media promotion.

Thankyou for reading it.

Explore more :).

The New Social Media @WeHeartIt #esm

Actions speak louder than words.

Perhaps, you won’t deny the fact that actions captured are much more louder and self-explanatory.

Yes ! You guessed it right. We are talking about pictures. Pictures that serve as the memories of life, that speaks about the moments in our life which we might have forgotten, the one’s that are special for us, the unforgettable time, we want to live again.

I myself have my own photo collection that i adore a lot and i go back to it whensoever i find a pinch of free breathtaking moment.

Well so in this era of networking where we can’t live without sharing the simplest illogical news of whether i had my breakfast or not on a social media site, Images describe everything that wish to say. It’s the picture through which the feelings are expressed in a way which we might not find words to explain.

Connecting to this, the image-based social networking league has got a new member on-board named, WE HEART IT.

We heart it, a San Francisco based company, launched in May, 2013, is a company with less than 20 employees.

This networking site has a canvas for the user that displays all the images from the users collection. The user can ‘Heart It’ any of their favourite image that they like and thus it will add up to the user’s collection and will automatically show up in their canvas.

Inspirational quotes are what you will see often printed on a photo at this image-based social media destination.Tags are also a facility provided to the users so as to arrange his/her images. Comments, though, are not allowed so as to counter the negative influences.

We Heart It is used by nearly 70-80% of users below the age 24. This implies its popularity among youngsters and this makes this place cool as for the youth of the world. People can also follow each other and thus networking is all happening here with the help of images.

We Heart It announced 20 million monthly active users and $8 millions in funding in the month of July.

I think these stats were enough for the Google Play Store team to declare it as the “Best App of 2013” accompanying a lot of great players in this app biz including Instagram.

That’s a huge achievement for a app that came just now in the market. Well we hope this becomes one of the best social media network for image-networking and till then shhh..

Men at Work @WeHeartIt

Enjoy this Platform and keep exploring !!

Good Day!!

Photos First Please @Twitter #Socialmedianews

Once Jimmy Fallon, (a serious comedian) said

I don’t even read the papers. I read ‘USA Today’ because it has color photos

 

Twitter, as we all are aware of, is laying a lot of stress these days on the use of media specifically images. The company’s updating its functioning every 15th day to get into the race of spreading the word through photos.

Twitter is speeding up its pace with the companies like Snapchat and Instagram and thus is continuing to be the believer of tweeting more photos and thus motivating people from around the world to share photos on this social media platform.

So what have they introduced now ?

Twitter has a brilliant application on iOS. Well that’s what they have focused upon.

Twitter has included a feature that automatically shows a user of this iOS app, his/her photo gallery instead of the same regular keyboard, thus allowing the user to choose a photo for the tweet that he is about to frame and update.

 

If the user does not want to include a photo in his/her tweet, they can click on the empty white text space which will pop up the keyboard directly as just the same old fashioned way as we use it.

Now this tries to push the user to share images in their tweets. Twitter is trying to find all possible ways to upload media files on its platform and generate more photo shares across oceans.

Well Twitter already has carried out a series of improvements regarding the photos vertical. Starting from the Twitter photo filters to the enhanced photo preview to the sharing of photos through direct messages, Twitter has done it all as to prove its existence, not only as a message sharing platform but also as a photo sharing social media platform.

So I would end this by saying that Tweet images now and flood your account with the best of your photos from your phone’s gallery.

Thank you Explorers . Have a good app time. 🙂

Moving out of China @Sina Weibo #socialmedia

Can social media be restricted ?

Well No !! No, but why ? Because its SOCIAL-MEDIA.

Social media is all about being social. It’s about connecting to the people around you, be it you neighbour next door or be it your boss sitting in his cabin 22 hours away from you in an alien country.

Social Media sees no boundary. It sees people, their concerns and their will to share.

That’s what the biggest social media platform of China is trying to do. Yes, you guessed it right , We are talking about Sina Weibo.

Sina Weibo, a Chinese micro blogging platform, connects people of China. Due to the strictness of law in china over media , people from all around the world are not able to sign up on this platform. The strict policies of the Chinese government is something that concerns me as to what is it that the Chinese community should not socialize.

Well Sina Weibo seems to have found a way to resolve this conflict. They have introduced a new feature which helps a user outside China to register through their Facebook account. Even the sharing of content from Sina Weibo to Facebook and vice-versa may be available to use with a Graph API.

This feature will enhance the sharing stats of this platform and thus will trigger more user engagement and boost up its growth internationally.The Chinese people cannot take the advantage of this feature as Facebook is blocked by the Firewall in China.

This benefit is currently available for Hong Kong’s and Taiwan’s users but Sina is expanding its network as time’s progressing.

No Internet, No Worry@Twitter #messaging

In this era of social media, where it has transformed into one of the necessity when it comes to the world of networking, one needs to stay alert and aware of the trends that are going on, worldwide. Well we have a lot of platforms that keeps us up to date with what’s going on each and every moment on this earth. One out of them is Twitter.

Twitter, that allows us to put a 140 words status aka Tweet, is often compared to text messaging that is again one of the closest and most used offline networking tool.

Yes, the focal difference between Text messaging and Twitter is the factor of internet connection. While Text messaging is enjoyed by almost everybody around the world without getting online, Twitter, on the other hand, is a online platform.

This makes it difficult for the people who own entry level mobile devices to stay up to date with the trending topics on Twitter.

Though Android and Ios has transformed the mobile industry, but out of those 230 million registered Twitter users, the number of the users with entry level devices, which of course do not have internet services, is pretty decent.

This got Twitter thinking!

So What did Twitter do?

Well Twitter announced its partnership with a Singapore based company, U2opia, which is also partnered with Facebook Inc, to bring Twitter to all those entry level devices, on which international users are not able to experience this service.

USSD, Unstructured Supplementary Service Data, is how U2opia provides this service. USSD does not supports graphics, videos, pictures, etc and so the users will only have the access to the trending topics based on their location. As to start this service, users will have to dial a simple code.

This service will kick- off in the first quarter of next year, that is 2014. Till then prepare your mind to join one of the booming social media community around the world.

Lets end this by quoting the words of the Chief Executive and Co-founder of U2opia, Sumesh Menon,

“For a lot of end users in the emerging markets, it’s going to be their first Twitter experience”

Stay Connected!!

Keep Exploring!! Take care. 🙂

‘Save for Later’ @Facebook #socialmedia

Everyday we come across hundreds of articles on Facebook. Out of those hundreds, a lot of articles flatter us with their catchy look and cheesey headings. But in this era of urbanisation, where technology is travelling in a bullet train, we hardly get time to read those full articles due to the busy schedule that we (have to) follow strictly.

Facebook Inc, a company that knows all about us, seems to understand our problem and thus is trying to develop a new way to help us read, share and enjoy all those lovely articles that we really want to go through.

The service is being referred to as the ” Save for Later ” option which will give us the access to offline reading of the shared link articles. This means that we can save all the content onto our device that are posted everyday on Facebook excessively. 

The company is testing this service and thus this feature is being acknowledged by some of the users in the mobile application. All the saved articles are listed next to the Facebook Apps block. So whenever a user clicks on the shared link article’s bookmark icon provided with the post, the article automatically moves to the offline reading folder, which can be accessed anytime as per your convenience.

Facebook is trying to grow its user engagement stats and thus is implementing a lot of changes that are content-driven. Few days back, the company added ” Stories to Share ” feature to all the new pages of the organisations. Even the tweaking of the News Feed Algorithms was implemented so as to provide the high quality content to the user.

This makes it crystal clear that Facebook is making its content-driven approach real strong and thus this is going to help the users find better content, the publisher get acknowledged for their articles and at last generating maximum user interaction for the company itself.

Though this feature is already a part of apps like Instapaper and Pocket, but having it in Facebook’s app would be a different experience and the users would want it as soon as possible. So Facebook should think of implementing it this time .

Lets enjoy the world of social media which is becoming more and more efficient and effective as the time’s progressing.

Have a Good Day and Explore SM!!

Virtual DJ left our party @Turntable.fm

Music has been one of those elements on earth which unites people irrespective of their location, cast, creed, and all the other lame discriminations that the most intelligent animal on this earth has segmented.

To work for this cause, Turntable.Fm was among one of the big brands that the whole world looked upon. This name undertook the job of bringing people under one (virtual) roof and uniting them all and perhaps inducing in them so many precious skills including Teamwork, Patience , Listening power and many more through the path of Music.

Founded in 2011, Turntable.fm, also termed as the ‘Virtual DJ’, gave the sole pleasure to feel that state of joy to over 600k users to join their music rooms where it was the users choice to play any song from the 2 million song list that existed on the platform. Listening to music on Turntable.fm was real fun and the best utilization of time as you never knew when your fellow virtual roommate would play a country club or hardcore Gangsta hip hop track.

Turn by turn, track by track, your ears always sincere towards the play with your heart and mind flowing into the sea of symphony and lyrical spoken content.

But if it was so popular and loved , So what was the need to shut it down?

The reason behind this is simple. “Lack of Funds to run this fun.”

The company was finding it difficult to generate revenues from this venture. Due to all those high royalties paid for the song rights, the company thought of closing down the business.

Does that mean that no Turntable now?

Turntable is something that is very much appreciated for its unique ideas. Though Turntable.fm is already closed, the company is coming up with Turntable Live to keep up the name of what once was a successful venture.

This new venture , Turntable live, will allow fans like us to chat directly to the artists and attend all sorts of virtual concerts. Would be an interesting thing to watch!!

Lets Pray for the success of this new venture by Turntable. Cheers!!

Tweak My News Feed @Facebook

Facebook has become a hub for sharing all the latest news, articles, celebrity talks and what not. The latest i can think of is the news related to an amazing person who’s unfortunately not with us anymore.

May God bless his soul !!

Well lets move on and talk why we’re here. ==> Facebook is tweaking its News Feed .

Yes you heard it right. Facebook’s News Feed algorithms are being modified so as to acknowledge a sense of high quality content that user may like to click on his mobile device (specifically).

But what is the need for it ? I mean Facebook has a lot of good content, already being shared!! So why did they think of this updation ?

Well the answer to this came from the results of the surveys they conducted.

The surveys clearly indicate that the average Facebook users prefer the high quality content articles related to all the latest events that connects them to a good resource as compared to those short memes hosted outside Facebook that usually have very low information for the user.

Facebook has over 1.5 billion users and it noticed an increase of over 170% referral traffic from Facebook to other media sites this year.

Facebook in order to reduce this number, is trying to increase the high quality content so as to show the right content to the right people at the right time without referring it to the memes outside Facebook.

Facebook has always focused on displaying the post with respect to its importance to the user, unlike Twitter which follows a chronological order for the same. Thus the implementation of these highly complex algorithms much more effectively will help Facebook to involve the user into good content exploration and thus increasing the company’s use and value.

Search Optimized @Twitter

This time it’s about Twitter.

Well i guarantee that most of us are using this social media platform through mobile . I have a figure that might catch your interest.

As you can see, these stats were officially posted by twitter which states how important is a Twitter mobile Application for people across the world, be it on Android or Ios .

So why are we talking about the mobile users then?

The Answer to this is just one word ‘Updation .’

Twitter is updating its Android and Ios apps to simplfy the process of discovering those 140 words that mean alot to this generation.

Updating!! But What’s new?

You might be aware of the search filters that you have in all your Twitter apps. Well thats what the company’s updating. It is adding new features  that will help you discover specific content with ease . After all nobody likes to waste their precious time going through a long idiotic search process.

So let me walk you through them one by one.

1. Toggle Option : Twitter with this update made it a lot easier to switch between all your Top Tweets and regular Tweets. This will help us to follow the most important story of the moment.  Also, We can narrow down the search to the Tweets from the people we follow. This will only show what we intend to follow ,Thus making our Twitter search alot personal.
2. Media : Now we will be able to search and filter specific media content including photos and videos. This will help us enhance our visual search experience on Twitter.
3. Timeline : Now, the Discover tab will contain a timeline of everything that’s trending. This will also give you an idea of the trending TV shows and nearby events .

Lets hope we get a better system that is perfectly updated to optimize our search on Twitter.

With that I will say a good bye to all of you . Stay connected to learn more about what’s new .

Thanks for reading !! Good Day 🙂

Place pins with Pinterest Place Pins

I’ll start with what a CEO of a social platform worth $3.8 billion stated in a meeting at the company’s HQ at San Francisco ,

“We thought,  how do we turn pins , little pieces of information , into action?”

Well i hope its clear that the word ‘pins’ points towards Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann .

Yes its true . Pinterest brought something new for all of us . The PLACE PINS. 

Place Pins !! Oh .. What is it ?

Well Place Pins constitute to a world tour and travel guide which inturn is owned by each and every individual present on Pinterest. It allows us to share all the known and unknown destinations all around us . Be it the new Candy shop that opened next to your house to the affordable Spa in the city or the Bar that you love to crack a bottle or two in to the new Pet shop. You can pin anything on it .

Alright !! As we now know, What are Place Pins, So how do we start pinning ?

Well that is so easy . We just need to create a new board or select an existing one, based on the location. That’s it. Really !!

Now start pinning any local place of interest. Add a map to the location, phone number or any other  extra details to the pin.

The same board can be pinned by multiple users also, letting all our friends pin and share the best places in town on just one map . Won’t this make our bond strong !!

We can even send a board to any of our friend suggesting the places he/she should surely visit.

As for the inspiration, lots of travel websites including Airbnb, Hotels.com, Booking.com, JetSetter, Virtual Tourist, OpenTable, NatGeo Travel, Lonely Planet etc created their own pin boards which we all can view, use and share.

Well that’s really interesting. But can i pin it through my phone?

The answer is ‘Yes’. This feature can be accessed on the go with Ios and Android apps. So now if you’re standing at someplace interesting, just pin it on your board.

So Pinterest is helping you visualize your trip and share with the world your city’s unseen wonders.

In the end, lets just close it with the words of the man behind this pin , Ben Silbermann quoting

“We’re excited to inspire you to go out and do things. “