Social Media Saturday: This week in social media was all about including everyone in the most up to date versions of various social networking platforms.
Among the updates to social media platforms, Facebook began rolling out its Graph Search feature to all Facebook users who use the U.S. English version and Vine added its new features - meant to combat a new video-sharing challenge from Instagram, to Android users - after rolling out the update to iOS last week. Oh, and Sharknado took over Twitter. Without further ado, let's get to the social media stories of the week!
Enhanced Vine for Android
Vine's newly feature-rich app was finally released for Android, after being released for iOS last week (and hinted at by the Twitter-owned six-second video-sharing service right before Facebook's Instagram announced its 15-second video addition in June).
The updated Vine app includes several improvements, most of which are to the browsing and sharing functions. There are 15 categories of channels to browse in the "Explore" screen, which include categories like Art and Experimental, Special FX, Dogs, Cats, News and Politics, Health and Fitness, and Nature. The categories have two tabs at the top to browse either popular Vines or "on the rise," or trending Vines.
There's another social feature called "revining," which, if you've ever used Twitter before, is self-explanatory: it's a one-button sharing feature for Vines that you've found and liked. A few other improvements include new focus, grid and ghost tool for the camera and a fast capture widget that lets you jump straight to capturing a Vine video from your home screen.
Finally, there's a new mute button in the menu, which is essential if you get annoyed by Vine's automatically playing feed of videos. Now if Vine would just go one step further and make Vine videos non-playing by default, and only playable by clicking on the video (like Instagram's video service), that would be nice.
Facebook Graph Search for All (U.S. English Speakers)
Facebook announced on Monday of this week that they're done beta testing Graph Search, a powerful new tool to search for content on the giant social media site, and are going to be rolling out the feature to all U.S. English versions of the social network over the next couple weeks or so. "Everyone using US English should start seeing their search box automatically updated," said Facebook's news blog on Monday. "This is just the beginning. We're currently working on making it easier for people to search and discover topics, including posts and comments. We're also working on getting mobile Graph Search ready."
Graph Search is meant to allow people to discover and connect with other people much more easily, but privacy concerns follow Facebook's every move as well. This time, concerns have been raised about possible phishing attacks or cyberstalking, but Facebook provided information on its blog post on how users can manage what information they provide others on the network, and this tutorial can help you keep your private information private as well.
Twitter's Sharknado!
If you were glued to your television screen this week (Then get unglued. It's summer - go outside!), you still probably didn't see a silly SyFy original "B" movie horror film called "Sharknado." However, if you were on Twitter this week, you probably got caught up in the Sharknado's deadly gale at one time or another.
Comedians, celebrities, journalists, Tweeters, Viners, everyone else had a good time, as the #Sharknado hashtag took off on Twitter, with people sharing jokes, GIFs, pictures and Vines about the most outrageously silly and schlocky movie of the summer. The movie is about a shark-filled tornado that hits Los Angeles.
Comedian Patton Oswalt found plenty of comedy material in the movie, but also particularly in its Twitter buzz:
Based on the Twitter attention it got, SHARKNADO is our Arab Spring.
— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) July 12, 2013
Meredith Blake of the Los Angeles Times spoke with Sree Sreenivasan, a social media expert at Columbia University, about the buzz surrounding the Sharknado. "The sheer absurdity of it means it inherently gives you a place to be funny and show your wit to tens of thousands of people," said Sreenivasan. The LA Times said that at its peak, the Sharknado caused 5,000 tweets per minute, though the movie itself only got an ordinary 1.4 million viewers for the movie.
However, all publicity, as they say, is good publicity. Expect a Sharknado 2 from SyFy - or maybe it will be a Pyranhacane.