This week in social media, Facebook surprised investors with great returns and growing mobile revenue, Pinterest announced you can opt out of being tracked, and hackers attacked Instagram users with smoothies. Yes, really.
Pinterest: Opt Out of Tracking
As Pinterest has expanded and added more personalization features, and began targeting advertising, the service ran into an inevitable problem with their users: Some people just don't want to give up that much information about their browsing habits - personalization be damned. And it's not unheard of that a social media site will give up targeting ads if it means retaining users. Twitter decided to offer "Do Not Track" in May 2012.
So on Friday, Pinterest announced on their blog that, along with new personalization options for their home feed, they were allowing users to turn off tracking: "We're excited to give everyone a more personalized experience, but we also understand if you're not interested! We support Do Not Track, and you can change your account settings anytime." If you're a Pinhead but worried about what's being tracked, check out Pinterest's updated privacy policy - which is lengthy but relatively in plain English - and decide for yourself if you want to opt out.
Facebook: Beating the Street, and Skeptics with Mobile
On Wednesday, Facebook Inc. surprised investors and silenced its critics, announcing its second quarter earnings report, which showed sales increasing by more than 50 percent and healthy ad revenue - especially from its growing mobile platform. In total, the company pulled in $1.18 billion in revenue, and made $1.81 billion in sales, surpassing the expected figure of about $1.6 billion.
Behind Facebook's success is a huge increase in ad revenue from its mobile platform, which now provides 41 percent of overall revenue for the social media giant. That's up from exactly 0 percent mobile revenue, compared to the company's total earnings in the beginning of 2012. Facebook mobile now has an average audience of 500 million people per day. In addition, its feature phone app - "Facebook for Every Phone" - which, as we reported previously, reaches a global audience of people who don't have access to smartphones currently, just celebrated 100 million people using the service. And Facebook has just started selling ads on that platform.
Instagram: Smoothie Hack Attack!
Yes, there was a security breach on Instagram involving smoothies. And yes, it was actually kind of funny, but also a serious problem. On Friday, some Instagram users began reporting on Twitter that they had been locked out of their user profiles after trying to reset their passwords, according to the Verge. A strange URL appeared in most of the victim's bio pages, and photos of smoothies were posted on their accounts without permission.
Big security breach definitely happening on Instagram. This is the third hacked account I've seen including mine. pic.twitter.com/sWvoZBeVIo
— Graham Hancock (@grahamhancock) July 27, 2013
Fun smoothie pictures aside, it's hard to imagine hackers taking over several accounts without having something more nefarious in mind than posting pictures of pink blended fruit juice. Currently it's still unknown how the hackers gained access in order to post that link in users bio pages, and whether the hackers have broken in to Instagram's servers or are phishing for account passwords. The Verge says that the URLs are constructed to look like BBC News links, so don't click on anything looking like that until Instagram has figured this out. Also, you should probably never click on links that inexplicably appear on your bio page, out of nowhere.
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