social media round up
Social Media Round Up – #Tubechat And Snapchat Spectacles
Snapchat is back at it again with a new innovation. Following our post a few weeks back, Snapchat has this week introduced its first hardware product ‘Spectacles’. The new creation, to complement the existing app, provides users with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connected sunglasses which have an integrated camera. The glasses are capable of recording a day’s worth of images and video which is automatically shared with friends – without being plugged into a phone. As the lines between reality and social media keep crossing, we are looking forward to what’s next. TFL has been slowly adding to its badge collection over the past few months. Commuters will be used to seeing the ‘baby on board’ badge offered to pregnant women and there have recently been trials of a ‘please offer me a seat’ badge for passengers with hidden conditions. But now, a brand new badge – ‘Tube Chat?’ – has been introduced by an American man named Jonathan Dunne in attempt to encourage commuters to interact with each other. However, renowned for not even making eye-contact with fellow passengers, London’s tube commuters took to Twitter using the hashtag #tube_chat to express their dismay at the new badge. One user tweeted, “I feel like civilisation is ending. #tube_chat” and another said “the worst thing about the #tube_chat badges is that they haven’t even CONSIDERED the rest of us, who’ll have to listen to it happening.” We are certainly looking forward to an influx of #overheardonthetube tweets. It was one of the most anticipated political moments of modern times – and the hype was only amplified by social media during the presidential debate on Monday night. On Twitter, the debate racked up numbers more commonly seen during international sporting events or shocking breaking news. Nearly five million tweets were sent out using hashtags #DebateNight and #Debates2016. To put that into perspective, that’s about 20 times the number of tweets sent during the first big showdown of the UK 2015 general election – considered at the time to be a huge online political event. This week the rumour mill was rife with stories about entertainment powerhouse, Disney, potentially planning a bid for social media platform, Twitter. With uses aplenty of “speculation” and “allegedly” as well as quotes from “unnamed” sources, confirmed details are currently sparse but reports of the impending sale of Twitter have been appearing fairly frequently over recent months. Coming hot on the heels of similar reports of Google and Microsoft looking to make the purchase, the overarching response to the Disney rumour is not a positive one. The health of Twitter’s business model is not currently an optimistic one and the general feeling is that Disney is not the company to be able to turn this around. We don’t expect any imminent confirmation of a sale but watch this space for reports of new ownership and what this might mean for the future of Twitter.SNAPCHAT SPECTACLES_
#TUBECHAT_
THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE_
DISNEY AND TWITTER_
