10Yetis - Weekly Dose of Social - Autoplay, YouTube Gaming, Instagram and Vine updates

This week has been a busy one in the world of the social, so busy that you may have missed some of the snippets of news. The biggest stories this week come from Instagram, YouTube and Vine.

It’s the news that all Instagrammers have been waiting for, Instagram has now stuffed the square requirements for photographs into the bin. Well sort of. Usually you have to crop your photos into a square to share them on the app, though many people use external apps to add white or black bars to keep the original aspect ratio on their images. In fact it’s been shown that 20% of Instagram photos are padded with the thick borders to keep the rectangular aspect.

Instagram have clearly noticed that this feature is important to users and have now added the option in to the app so you can keep those group friends photos without having to cut your friends off the end. Also you’ll be able to take lots of tall building photographs and share them without cutting off the top! The new feature keeps the app nice and simple with just one extra button to press if you’d like to keep the original ratio. The camera still displays as square as does the grid on it so as to not over complicate things. I’m super excited about this update as I often use a third party app to do this, and I love Instagram, nice work on listening to your users Instagram.

You may have heard about the horrific news out of Virginia yesterday where two people, a journalist and a cameraman were shot dead live on air during a news broadcast. The shooter posted live video of the shooting from his perspective on social media sites. Both the video from the shooters perspective and the clip of the live broadcast were widely shared across the web on news websites as well as Twitter and Facebook and many of these used the autoplay feature which meant that anyone visiting the page would instantly hear and see the video. This feature has led to discussion among parliament as to whether videos have the autoplay function. Especially when videos such as this; with distressing content can be seen by vulnerable social media users. There was a lack of adequate warning on many of the videos that the viewer was about to see distressing content. It’s definitely a question that needs further discussion, and if nothing more comes of this, then warnings should definitely be made clearer on videos with a graphic nature.

YouTube announced this week their new venture, YouTube Gaming. The new feature of the site is found at http://gaming.youtube.com and it is a one stop hub for all things gaming. You can easily find your favourite game and featured videos related to it as well as live streams. Users will get recommendations based on the games and channels they like. It has also been made easier for users to live stream their own gaming, which is currently still in beta, but looks promising. Not only this available in desktop form but there is also an app version for Android and iOs devices in the US and the UK. Other countries will be added soon. This is great for users of YouTube and Twitch who can see all their favourite features now in one place.

Vine have announced their latest new features which are all about music. Snap to Beat is the new way for users to add perfect sound loops to their Vine videos. It was a challenge for users to do this beforehand without using an external app to add music to their vines. Now you can add a track you like just by clicking on the musical note on the details screen then snap to beat instantly identifies how much of the song to use to make a seamless loop and trims your video to fit to the music clip. You can easily edit music separately if you’d rather by turning off the Snap to Beat feature.

Vine didn’t want to stop there, they’ve added another music focussed feature which allows you to find featured tracks and add them to your Vines. But also, there’s a new shazam style feature which means when you hear a track you like on a Vine you can simply click the musical note to find out what the track is. Simple. Read more about the new features in our in-depth blog here.

That’s it for this week. Enjoy your bank holiday weekend!