31st Jul 2015 by Helen Stirling

10Yetis - Weekly Dose of Social - Google+ and YouTube consciously uncouple, Windows 10 and Twitter buddy up, Periscope adds new features

Google and YouTube consciously uncouple

Google plus and YouTube have announced that they officially uncoupling. After many months of backlash from YouTube users who didn’t want to have to integrate their YouTube accounts to a Google Plus account; Google have finally paid attention. Before they integrated there was anger at the plans, and then they did, and people didn’t stop complaining, so you can probably guess that most of the YouTube users list were pretty darn happy when they ‘won’.

In a statement on Google Plus Ben Horowitz (VP of Streams, Photos and Sharing at Google) said:

“Four years ago when we conceived of the “Google+ Project”, we made it clear that our goals were always two-fold: Google+ aspired to be both a “platform layer that unified Google’s sharing models”, and a product / stream / app in its own right. (…) We decided it’s time to fix this, not only in YouTube, but across a user’s entire experience at Google. We want to formally retire the notion that a Google+ membership is required for anything at Google… other than using Google+ itself.”

We think this is an important move on Google’s part as it will separate the plus platform from all other Google’s products which was a universally hated requirement. It should bring users back to YouTube, not that they really had a problem with that, and help to grow channels and views even more. As for the future of Google Plus we’re still not so sure. It still seems to work well for tech communities but there doesn’t seem to be any strong celebrity or brand presence on the site which shows the end of it as a social network. I will say that I personally love the photos section of Google plus which keeps all my photos auto-uploaded and organised easily and simply, and even makes slideshow stories from them too. They as a company have been discussing focussing on this side of things and we look forward to seeing where the product will go next.

Twitter looks fancy on Windows 10

Windows 10 officially launched this week and users of Windows 8 were invited to download a free upgrade. The topic of windows 10 trended on Twitter for the day as users shared their experience of the new operating system. Twitter announced on their blog the integration with Windows 10 and a special optimised version. The app will give you instant access to top tweets, photos and videos without having to login, and you will be able to see live tweet tiles in the Start menu.

It will also allow you to upload multiple photo tweets, have animated GIF playback, Vine playback and previews in your home timeline. All this along with a new slick layout. It’s available globally as of now for Windows 10 users and there will be extra updates to come.

New periscope stuff

Periscope launched around four months ago and since then it has really blown up to become one of the most popular new social apps. Now they have released new updates to change the way iOS users interact with it.

There is now a mute option for every user on the app. If you don’t want notifications when someone goes live on the app, then you can mute them and you won’t be interrupted when that person in America goes live whilst you are sleeping! They also announced that this update will be added to Android very soon.

Periscope have also updated their global feed meaning that there will be more high quality broadcasts populating this area of the app. This is helped by the new option to add your language preferences in your account settings; this will affect the type of broadcasts you see in your global feed.

After broadcasting you will now be able to see your broadcast stats, this is extra handy for brand marketers who will be able to pull stats for reports so they can analyse their Periscope activity and adjust accordingly. The stats shown are total time watched among others, and these stats will stick around so that you do not lose them and you can refer back.

Finally if you are both an iOS 8 user and OS X user you can easily move between devices if they both signed into an iCloud account. This is super handy if you want to switch from iPhone to Mac or vice versa.

So that’s it this week for our Social update. Come and see us again on Friday for another weekly round-up!

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