Amazon enters the instant messaging race, Facebook wants more money and Google is finally getting a makeover - Social Media Insight

Hello and welcome to your weekly catch up on all things going on in today’s digital landscape! This week, we’re looking at Amazon’s development of a messaging platform and Facebook testing a paywall for selected media stories to start with. We’ll also be looking at that Stories feature on Facebook, you know, the one that hardly anyone uses which is now going to be available for brand pages. Finally, we’ll be briefly looking at Google’s news where it’s going to drastically update its homepage for the first time since the 90s.

Anytime by Amazon

There are already so many ways for us to communicate in our day-to-day lives, not including the means that has stood the test of time – face to face. From instant messaging, video chats and numerous alternative messaging services. But the more the merrier, right? Well that’s what the bosses at Amazon must have thought, as they seem to be working on their own messaging app. AFTVnews leaked the information about “Anytime”, a messaging app built for all platforms

But the question on the tip of everyone’s tongue is, how will it compete and how is it different to the other well-established messaging apps? Well user-to-user communication is rumoured to be easier; it looks as though users won’t need telephone numbers, just their names to sign up. Also, users will be able to add their friends into chats by mentioning their names, and they will be able to colour code their conversations based on what’s most important to them.

Amazon also wants to bring features like music and food ordering to the app, but little has been released about the app so who knows what they could come out with.

Money, money, money!

Facebook is on the hunt for more ad revenue streams and looks to be heading down the road of testing a paywall for subscription-only news stories.

For now, this is very much in the starting project phase, but the move fits Facebook’s strategy perfectly and contributes towards the channel’s fight to reduce ‘fake news’. The News Feed is full and there is no more ad space, therefore Facebook needs to find a new ad revenue stream. It is possible that Facebook will start working with publishers to introduce a paywall system that limits user’s ability to view more than ten articles per month, before paying a subscription fee.

Publishers will have full control over which of their stories and articles fall behind the paywall. With that being said they will also keep full control to their subscriber data, with potentially added access to Facebooks data. Benefiting companies in allowing them to understand what stories trigger more engagements on the platform.

Once again, this project is in its infancy and a lot could change by the time it’s released. But what we can be certain about is that, if this new change goes forward, it could greatly impact the way people use Facebook.

Brand Stories Are Coming To Facebook

It started with Snapchat; was copied by Instagram (and again by Facebook), but lesser interest was shown in the latter, however things are about to change. Facebook is preparing to expand stories to branded pages. Facebook has provided no information on the possible new features to this date but it will only be a matter of time before some information is released.

It has been suggested and assumed that the stories will work similarly to the way they work for standard users of Facebook, yet they suspect that the brands will take advantage of this new feature much more than when it was offered to users originally, when it was a firm flop.

Google Gets A New Look

Google is getting its first major update since the 90s and we’re excited to see how it’s going to look. We’ve been using Google on our mobiles for a long time now and we’re expecting to see something similar on desktop. On Wednesday, Google announced it was developing further customisation to the feed.

Now your feed will be based on your interactions with google, but also on what’s trending in your local area and around the world. Following on from this, users will be able to follow topics straight from search results for things such as sports, movies, music and celebrities – offering updates for those topics on your feed.

Exactly how the new update will work on the web is still yet to be known. The feed is most likely to require users to log into Google to see it, and is believed to resemble the layout of the tablet experience google offers. So far, little has been released but what we can be sure of is that the new changes to something like Google will be sure to cause some controversy.