#SongbirdStories - The Rest from the Nest of #SocialMedia

It's been a productive week here at Songbird, we've welcomed a new writer into our ranks, reported on a wide range of stories and brought a live bear into to the office as a form of motivation. I might have made one of those up. Anyway, as usual, we didn't get time to cover everything, so here's the rundown of all the stuff we missed during the week.

Arnie Backs John Kasich on Snapchat

Gov @Schwarzenegger just did the first-ever @Snapchat endorsement announcement for his old friend @JohnKasich. pic.twitter.com/GcUWupt2cW

— Daniel Ketchell (@ketch) March 6, 2016

I know what you're thinking - who the hell is John Kasich? Well, he's the Republican presidential candidate the ostensibly the most rational appeal. His policies are regarded to be more progressive than those of Trump, Cruz or Rubio, but he's still behind them in the delegate race. If he wants to stay in contention, Kasich will have to win in his home state of Ohio.

Over the week though he got a big celebrity endorsement, as Arnold Schwarzenegger backed him, on Snapchat. The Austrian actor/colossus has been playing around with the platform for a few months now, sending shoutouts to similarly muscle-bound friends like Sylvester Stallone and J.J. Watt, but this might be the first major political endorsement to appear on there. Kind of a watershed moment, especially is Kasich wins the candidacy, which would effectively prove that social media trumps social media notoriety. Or alluding to the size of your wiener.

Rando, the Random Sharing App Arrives

TechCrunch

How to spice up GIF and photo messaging? Why, make it completely random, of course! Rando, a new app developed by the developer of the hugely popular Launch Center Pro, which allowed you to map specific tasks like looking up local coffee shops or searching a barcode on Amazon to single buttons. Rando on the other hand, enables you to either share or blindly send randomly selected photos and GIFs. You can also pick a small pool of images for Rando to select from, or a certain mood, but the end result is the same. I'm unsure what the exact appeal of this is, it strikes me as a kind of social experiment masquerading as an app, so it'll be interesting to see if it catches it.

Tinder Introduce Profile Sharing

Tinder already has a share button, which you can use whenever you get a match to publicly or privately declare that fact (as well your total matches since you started using the app), but now they're testing out a 'profile sharing' function, wherein you can recommend potential matches to other people. Once sent, the profile link lasts 72 hours, during which time the recipient can click it, which will open the app, enabling them to swipe left or right on it, as normal. 

Snapchat Changes Fonts, Teens Freak Out

Twitter

Remember a few years ago when people would lose their minds every time Facebook made the slightest little aesthetic change? Well, evidently that had a lot to do with the younger demographic, because now changes on Snapchat are eliciting that response. On Tuesday, Snapchat changed their main font to an only-slightly-different one, and the response was disproportionately dramatic, and vitriolic. People were calling it 'disgusting', 'unacceptable' and, most alarmingly of all, 'worse than comic sans'. Imagine what would happen if they made any legitimately drastic changes. I imagine they would have to get the United Nations involved. 

Katie Price Identifies People Who Made Fun of Her Learning Disabled Son on Twitter, Proceeds to Savage Them

Who is allowed to set up a site like this does anybody know this person as I'm sure the police will find out pic.twitter.com/QPiju39ZHj

— Katie Price (@MissKatiePrice) March 9, 2016

There is absolutely no excuse for making fun of anyone because of a disability, mental, physical or otherwise. Katie Price lives in that rather unpleasant domain of celebrity where people think they can say whatever they want about her, or her loved ones, simply because she is famous. During the week, Price began taking screenshots of Instagram posts which ridiculed her son, who suffers from blindness, Parker Willi Syndrome and is on the autistic spectrum. She included the usernames of the perpetrators in the posts, encouraging her followers to help her track them down. 

Facebook Are Introducing a Way to Disable Live Video Notifications, Following a Barrage of Complaints

Digital Trends

You've probably noticed that Facebook will now let you know when live feeds which might interest you start up. Depending on how many pages you follow, that might mean an overwhelming influx of notifications, enough to warrant a huge amount of complaints, especially given that, at present, there's no direct way to shut them off. In response, Facebook assured people that they're working on a disable setting, to be rolled out over the coming weeks.

Conor McGregor Beats Back Twitter Haters After Critical UFC Loss

Sky Sports

Even people who don't follow UFC know who Conor McGregor is. The unfailingly, aggressively confident Irishman moved up to the lightweight class to face Nate Diaz, and spent the entire run up assuring people that he'd be out cold by the end of the first round. As it turned out, Diaz trounced him, something which many Twitter users were delighted to throw in his face. He put a long post about it on all his channels, accepting the loss, promising to bounce back, and labeling his detractors as 'steak for breakfast'. He said some other things about it too, but I can't repeat them here. 

Facebook's Latin American President Arrested in Brazil

In one of the most bizarre stories of the week, Diego Dzodan was arrested at the airport in Sao Paulo. He's been questioned about WhatsApp's alleged non-compliance with a court ordered mandate to release private messages linked to a large drug trafficking ring. Facebook remain fully opposed to the arrest, labeling "extreme and disproportionate". They claim that WhatsApp don't have any staff in Brazil, that Dzodan has no direct link to the case, and that the information the courts want is not theirs to release, as WhatsApp messages are encrypted by users. Brazil previously shut the service down for 48 hours, prompting ire from Zuckerberg and the rest of the company. Clearly there's still a lot of bad blood between the country and the social media giant.

Callum Davies

Callum is a film school graduate who is now making a name for himself as a journalist and content writer. His vices include flat whites and 90s hip-hop. Follow him @CallumAtSMF

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