#SocialSongbird Weekly #Roundup 26/09

Welcome to the inagural edition of our latest weekly feature. While we pride ourself in covering a wide range of stories and topics as the week goes by, we can't cover everything, and some things, while interesting, perhaps aren't big enough to merit a full article. Bearing that in mind, we're bringing in the 'Weekly Roundup'.

Every Saturday, we will round up all the stories from the past week which didn't quite make it onto the site. Expect a heady mixture of social media news, weird stories and trending topics, perhaps intermingled with the odd bout of adorable animal imagery. Here's this week's haul:

Instagram Add a Date Recognition Feature

The Next Web

Instagram has been going from strength to strength of late, blasting past Twitter to a 400,000,000 strong user base and raking in an obscene amount of money in the process. Despite this, they continue to play around with the formula and add in weird new features that nobody asked for. The latest is an odd little prompt that detects when you've taken pictures on that given day, and then suggests that you might want to upload them. Considering that the vast majority of Instagram photos were taken moments before being uploaded anyway, it's difficult to understand exactly why they felt the need to add what is essentially a 'nagging function'.

Facebook (Very Briefly) Crashed, Chaos Ensued

Wired

If you were on Facebook on Thursday at around 5:30pm BST, you're a liar, because the entire site had gone down, mobile and all. The last time this happened in January, hacking groups all raced to take credit, but it ultimately turned out to be Facebook's mistake. This time nobody is taking credit, but the short few hours during which the site wasn't working properly were still enough to send Twitter into a flurry of mild annoyance/total panic. It is, of course, absolutely ridiculous to expect any major site to run properly for ever and ever, especially Facebook, yet they continue to suffer a massive backlash from users every single time even the smallest thing goes wrong. It's like an entire world populated with that guy you saw lose his temper at Tesco because they were out of his brand of toilet paper. 

Megan Fox Makes a Triumphant Return to Social Media

Hi. I'm still here, I just continue to have an angsty relationship with social media. But what better way to express my apprehension than with a selfie. This time in black n white! 👌🏻

A photo posted by Megan Fox (@the_native_tiger) on Sep 17, 2015 at 5:16pm PDT

Megan Fox has had a difficult relationship with social media. Her tendency to just say whatever pops into her head with no filter and generally be rather aloof has resulted in a lot of abuse. Anyway, as of this week, she's back, having posted on Instagram saying that, despite negative past experiences, she's ready to give it another go. This comes twinned with the news that she will be taking over from Zooey Deschanel on New Girl whilst she goes on maternity leave (the actual character will be on jury duty). Whether she'll stick around once Deschanel returns is unclear, but it'll definitely shake the show up in a pretty significant way. It will also be Fox's first time in major limelight since those awful Lego Bionicle movies she was in. Oh, those were Transformers? Christ...

Twitter Change Their Button Design and Do Away with the Share Counter

The Drum

In the second big platform update of the week, Twitter have been doing a bit of cosmetic tweaking. They've removed the grey, embossed effect from their buttons in favour of a blue, simplistic approach, likely following Google's example. It's not an overly interesting change, but it does make the icons a lot more easy to read than they previously were. They've also done away with the standard share counter, which has served to unclutter their interface further still, but also means that people who actually care about share counters will have to build their own via Gnip.

Facebook Expand Instant Articles 

Recode

Facebook are getting pretty serious with their commitment to increasing journalist appeal/reach. Not content with introducing an all new platform which makes it easer to writers to find and embed sources from the main site, they've added a whole compliment of new publications to their reader-friendly Instant Articles platform. New publishers include The Huffington Post, Mashable, MTV, Daily Mail/Elite Daily, Business Insider, Hearst, MLB, Complex, Bleacher Report, Mic, Gannett, Time Inc., Refinery 29 and The Washington Post, who are claiming that they will make their entire output, over 1200 articles per day, available on the platform. This doesn't mean that Instant Articles is yet ready to expand beyond its current limited availability (only 12.5% of iPhone users have been granted access), but watch this space.

And as (sort of) promised, here's an adorable animal. It turns out the #CuteOff thing is actually still going strong, with this heart melting image of a red panda emerging on Thursday.

Let's keep the #CuteOff going! @RedPandaNetwork @redpandazine #redpanda #animals #cute pic.twitter.com/I22wVMTISS

— Mathias (@mathias_appel) September 24, 2015

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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