HELLO AGAIN EVERYONE! After a brief hiatus born of my having the selfish temerity to step away from the web for a long weekend – did you take care of it? is it ok? I worry, you know – Web Curios is back, ready to almost immediately clock off again as we look forward to celebrating the May Bank Holiday in inimitable British style.
So, as you purchase your nitrous ampoules and get the pingers in, as you bulk-buy batch-crafted artisanal gin to mix into poorly-conceived mix-and-match cocktails, as you stake out your place on the nearest patch of beturded scrubland with your disposable barbecue and Tesco Finest snorkers and pray God that the rain stays away, let me ease you into the weekend with another selection of the very finest, the very best, the…well, not technically the freshest as a few of these have been hanging about since last week, but they’re still ACE, obviously…the…the…most links anywhere on the internet! Consider clicking on every link and reading every word a sort of intellectual pre-penance, a bit like taking confession before you go out and do a murder – there is so much assorted smart and interesting and brilliant (all the work of people who aren’t me, to be clear) in Curios this week that upon finishing it you will have EARNED the right to spend the next 72 sandblasting your frontal lobes with whatever combination of uppers and downers you choose.
Once again, then, take a deep breath, take my hand, and proceed to DIVE INTO THE TELEPORTATION POOLS OF MY MIND as I take you on a meandering journey through a bunch of utterly unconnected websites all strung together with the mucus-like glue of my prose. I’m glad it’s back, youy’re largely indifferent, but, regardless, THIS IS WEB CURIOS!
By CESS
THE SECTION WHICH APPRECIATES YOU MIGHT HAVE SEEN MUCH OF THE BELOW ALREADY GIVEN THE FORTNIGHT’S HIATUS BUT WHICH HOPES NONETHELESS THAT THE THIN VENEER OF ‘INSIGHT’ GIVES YOU REASON TO AT LEAST SKIM IT FOR OTHERWISE ALL MY WORK IS FOR NAUGHT AND YOU WOULDN’T WANT THAT NOW WOULD YOU?
- Facebook’s Earnings: Oh look, MORE MONEY! MORE USERS! Like some sort of poorly-conceived hoover/hydra hybrid, you cut off one head and the others just keep on hoovering up the pennies – in this case, whilst Facebook might be reaching peak, Insta and Messenger and WhatsApp are all still growing vertiginously and, per the earnings call, are being looked at in terms of increased monetisation (you didn’t REALLY believe WhatsApp was going to stay ad-free forever, did you? Did you?). Interesting side note from the earnings call (despite Facebook’s recent insistence that its entire raison d’etre was the fostering of community and not (heaven forfend, no siree!) the collection of the greatest collection of information about human interest and behaviour that has ever existed, to be used for monetisation purposes how and whenever possible): there were somewhere in the region of 10 mentions of the term ‘community’ on the call with analysts, whereas there were over 40 of the term ‘ad’ or ‘advert’. Draw whatever conclusions you feel most appropriate here.
- ALL OF THE THINGS AT F8!: And lo, it came to pass that once again the world’s media gathered in San Francisco’s environs to once again congregate within the hallowed halls of Zuckerberg’s Big Blue Misery Factory to clap like seals at the GLORIOUS FUTUREANNOUNCEMENTS! And what were they this year? Well, there were LOTS (but mostly of limited interest, at least immediately, to advermarketingprdrones) – here is the full list from Day 1, and here is the full list from Day 2; and here is the Techcrunch aggregation of all of the stories from the event. For me, the big stuff is the ‘Clear History’ option for users, which enables people to effectively scrub Facebook’s profile of their browsing history – there’s no indication of how this is going to affect targeting options, and it’s not going to be live in the wild for a few months yet, but it’s a sensible move from a user (and PR, obvs) perspective. Other than this, the integration of apps into Stories on Insta and FB is a big deal – you can see by how excited people are getting about being able to inflict their musical tastes on their stalkers thanks to Spotify integration, for example – and something that, for appropriate brands, is a huge opportunity for expanding reach (oh, and the quote in here about them actively seeking to monetise stories with ADS is unsurprising but worth noting); equally, the additional expansion of AR for brands into Instagram and Messenger, along with the improved tracking tech they’ve announced, is big news (POOR THE SNAPCHAT), although it’s seemingly still going to be locked to those with all of the ad monies, at least for now. Oh, and there’s going to be dating, to keep the middle-aged locked into the platform forever, through the first marital slump, the affairs and the comfortable descent into the swinging and poly scene (that’s what everyone does in middle-age, right? That’s why all poly people you ever see on telly are so, well, unappealing, right?), but that’s of no interest to YOU, you virile young folk.
- FB Introducing New Video Ad Formats: Pre-roll, basically, which they’ve been touting for months but which seems now to be A Thing (in the US, at least, and only through Facebook Watch rather than in Newsfeed), these excitingly “also included a new feature called “preview trailers,” ads to promote Watch shows and other videos that can take viewers to the full-length program.” Excuse me while I take a moment for the tumescence to subside.
- New Tools for Facebook Fundraisers: Of course, sometimes Facebook does things that it’s hard to frame as anything other than A Good Thing, no matter how hard I try (and God knows, I tried) – this allows for matched donations, creates a whole new raft of categories for ‘personal fundraising’, and eliminates Facebook fees for said personal fundraising projects. As per, these are starting in the US and then rolling out globally, but it makes Facebook an (even more) obvious choice as a place to raise money (although I find the growing concept of personal fundraising incredibly depressing, given it feels like a direct consequence of the sorts of services / assistance that people might once have reasonably expected to receive from, I don’t know, the state, or third sector organisations which no longer exist as a result of several years of swingeing cutsohgodnopleasenotthepoliticsmakeitstop) (oh, good, see, I did manage to find a negative take, well done ME!).
- Marginally Better Video Retention Metrics for Page Admins: Thrill-a-minute stuff, this, isn’t it?
- Facebook Is Fighting Fake News By Making It Smaller: This is, I promise, not a joke or an Onion headline.
- What Does Facebook Know About Me: This Q&A, part of FB’s ‘Hard Questions’ series (see Curios passim – and also this one, which is honestly interesting regarding what it does and doesn’t allow on the platform), is actually a pretty decent rundown of what information Facebook holds about its users and how that information is then used, but contains this absolute ZINGER which I must quickly draw to your attention. ““Q: If I’m not paying for Facebook, am I the product? A: No. Our product is social media – the ability to connect with the people that matter to you, wherever they are in the world. It’s the same with a free search engine, website or newspaper. The core product is reading the news or finding information – and the ads exist to fund that experience.” WELL GOLLY GOSH, MARK! Given, though, that social media is necessarily constructed solely of content produced by us, its users, it is surely massively disingenuous to suggest that, given we are the ‘information experience’ the company purports to sell, that the product is not EXACTLY what fcuking are, you appalling obfuscatory fcukers.
- Insta Launching Native Payments: Well this is big, and snuck in somewhat unnanounced overnight – Instagram users in the US and the UK, at least some of them, are being offered the opportunity to input their credit card details so as to allow native payments through the platform, which is obviously HUGE from a retail point of view. No indication at all as to how the experience will work for users, and seemingly no retailers have yet been offered the opportunity to let users check out through Insta, but it’s a matter of DAYS, surely. Are you excited? I’m excited (I’m not excited).
- Download All The Stuff Insta Knows About You: IT IS OWNED BY FACEBOOK IT IS JUST AS SHADY FFS DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND YOU MOUTH-BREATHING IDIOTS?
- Twitter Results: These were widely hailed by analysts as A Good Thing for Twitter overall, and the toplines are positive – ad revenues are up 21% Q on Q (although contrast that with Facebook’s terrifying performance and you start to see that this is all pretty relative), and DAUs is up 10%…but equally, this is the third consecutive quarter in which that DAU uplift has shrunk, which isn’t a fantastic trend. I’m as bearish as ever on Twitter’s market prospects, though continue to find it impossible to conceive of a better solution for communicating at speed and scale (which perhaps speaks to my own paucity of imagination rather than to anything big about Twitter itself).
- Twitter Announces New Sponsored Content Formats: Buried within this rather tedious announcement about some new TV partnerships or somesuch is the SEISMIC REVEAL that “Twitter is also announcing new ad programs. There are Creator Originals, a set of scripted series from influencers who will be paired up with sponsored brands. And there’s a new Live Brand Studio — as the name suggests, it’s a team that works with marketers to create live video.” I confess to not having even bothered to look for additional information on these, as if you have the sort of budgets to be thinking of this sort of crap then you almost certainly have a Twitter rep already attempting to flog you it, but I hope that by acknowledging my professional inadequacy here I will go some way towards mitigating it. Have I? IS IT ALL OK?
- Snapchat Results: We’re not going to dwell on these, but TechCrunch’s piece is a reasonable overview of why the numbers are…not good (and further clues were found in the F8 stuff from Day 2 in which they announced that Insta and WhatsApp’s Story mechanics were being used 2x and 3x as often as Snap’s original version).
- Snapchat Launches Snappables: Presumably because ‘slightly janky AR games’ didn’t fit with the brand. Snappables are a series of interactive lenses, which allow users to play a series of simple games controlled using the same AR interface that puts dog ears on your head to hilarious effect no stop it I am crying it’s LIKE YOU ARE A DOG rofl. So you can bop your head up and down to do virtual keepy-ups, say, or contort your mouth to catch floating emoji poos, or whatever (I am guessing as to some of these, you may be able to tell). At the moment these are being built in-house and rolled out weekly, but they would BITE YOUR HAND OFF if you are a brand that wants to spend 6 figures (I’d guess minimum spend on one of these at the outset would be no less than $250k) on making a themed game where you have to, say, chomp as many Whoppers as you can in a minute (£10 says that literal idea, or a close variant on it by one of the fast food peddlers, is one of the first three branded versions). This feels very much like an excellent way for digital studios with some AR chops to make some quick and dirty cash for what will basically end up being fancy shovelware – God, it’s like 2010 and Facebook apps all over again!
- Snapchat Testing Unskippable Ads: Only in its – largely execrable – commissioned shows, mind (seriously, have you ever tried watching any of Snapchat’s original content? I know I am pretty far away from the target audience here, but, honestly, I’d almost rather watch Zoella) – beautifully, the report (apologies for the Mashable link, btw) refers to these unskippable 6-second spots as ‘Commercials’, as though Snap has invented something SHINY and NEW and REVOLUTIONARY. The future is the past all over again but with a greater degree of jaded ennui, I am discovering.
- Snap Launches Spectacles 2.0: Because it’s nearly Summer (ha!) and you might be in the market for a new pair of shades with which to record all of the sunburn and vomit and rejection. It’s not exactly clear what differentiates these from v1.0, other than the fact that they are on mass-sale and that they have some new colourways, but if YOU want to film slightly motion sickness-inducing facevideo then go for your life.
- All Of The Snapchat Ad Formats: A really useful rundown by Business Insider (again, sorry) – exactly the sort of thing that all platforms should have readily accessible as an explainer and yet weirdly don’t seem to have in place at all.
- Alexa Will Now Remember: Well, soon – and in the US only, but if you do stuff around recipes for Amazon’s Domestic Surveillance Hub (or Echo, as it’s more commonly referred to) then you ought to be aware of the imminent introduction of a degree of persistence in the device’s memory; users will be able to tell Alexa to ‘remember’ information (in the example they suggest birthdays, but one could equally use ‘my favourite Divinyls song’ or ‘the podcast that makes the red mist recede’); the applications for this for Echo app developers are obviously really big, not least for the creation of games – you could reasonably imagine scripting an audio-RPG which allowed for persistent and interactive inventory management, for example (Jesus, that’s where my brain decided to go first with that? SO DEPRESSING).
- Google Surveys: Josh, who knows everything about surveys and data, tells me that Google have been punting this to research agencies for a while now, but the fact it’s now available for anyone to use is a NEW THING! Using Google Surveys, anyone with a Google account can set up a reasonable (if, as professional datawonks would scream, VERY unsophisticated and statistically problematic) series of surveys using all the question types you might expect, targeted (roughly) by region (broad geography-level rather than anything so useful as postcode) and age (standard demographic brackets) – you pay per response, with the cost depending on all the usual factors like complexity and the like. Costs seemingly start at £0.08 per respondent, which seems like a pretty good deal as long as you don’t worry about fancy stuff like weighting and the like.
- Ofcom Media Use Data: The latest data dump from Ofcom, telling us all what we already know – to whit, we are all staring at our phones all the time. Nothing hugely surprising, but useful to bookmark for the next time you need to persuade a client that no, really, it is important that they have a mobile-friendly website (you scoff, but I get paid to deal with some SPECIAL PEOPLE). Oh, and the other main takeaway is the first real acknowledgement in these sort of stats that the vast majority of web users are simply not intellectually capable of understanding some of the complex issues which underpin online information flows, or indeed bereft of the critical thinking faculties required to make sense of, well, most things on the internet. Which is simultaneously true and incredibly depressing.
- The Strategic Planners’ Presentation Template: Obviously YOU are all far too sophisticated and professionally advanced to have need of this sort of thing, but on the offchance that you know someone who might benefit from this sort of guided instruction then SHARE WIDELY. It’s old, but it’s still useful.
- The Humanity Test: Simple, clever, and riffs on the Captcha ‘are you human?’ tests in an interesting way – smart, by the UN.
- Invisible Friends: Last up in the tedious-but-necessary section about WORK is this excellent idea by Australian charity MPAN (Missing Persons Advocacy Network) which uses Facebook’s otherwise creepy-as facial recognition feature to help find missing antipodeans – by adding profiles connected to these missing individuals as ‘friends’, Australian FB users can, simply by using the platform as normal, help identify them. Every time anyone gets tagged in a photo, it also alerts their friends that they have been tagged – meaning that if anyone gets tagged in a picture featuring these missing people, the profile owner (in this case, the charity) will get an alert, and a clue as to where the missing person in question was, when, and who with. Simple, smart and for a good cause, this ought to win awards.
