May is here and with that, here are the latest social media and technology updates you should know about:
- Snapchat adds chat functionality: Snapchat users can now actually chat – through text or live video, with friends. Text messages disappear after conversations are ended, unless you screen capture them, just like photos sent over Snapchat. The addition of text and video chat seems designed to offer direct competition to popular messaging apps like WhatsApp on a platform that is already popular with many young users.
- Vine Updates Website: Vine has revamped its website to better complement and extend its user experience beyond its mobile app. Similar to its app, Vine’s newly updated website allows users to search for videos according to channel, hashtags, or current or rising popularity. The site allows includes a feature called “TV Mode,” wherein users can select a video by hashtag and watch a series of videos all employing that hashtag.
- More Privacy and Control Coming to Facebook Users: Facebook held f8, their developers conference, in San Francisco last week. While the conference was focused on how changes in the social network would affect developers, there were notable updates for the average user. According to Facebook, users can expect to have more control over the types of information they share while on Facebook (birthday, email address, etc.) and keeping their identity and personal information private when trying out apps.