Social media is forever changing which makes it easy to miss an update from time to time. Twice a month, we look into three of the latest key updates from the past few weeks from the various social media giants. Here’s what’s been happening recently…
WhatsApp Adds New Privacy Tools, Including Online Activity Controls and the Ability to Silently Leave Group Chats
Amid ongoing concerns about how it can be used to organize criminal activity, due to its default encryption process, WhatsApp has announced some additional privacy features, providing even more assurance and control for users, in various respects.
First off, WhatsApp’s giving users more control over how others see them in the app, with the option to switch off online activity markers, or restrict those signals to certain users.
As shown here, you’ll soon be able to decide who can see when you’re online in the app – ‘Everyone’, ‘Contacts’, ‘My Contacts Except’ or ‘Nobody’.
That’ll provide more capacity to avoid unwanted interactions by hiding your active status, which could be of significant value for users who want to go about their interactions in their own time and space.
WhatsApp’s also adding a new option to leave groups silently, so you can skip out of a group chat without alerting all group members.
As you can see, group admins will still know you’ve left the chat, but there won’t be a ‘John Doe has left the discussion’ notification for all users in the thread.
In addition to this, WhatsApp is also extending the time window for deleting your messages from your chats.
Rethinking your message? Now you’ll have a little over 2 days to delete your messages from your chats after you hit send.
— WhatsApp (@WhatsApp) August 8, 2022
And finally, WhatsApp’s also rolling screenshot blocking for ‘View Once’ messages:
“View Once is already an incredibly popular way to share photos or media that don’t need to have a permanent digital record. Now we’re enabling screenshot blocking for View Once messages for an added layer of protection. We’re testing this feature now and are excited to roll it out to users soon.”
Tweet Editing Looks Set to Finally Arrive?
It’s been the most highly requested Twitter feature upgrade for years, and now, it looks close to becoming a reality, with initial testing of Twitter’s coming edit function set to be made available to Twitter Blue subscribers in the app.
As you can see in this introductory screen, shared by app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi, the new edit option, which Twitter has been working on for several months, now looks set to be launched as part of Twitter Blue, along with the other add-on tools that you can access for $2.99 per month.
At least, for now. Twitter also recently announced that the cost of Twitter Blue is rising from $2.99 to $4.99, which, at the time, seemed odd, given that Twitter’s jacking up the price by 67% with zero feature upgrades.
But maybe this was in anticipation of tweet editing becoming available, and the likely boost in interest that Twitter Blue will see as a result.
Do you want an edit button?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 5, 2022
Could We Soon Have The Ability To Schedule Posts Within The Instagram App?
It’s been available in Creator Studio for a while, but soon, you may also be able to schedule Instagram posts from within the app itself – including Reels.
As you can see in this screenshot, shared by app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi, Instagram is developing a native post scheduling process within the app, which will eventually enable users to schedule all of their posts, including Reels and Stories, to go out at set times.
Which, functionally, is not a major upgrade. As noted, users have been able to schedule regular IG posts in Creator Studio since 2020, and Stories since early last year. Meta also recently announced a new Reels API, which will likely enable users to schedule Reels content via third-party management tools also – so it is, for the most part, already possible to schedule all of your Instagram content in other forms.
But not from within IG itself – and that may well prove to be a hugely valuable option, particularly for social media managers that are on the go, and are creating content using the app’s tools. Whoop whoop! Watch this space closely…
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