Stay up-to-date on the top tech news and trends each week with our Weekly Top 10 Tech. See something we missed? Tag @swebdevelopment on Facebook and Twitter! Here’s our top 10 for this week:
1. Twitter To Stop Counting Photos And Links In 140-Character Limit
Earlier this year there were rumors that Twitter would be changing its character limit to 10,000, but after an uproar from the online community, that idea got shot down quickly. Twitter will soon be making a change that users will love, however, and stop counting photos and links against the character limit. Good move, Twitter.
2. Hands-On With Spaces: Everything You Need To Know About Google’s New Chat App
Google has created its own chat app, Spaces, with different conversations between friends housed under topical spaces. Unlike Facebook’s Messenger, WhatsApp, or Google’s own Hangouts, the vision for Spaces is to be a place where small groups of friends, families, or coworkers come together to coordinate plans or discuss common interests. We’re not so sure an entirely new app is needed for this, but Google loves creating new things–we’ll see how long this one stays around.
3. Facebook To Sell Video Ads On Behalf Of Other Firms
Facebook has already been selling advertising outside of the Facebook platform through its Audience Network, allowing advertisers to tap into Facebook’s audience analytics to create targeted campaigns in partner apps. Now Facebook is focusing its efforts on selling video ads through those same networks.
4. Google Duo Makes Mobile Video Calls Fast And Simple
Google has plans to launch its own video calling app this summer, and its touted as being even simpler and user-friendly than FaceTime–and will be available on both Android and iOS. Unlike FaceTime, it’s mobile only, and would take convincing your friends and family to download yet another app.
5. Voice Search Is Exploding and Digital Strategy Will Never Be the Same
Keyword search is on the decline, and more and more people are using voice activated searches to ask full sentence questions instead. This will inevitably have an affect on SEO, and businesses will need to start focusing on giving full sentence answers in return.
6. Facebook Will Soon Turn Your Panorama Photos Into 360-Degree VR Images
360 VR videos are all the rage right now, but producing them is not accessible to most people. In an effort to change that, Facebook will soon allow everyday users to upload panoramic photos to create 360-degree VR images. The best of these user created images will be curated in a section of the Oculus 360 Photos app as well.
7. What You Need To Know About Pinterest’s Activity Changes
Pinterest users may have been surprised to see a drastic uptick in their number of repins recently after an update to the popular website. Pinterest is now aggregating the total pins of a source, and showing that number on every existing pin, giving a more accurate picture of the virality of a website’s content.
8. Android Apps Can Now React To Your Environment
At this week’s Google I/O conference, Google introduced new tools that allow developers to create apps that customize themselves based on the users current location and activity. From switching to high energy music when a user plugs in their headphones and begins to run, to a smart alarm clock that wakes you up depending on how much sleep you got the night before and what time your first meeting of the day is, the possibilities are promising. Some of these capabilities have been available to developers before, but Google is now streamlining the process without requiring the use of multiple APIs.
9. Netflix Launches Its Own Speed Test Website, Fast.com
In an effort to help users determine who’s to blame when there’s trouble with their connection during the middle of their favorite shows and movies, Netflix has launched its own speed test site. The site is extremely basic and begins testing your internet connection immediately upon loading. There are a number of internet speed testing websites out there already, but Fast.com specifically tests downloads from Netflix’s servers.
10. LinkedIn Resetting Passwords After 117 Million User Credentials Stolen
Back in 2012, LinkedIn had a major data breach where hackers were thought to have acquired about 6.5 million users’ passwords. This week LinkedIn announced that it learned the number was actually over 100 million users, after many of those passwords started showing up for sale illegally online. As a safety measure, LinkedIn is recommending that all users update their passwords as well as creating a two-step verification to increase account security.
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