The adage “the more things change, the more they stay the same” could aptly describe 2015’s digital offerings so far. Mobile video and mobile video sharing have been the primary areas of focus. This week Twitter introduced not one but two new products specifically designed to compete with applications that already exist.
Periscope
Ad Week: Brands Are Already Using Twitter’s Periscope App
After Meerkat’s enormous showing at SXSWi, Twitter released its own competitor, Periscope. Periscope has already gotten the attention of brands, which are testing out what they can do with the live-video app. Brands like Red Bull, Spotify and Mountain Dew – all quite youth-focused brands – are carrying on a recent tradition of companies quickly jumping on buzzy social tools.
Vine
Tech Times: Vine App Gets 720p Update: Go Watch Videos Now In HD
Vine has announced a big improvement in its service and its quality, now allowing users to publish videos in 720p HD. Until now, users were only able to publish videos in 480p. As handset displays become more and more advanced, higher resolution from video sharing platforms will be necessary. While this might not be important to a teenager whose video is titled, “teachers be like…” it IS significant to brands trying to showcase products that would benefit from higher resolution videos.
Tech Crunch: Twitter Publicly Launches Curator, Its Real-Time Search And Filtering Tool For Media Outlets
This week, Twitter launched Curator, its new product that lets media organizations, publishers, and broadcasters identify, filter and display tweets and Vine videos on any screen in real-time. A direct competitor to Storify, Curator will allow organizations to quickly filter out unwanted content and feed the most desired content into websites, TV shows, apps, and so forth.
Quartz: Elon Musk knows how to work Twitter
Earlier this week, Elon Musk tweeted that a new product will be unveiled at the end of April. Twitter users reacted with a measured and rational response…just kidding! #NewTeslaProductGuesses started trending within minutes, filled with jokes and rampant speculation. While before the tweet, Tesla’s stock was trending downwards, its price immediately shot up 3 percent. To his credit, Musk denied any attempt to affect the stock price, but one still has to wonder if it is even legal.
Facebook: A New Way to Organize Photos of Your Child on Facebook
In order to make sharing photos on Facebook easier between parents of new children, Facebook has introduced a scrapbooking feature in which multiple users can add photos to a specific scrapbook, eliminating the need to tag your partner in photos he or she is in, and creating a simple searchable way for people to share photos with family or friends. Potentially, brands with multiple public facing personalities (such as a musical group) could use this tool to collaboratively post images and videos.
