Social Media platforms are always searching for new ways to let you connect with your friends, family or even people with the same interests as you, whether it is by posting or sending pictures surrounded by bursting hearts or a fake crown upon your head and even engaging in discussions with your followers through the “ask me anything” feature that was recently deployed and they aren’t stopping here.
Recently Instagram released its newest hack, aimed at personalizing your DMs by adding the ‘voice messaging feature’, which allows you to record a full minute of audio.
So here is what you can do with the new feature. Open your Insta DMs and you will see a small microphone sitting on the right corner of your screen, hold the microphone icon down and start talking, as soon you’re done, simply let go of your finger grip and the message will be on its to the recipient. Moreover, what we advise is to choose your words carefully and If by any chance you did end up saying something you didn’t intent of saying, you can just swipe left, drag the recording to trash and voila, you can pretend like it never happened.
Another way to use the microphone is by swiping up once and holding the microphone icon to reveal a lock icon (same as whatsapp) and you will be able to talk hands-free and send the message across by tapping the ‘up’ arrow, or you can just hold the phone to your ear while on your DM thread, there will be a soft beep to guide you, after the beep, start recording your message as if you’re on a phone call, remove the phone from your ear and press the icon to send.
On a different note, after announcing the ‘Sparkle’ button back in September, Twitter is now bringing the feature to all, enabling everyone to easily switch between chronological and algorithmic timeline. The new button will be present at the top right of the application replacing the compose tweet button, when you tap on it, your timeline will then switch to show you the latest tweets in opposition to what is defined algorithmically as the most likely to be of interest.
Twitter’s algorithm has been a cause of frustration for users, with some arguing from its initial implementation back in 2016 that an algorithm ranking of tweets runts in counter of what Twitter is all about. However, Twitter’s new simple implementation of ‘Sparkle’ will change the course of the matter and allow users to happily switch back and forth between chronological and algorithmic tweets.
Keith Coleman, Twitter’s product lead, announced the change in a Tweet thread and the company stated that this feature will be available on platforms other than iOS in January 2019, and with this change the company will put the “show the best tweets first” option to rest.
That’s all for today! Tune in to #SocialSpeak next week for a new topic and if you have a topic in mind that you’d like us to write about, please do leave a comment in our comment’s section. Tchau!
