Twitter’s new video tool looks set to be on the way, whilst LinkedIn is now letting everyone publish from their personal account. Here’s our top five round-up of digital news.
Twitter’s new video tool is coming.
Reports have surfaced that Twitter is about to launch its new video product in the coming weeks.
The new feature will allow users to shoot, edit and post video directly through the Twitter app. At the moment, Twitter users can only share video through services such as Vine.
Twitter hopes that the change will result in more video clips being posted to the service, with video tending to enjoy stronger engagement rates.
The feature is likely to be very similar to Vine, but with some slight differences. It’s expected that the time limit for video will be as much as 20 seconds, rather than the six second limit on Vine.
Google loses ground to Yahoo!
Google has seen its biggest fall in market share since 2009, according to StatCounter.
Data from StatCounter claimed that Google had 77.3% of US searches in November, but that fell to 75.2% in December 2014.
Meanwhile, Yahoo saw its biggest US biggest increase in market share in five years, growing from 8.6% to 10.4% in the same period. The increase has largely been attributed to Yahoo’s new partnership with Mozilla Firefox.
Bing remains the second most popular search engine in the US however, with 12.5% of the search market.
LinkedIn extends publishing platform
LinkedIn has rolled out its publishing platform to all 17m UK users, allowing users to publish content under their own personal profile.
The feature effectively allows members to publish content that can be ‘followed’ by others. The feature was originally rolled out to key business influencers, including Sir Richard Branson and David Cameron.
The feature was successfully rolled out to US users last year, and will now be rolled out to around 230m English speaking members.
“Collectively, our members have several centuries’ worth of experience under their belts, and we wanted to give them a tool to showcase and share it,” claimed LinkedIn’s Darain Faraz.
Facebook’s book choice club sees sales rocketing
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg launched a book club at the start of the year – and has turned around the fortunes of the first book in the campaign.
The first book chosen in the Facebook reading group, The End of Power by Moisés Naím, sold more copies in two days than it had in the previous 18 months.
The book, a 2013 economics title that claims that power is in the hands of individuals, is currently 30th on the Amazon.com overall bestseller chart. Publishers have since been rushing to secure more copies of the printed version, whilst ebook downloads have also seen huge growth.
The page ‘Facebook’s “A Year of Books” has grown to more than 60,000 followers since 2 January.
Google received 345m removal requests in 2014
Google received more than 345 million requests to remove links to copyrighted content, according to analysis by TorrentFreak – more than double the amount in 2013.
Google has been reporting takedowns since 2008 (it received 68 requests that year) and has since seen a 550,000,000% increase in requests.
More than one in six requests for the removal of content came from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the body that represents the British music business.
In a statement made in October 2014, Google said: “Online piracy still remains a challenge, and Google takes that challenge seriously.
“We develop and deploy anti-piracy solutions with the support of hundreds of Google employees. This regular report details those efforts, as well as how Google products and services create opportunity for creators around the world.”
