Location, Location, Location
After acquiring social mapping startup Zenly, Snapchat rolled out its newest feature, Snap Map. The social map feature allows users to view events from around the world and share their location with friends. Once you see what your friends are up to, meeting up with them is easy. Snap Map differs from Facebook’s Live Location feature by only updating when the actual app is open. This way, location sharing serves a more private platform for those you only choose to communicate with. No more #fomo. (Source: TechCrunch)
The Long Road Ahead
Despite famously being known as anti-tipping, Uber has introduced a tipping option to its app as part of the company’s 180 Days of Change initiative. In their attempt to make “meaningful changes to the driving experience,” Uber now allows tipping similar to its main competitor, Lyft, and hopes this will provide an incentive for more drivers to join their company. The change will begin in Seattle, Minneapolis, and Houston and will hit the rest of the country by late July. After Travis Kalanick’s resignation as CEO, Uber could really use some good news. But even if this initiative solves their drivers’ problems, this one aspect is just the tip of the iceberg. (Source: Mashable)
Strength in Numbers
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced the company’s new mission statement: to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” Although Facebook started as a tool to connect different cultures and opinions, political strife and international tension have spread misleading information and extremist ideology across the platform. Zuckerberg believes that deeper ties between Facebook users could solve this problem. The company hopes to have 1 billion users involved in “meaningful groups,” and they even plan on installing new tools to help moderators, the unpaid organizers of Facebook groups, filter out hate speech or just keep groups focused on a certain topic. Improved analytical tools will make better use of data and help determine which posts are inappropriate and need to be removed. The Zuck hopes that in time the fake news till you make news mantra will disappear. (Source: Bloomberg Tech)
