Welcome to the latest edition of our Digital Digest. Without further ado, here’s a run-down of the week’s hottest digital news…
**Feeling ‘yucky’? Google can help…**
Based on the insight that nearly one percent of its searches are symptom-related, Google has announced that it is rolling out symptom-related direct answers on mobile. According to (link: https://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/im-feeling-yucky-searching-for-symptoms.html text: the Official Google blog), a search for a specific symptom such as ‘headache on one side’ will return a description of the symptom, self-treatment options and possible health issues related to the symptom that may necessitate a doctor’s visit. For now this is only in English, on mobile and in the US but this is expected to soon extend to other platforms, languages and territories.
**Instagram hits half a billion monthly active users**
Having more than doubled in size over the past 2 years, this week Instagram achieved the significant milestone of 500 million monthly active users (MAUs) worldwide. To coincide with this news, the leading photo-sharing platform has revealed that its users share an average of more than 95m photos and videos each day, drawing 4.2bn likes. That works out at about 44 for each post (clearly skewed by mega users such as Selena Gomez with her 86m followers and the growing numbers of ‘Instafamous’, ahem…)
Interesting, Instagram has also announced plans to productise video discovery, adding recommended video channels within the explore section.
**Facebook Live video map on desktop**
The desktop version of Live, Facebook’s video streaming feature launched back in Feb, just got an interesting new addition – ‘Live Video’. This lets you (link: https://www.facebook.com/livemap/ text: browse Live streaming videos on a world map) with blue dots representing Live videos and the size of the dot indicating how many viewers the video has.
**Ryanair make a Brexit boo-boo**
On the surface at least (our PR team recommend we exercise skepticism with this notoriously PR-hungry brand!) Ryanair made an ‘embarrassing mistake’ by sending (link: http://ryanairemail.com/nl/jsp/m.jsp?c=%40BfCHEcBNWRJP57R%2F4RHtqWOSYLthcoN36MXUbnF7Whk%3D text: the wrong version of their post-EU referendum flash sale memo) to their database. Whether this was intentional or not, it did get people talking about the 1 million cheap seats on offer… sneaky!
**Bentley create a 53-billion pixel photo**
To promote their latest new model, luxury-car brand Bentley has used technology developed by NASA to create (link: http://www.bentleymotors.com/en/apps/look-closer.html text: a 53-billion pixel photo) that allows users to zoom in all the way from the panoramic view of the car on San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge, to the interior where you can clearly make out a stitched version of the Bentley logo on the leather seat. We hear that the image, a composite of 70 different photos, would fill a football pitch if printed! Impressive. And if that’s not enough showing off, they’ve also created (link: http://www.bentleymotors.com/en/apps/look-closer.html text: a 360 version from within the actual car).
**Twitter launches Engage app, increases length of video uploads**
Engage is an app launched by Twitter to make it easier for celebrities and influencers to monitor their engagement, presenting real-time data based on the number of people who see and engage with their tweets and filtering results to show responses from other influential users. Similar in some respects to Facebook’s Mentions app, the idea is that this will make it easier for those with large followings to manage their presences. It has however been criticised for putting more of a barrier between celebrities and the average Twitter user. We enjoyed this Game of Thrones analogy…
> Regular Twitter vs “Twitter Engage” (link: https://t.co/E3VUdZiJDD text: pic.twitter.com/E3VUdZiJDD)
>
> — Dan Angelucci (@lucciinthesky) (link: https://twitter.com/lucciinthesky/status/745257992879226880 text: June 21, 2016)
In other Twitter news, the length of videos that can be uploaded directly to the platform has increased from 30 to 140 seconds. We understand this could extend Twitter’s companion app Vine, too.
Twitter has also revealed that for some users (namely professional publishers) the permitted length of videos will increase to up to 10 minutes. A new viewing mode has also been introduced as part of these changes, recommending ‘related’ video content to users when they select one to watch. The major social networks certainly seem to all be on the same page in this respect – video is the future. Which segues us nicely onto our final story for this week…
**Live video comes to Tumblr**
Not to be left out, Tumblr has revealed their own live video strategy. However rather than creating their own native platform, they are syndicating services like YouTube and YouNow.