What was hot on the web this week? Get up to speed on the latest trends, news and services with some of our favorite stories.
Instagram adoption gathers pace amongst top global brands
They say a picture’s worth a thousand words. But, it might now be more fitting to say a picture’s worth a thousand fans.
A new study from simplymeasured.com reports that 40% of companies from the Interbrand 100 rankings now hold an account with popular photo-sharing service Instagram. Renowned brands including Audi, Starbucks and Burberry have quickly racked up fans, with MTV already approaching one million followers. In addition, the research found that over half of the brands on the list have adopted Pinterest, another platform powered by snap-happy users.
With Instagram approaching the 100 million user mark in just under two years, a landmark that Facebook took four years to reach, the rise of photo based services is becoming harder and harder for brands to ignore.
Read more here.
Facebook rolls the dice
In a move that many see to be directly linked to the brand’s declining stock value, Facebook has opened the doors for potentially lucrative gambling apps to be introduced to the site
The worlds largest social network has approved the sites first “real-cash game”, Bingo Friendzy. Whilst players in the UK will have to be aged over 18 to use the app, the move has opened up debate around the presence of gambling on a site with a reported 20 million users who are aged 18 or under. Not only that, the brand will also encounter different laws in different regions, making it near impossible to roll out the scheme globally.
More gambling apps are set to launch in the coming month, with slot machine games debuting “within weeks” and Farmville creator, Zynga, shifting their focus from farm yards to playing cards, introducing real-cash versions of their own poker and bingo games.
Read more here.
Pool and court dominate Olympic conversation during second week
With the first ever ‘Social Olympics’ drawing to a close, Mass Relevance, Twitter’s official social curation and integration partner, has analysed conversation around the games so far.
Nearly 30 million Olympic-flavoured tweets were sent within the first 10 days of the tournament and conversation peaked on Monday with over 13,000 tweets per minute. American athletes dominate the top 5 most mentioned athletes, with legendary swimmer Michael Phelps and basketball stars Lebron James and Kevin Durrant joining Britain’s Tom Daley and Jamaican sprint king Usain Bolt as the most discussed athletes of the games before this week.
Expect Bolt to have surged up the rankings by the end of this week, especially after confirming himself as a double-gold winner on Thursday night.
Read more here.
The BBC have also revealed their favourite social media moments from the Olympics, including this viral snap that proves that no one is safe from Olympic fever.
Read more here.
Apple intensify Google rivalry by dropping YouTube app
Rumoured details of the incoming iPhone 5 have hit fever pitch in recent weeks, but one of the rumours gathering momentum this week claims that the new device will not feature any Google powered services. This would include Google maps, YouTube and, of course, web search on Safari.
Having already revealed their own mapping service, Apple announced this week that due to the end of their partnership with Google, a YouTube app would not be pre-loaded on to the new device. With Apple seemingly intent on stripping the search giant’s influence on the device, mobile searching could be the space where Google is hit the hardest.
Google is currently the default search engine on both the iOS and Android (which it owns) platforms, however the end of this relationship with Apple could create opportunities for rival engines such as Bing to penetrate the iPhone’s loyal and often enthusiastic user base.
Read more here.
Tags: Apple, BBC, Digital, Facebook, Google, infographics, instagram, London, monitoring, Olympics, Social Media, Twitter
