Private Content Thought Deleted Before Posting is Often Saved Anyway

Growing up, you may have been warned by parents and teachers that if you did something bad, it would end up on your "permanent record." Of course, eventually, you found out that such a record doesn't actually exist... at least not in a physical format. Most people are aware that everything you do or say online stays around forever. Even if you delete something, there's almost always a way for a tech-savvy researcher to dig up an old post or shared picture. However, what might come as a surprise to most internet users, as explained in Drew Harwell's L.A. Times article, is that many websites record words typed and images uploaded, even if you delete the content before it ever gets posted.

Many social media users have been in a situation where they were preparing a scathing review or an angry post, then decided to not post it at all, whether for personal or business concerns. Even though they deleted the words they had typed, and never approved the post to go out to their friends and followers, social media platforms (Facebook in particular) save what was deleted"until it is no longer necessary to provide our services and Facebook Products, or until your account is deleted." While it is unnerving to find out that the thoughts and pictures you believed were private were actually being stored on Facebook's servers, some might consider the privacy issue to be not too concerning. However, when Facebook recently accidentally exposed millions of those undeleted photos to third-party apps (not the first of their privacy faux pas this year), their customers were justifiably upset.

It's more than just social media sites that are gathering information you didn't intend to give them. Some online chat services for customer service (LiveAgent for example), show the responder a real-time view of what the customer is typing. These companies claim that this allows responders to more quickly reply to questions, yet they don't inform their users of what some might consider a breach of their privacy. If you knew that every word you typed could be seen, not just the ones you sent, you would probably be more careful with everything you write. I know I would.

According to research done at Princeton University, there are hundreds of websites that record all of the mouse movements and keystrokes made by a user while on the site. This could give companies and cybercriminals access to all kinds of personal and sensitive information, from passwords to credit card numbers. Such websites included WordPress, LiveJournal, and Spotify, among many others. The research couldn't conclusively determine whether a specific website actually had a record of the user's actions; it only showed that the sites had the ability to make such a record.

Not all websites and social media platforms fall into this category. Snapchat, for example, saves an unset message for 24 hours before deleting it completely, but during that time, the content is saved in an encrypted form that can't be accessed without the decryption key, which is only accessible if the message is actually sent. Platforms like Twitter and Instagram will save messages and images in drafts until the user chooses to post, but the content is saved locally, to the user's device, and is never uploaded to the platforms' servers. You should just be aware that in this day and age, everything you do on a computer (or even on a mobile device) could be recorded, saved, and possibly released to the wrong audience. As usual, be mindful with what you post online, and even be careful with content that you don't ever plan on revealing to the public.

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Consumer Version of Google+ Platform to be Shut Down Over the Next Several Months

Social media is an important aspect of most people's lives. For some, social media is a way to keep up with what's happening in the lives of their friends and family members. For others, social media is a platform by which they can advertise their business or find the latest news updates. Although each platform tries to compete with others to some extent, the different platforms tend to attract different types of users, and often users will have accounts on multiple social media sites. LinkedIn draws in job-hunters and business professionals. Facebook and Twitter tend to be for general connectivity, although the former is more for friends and family, while the latter is more general.

Google+, while not on the same level of popularity as Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, filled a similar niche, intending to connect users and improve social media reach through Google's impressive search engine optimization algorithms. Unfortunately, according to Sam Dean's L.A. Times article, SEO wasn't enough to keep the users engaged. Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company, recently announced that Google+ is getting wound down over the next several months. The company expects to have the social media platform completely shut down by August. This week, a Wall Street Journal article came out claiming that Google discovered a security breach on Google+ months ago, and the company never informed its users. Some analysts believe that this breach in customers' trust could be what brought about the announcement on Monday.

However, it seems very likely that the privacy breach (although it may have been the last straw) was not Google's main motivator for shutting down Google+. The real reason was probably one of simple economics. Google+ just wasn't bringing in enough revenue. Social media platforms, since they tend to be free to use, bring in money by selling advertisements. Advertisers will only pay a company if they can see that the number of potential new customers justifies the cost. If a company can pay Google a set amount of money each month for advertising on Google+, and be guaranteed an increase in customers and sales, then they will gladly make that leap. However, if they know that 90% of Google+ users spend less than 5 seconds per session, the company is unlikely to believe that their advertisements will ever be seen, so they will be unlikely to put an advertisement in the first place.

Although the consumer version of Google+ is getting shut down over the coming months, Google is still planning to keep up its enterprise platform, through which corporate customers interact and provide information that can be integrated into Google's other features, including Google Maps. It's impossible to tell which of the issues (low user rates or recent privacy concerns) really made Google finally flip the switch and shut Google+ down, but other social media platforms may soon follow suit. Due to several recent issues with Facebook's handling of user data and bugs in their operating system that allowed hackers to access the same data, governmental agencies like the Federal Trade Commission have stepped up their levels of oversight. Even the House of Representatives and the Senate are getting involved, looking to investigate and improve laws to keep data safer than before.

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Online Advertising in the U.S. Outpaces Print for the First Time

A company can be the best in the business and can be producing the highest-quality items at the lowest prices, but those facts don't matter much if no one hears about the company. So, in many ways, the reach of a company's advertising efforts can be a far more important factor in the business' success than the business itself. In the past, a company's outreach efforts involved advertisements posted in the local newspaper. Eventually, that developed into short commercials on the radio, then on television. Now, in the digital age, advertisers have to make use of the internet if they want to get noticed. In fact, according to Wendy Lee's L.A. Times article, over half of all advertisements in the U.S. this year were online.

Since companies are looking to target more consumers from the younger demographics, and since it's well-known that younger consumers tend to spend far more time on mobile devices than older consumers, those companies have pivoted their marketing strategy to focus on platforms like Google and Facebook. This pivot was so significant that in 2018, advertisers will spend a total of more than $100 billion on online advertisements, a 16% increase from last year's expenditures. Studies have found that the online advertisements are more successful in targeting consumers, provides the advertisers with more information about the targeted consumer, and even costs less overall.

The advertisements tend to focus mainly on social media and internet searches. For example, if you like a Facebook page related to cooking, you might tend to see more ads on your Facebook feed related to cookware. Or, if you search on Google for a specific product, the next time you use the internet, advertisements will be more likely to show you products similar to the one you searched for, or related products from the same company. Online advertising has the benefit that it can target specific demographics of consumers and can record how many people are actually affected by the ads (determined by the ratio of ad clicks to purchases).

It makes sense that companies are making the shift to online advertising. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have millions of users who log on every day, and a targeted ad can draw in many more potential customers than a generic advertisement in the local paper or a catchy commercial on TV. Especially as streaming services become more popular (thereby decreasing the percentage of the population who actively watch cable television), TV commercials become less effective and more annoying to the common viewer. Online ads are still seen as annoying, but if done in the right way, they can catch a consumer's attention without distracting a consumer from the posts and online content they are actually there to see.

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Twitter Planning to Focus More on Video-Based Entertainment

Twitter, one of the most popular social media sites in the industry, is known for its short posts, called "tweets." Over the years, it has grown to allow those posts to include links, or images, or even videos, but mainly, the site is known for their users' ability to communicate via one-liners. Recently, Twitter increased the character count allowed in a message, doubling the approved size, and users have responded positively. Now, according to an article by Bloomberg LP, the company is looking to focus on more video-based options, especially those in the realms of news, sports, and entertainment.

Twitter has been putting in quite a bit of hard work toward making that goal a reality. Already, the social media network has made deals with 30 media companies, including Comcast, Viacom, and Disney. After announcing the Disney partnership last week, Twitter's stocks went up by 4.5%. The company hopes that such partnerships will make the social media platform into more of a hub for live and pre-recorded video streaming.

Many viewers, especially from the younger generations, don't use televisions for the majority of their entertainment. They use smartphones, tablets, and computers to stream from the internet rather than using cable. If Twitter is able to capitalize on that trend and capture a sizable audience of viewers, they could exponentially increase usage of the platform. If more viewers went onto Twitter for news, entertainment, and sports, then they would also stay for everything else the site has to offer, which would improve viewership across the board.

Over the past year, the number of views on Twitter videos has gone up nearly two-fold in regards to daily viewership, and nearly half of the site's advertisement revenue comes from such videos. From "SportsCenter Live" to "Comedy Central's Creator Room," all of the new channels will likely bring in a variety of diverse viewers, who will, in turn, connect their own communities to the platform. The shift to video and live streaming could be the move that pushes Twitter ahead of some other competitors, both in social media and in entertainment.

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Snapchat's Planned Updates Expect to Expand User Base

In late 2011, a group of Stanford students came together to develop a new kind of social media platform, which they called Snapchat. Snapchat was unique in that it aimed to allow virtual communication with the same level of emotional range that one might expect from an in-person conversation. To accomplish that goal, Snapchat was designed to be impermanent in that all messages, pictures, and videos sent through the app would be deleted after the recipient had viewed them. The new concept took the social media world by storm and brought in many users, especially among the teenage to early twenties demographic.

Eventually, however, the buzz died down and many users became bored of the concept, turning to standard social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter for their day-to-day use. Snapchat kept updating their software, adding features to make it more interesting to use, but some people didn't see a purpose in sharing 10-second blurbs of their life. It wasn't until late 2015 that the company made a big change that brought in so many more users: filters. Their filters gave users the ability to change their appearance, voice, or background, thereby making photos and videos more of a fun experience to share with friends. Since then, Snapchat has been continuously adding to their supply of filters, getting more and more detailed by the day. Most recently, as Paresh Dave described in his L.A. Times article, Snapchat is making another big change, a search bar that will make the platform that much more similar to competitors like Facebook.

Besides the fact that the new update seems to stray from the company's original plan to be different from other social media platforms, the search bar seems to be a great addition. Not only will users be able to look up friends by name, they will also be able to efficiently find celebrities and companies that they want to follow. Additionally, all users will have the ability to send their Snaps to the company for the chance to be featured publicly, a feature that was once limited to specific locations and events. Perhaps the coolest part of the new update involves the use of artificial intelligence to identify objects or people in public videos. In that way, a user could choose to view any Snap containing a specific product or featuring the image of a politician or some other famous person.

Because Snapchat is now allowing public submissions from anyone around the world, they are making their users happy and are granting themselves access to far more content. If users are willing to send in their own funny or thought-provoking images and videos, then Snapchat doesn't have to invest money into coming up with their own. Their AI will sort the Snaps based on event or location, which could be helpful for real-time coverage by real people in the event of a natural disaster or local emergency. All of these changes to the app seem to be timely and will hopefully be quite effective in both helping the company grow and allowing users to connect easily.

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Twitter Inc. to Shut Down Vine and Lay Off Hundreds of Employees

Five years ago, Facebook and Twitter got into a battle over who would ultimately purchase Instagram. When the more-powerful Facebook ultimately purchased Instagram, Twitter took a risk and went for the unheard-of Vine app. In the short-run, Vine was a far cheaper investment and ended up with millions of users. However, now that live video streaming seems to be the way of the future. According to Paresh Dave, in his L.A. Times article, Twitter is being forced to stop all future development on Vine and cut approximately 9% of its workforce to make ends meet as their profits continue to decrease.

Vine is an app that enables users, especially those with comedic talent, to share short videos, limited to approximately 6 seconds. Many people have gained viral fame due to Vine, including comedians like Thomas Sanders and singers like Shawn Mendes. Unfortunately, even though Vine gained massive popularity, it only lasted a few years before users and advertisers realized that YouTube and other platforms would be more lucrative. As one analyst stated, there are too many alternatives for video advertising to have a successful app that limits clips to 6 seconds.

Vine isn't the only thing Twitter Inc. is getting rid of, though. In order to save around $100 million per year, even after severance pay, Twitter plans to lay off approximately 350 of its 3,900 employees. Unfortunately, analysts don;t believe that the cuts will be enough in the long run. While Twitter's revenue is up 8% from last year, in part due to advertisement sales, it is also showing a loss of over $100 million per quarter. Twitter executives seem confident that the addition of live-streaming capabilities will enable the company to be more successful in the future, but that remains to be seen.

One of the main problems that analysts have pointed out regarding Twitter Inc.'s business is that users are too limited. On Twitter.com, posts are limited to 140 characters, and on Vine, videos were limited to 6 seconds. Users don't like limits, especially when they are so small. At least on Snapchat, videos have a slightly longer 10-second limit, nearly double that of Vine. There has been some talk in recent years of Twitter raising their character limits, but as of yet, that has not come to fruition. Logically, longer messages and longer videos would have more space for advertisement, so if Twitter wants to stay competitive, it may have to adapt to the longer format used by most platforms.

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