Apparently this is the week where everyone copies Snapchat. First, Instagram came out with “stories,” and now Facebook is jumping in on the action.
In celebration of the Olympics, Facebook is running a little test wherein Facebookers in Canada and Brazil will see a little camera open up at the top of their feed with they launch the Facebook app.
From there users can take photos or video and add Olympics-themed stickers, frames, and filters. Just like Snapchat. And that’s really the highlight of the story here. Snapchat’s visual storytelling approach is what made it such a hit, but mostly with younger audiences. The old joke is parents aren’t allowed on Snapchat, but the reality is many adults really don’t get Snapchat because it’s so unlike most other social media apps thanks to its unconventional user interface.
So, Instagram and Facebook are wisely emulating Snapchat in their own way, hoping to engage a wider demographic with this fun way of communicating with friends and family.
Spotify’s latest swat at Apple Music
Spotify today announced a new feature which we believe it hopes will help it better compete with Apple Music. It’s called “Release Radar,” and it’s a lot like “Discover Weekly” in that it will create a playlist of music it thinks you will like once a week, only this list will be made up entirely of recently released music. That might seem like an obvious move but consider the fact that there’s not a whole lot of data on brand-new releases for Spotify’s algorithm to grab onto.
Instead, the new list is based on the sound of the music itself. Spotify has a new audio team in New York developing programs that deeply analyze the audio in order to create data on it which the new algorithm can use. It’s a clever idea, and we’re looking forward to seeing how it works.
Suicide Squad kills itself trying (and failing) to be funny
Finally: Suicide Squad. It seems like this movie was in trouble from the get-go. The media has been hammering on its identity crisis from the beginning, and we know it went back into reshoots pretty late in the game, some say as a reaction to the huge disappointment that was Batman vs. Superman. And before the movie was even released, superfans were calling for a takedown of movie review aggregator, Rotten Tomatoes, over its negative rating of the flick.
Is it really that bad? Well, DT’s own Rick Marshall went to watch it for you and … well, you’ll just have to read the review here. It’s … complicated. Should you go see it? We’re leaving that decision to you. No matter what you do with your weekend, though, be sure to check in with Digital Trends to keep up on emerging tech and entertainment news.
