One week, five stories #2

Instagram suggests wellbeing over ‘likes’ count

Instagram has chosen to remove the number of likes on its content a further six countries including Australia, Italy and Brazil. If the total like counts is not publicly displayed anymore, users can still see the details if they wish to do so. In recent years, Instagram has become a very prolific space to share content, but the ‘like’ supremacy, the sign of success on the social platform, has brought a growing feeling of competition and anxiousness to its users. The platform wants to refocus on wellbeing and capacity to connect with people and the things they care about. It will be interesting to see how businesses will find their ideal influencers if Instagram decides to apply this new system indefinitely.

Enjoy your youth, why bother with wrinkly pictures

These last few days, you might have been surprised by pictures of your friends or celebrities who seem to have aged overnight. Face App is the iOS and Android app that takes photos of your face and applies it a filter to age it instantly. But what really happens to your photos once you upload them on the app? Many experts have raised security concerns, once again that this app could create problems with their security terms or even their GDPR compliance. Among other things, the app could create a vast database of facial photos to train artificial intelligence to better recognise faces. However, this app is not really any more untrustworthy than any other photo apps or big social media platforms. So, if you really want to see what you’ll look like in 50 years, why not try it?

Google always knows how to keep you on your toes

In one year only, Google has made over 3,200 changes to its search system, in order to keep its tools up-to-date. Google has kept relatively quiet about these changes over the past year, but we can confidently imagine that they have affected its ranking system as well as the user interface. But, what does this mean for businesses? Well, just like Google, you must be ready to constantly change and improve your website, in order to maintain and improve your rankings in the search engine.

The whole of Europe couldn’t find their way after Galileo outage

Due to a technical incident, the European satellite-navigation system, Galileo, suffered an outage last week. This event caused many devices to be unable to pick their position, use any sort of GPS directions or timing services for several days. GPS is now a massive part of our daily lives, and such a long outage shouldn’t be underestimated, as it could highlight unexpected vulnerabilities to a system that was long-believed infallible.

Let’s free the aliens altogether

More than 1.7 million people have already RSVP’d to the Facebook event ‘Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us’. Area 51, in the Nevada desert, has raised multiple questions and led to many crazy theories for decades. What first started as a social media joke, soon became viral. And if many just enjoyed creating memes about it and sharing jokes, others took the event a little too seriously. The US military didn’t appreciate the joke quite as much and quickly tried to discourage the alien hunters with not-so-subtle threats.