It’s taken a while, but Facebook is now rolling out its promised ‘time spent’ dashboard within its main app, enabling users to track the time they’re active on Facebook each day, and set prompts to limit their use.
As you can see from the above screenshots, the new dashboard is available within the functions listing, and through it, you can see your total time spent, set daily reminders, and change your settings to make better use of your time.
The options are very similar to what Instagram launched last week, which are part of the broader ‘digital wellbeing’ push within tech circles that’s been initiated in response to a range of reports about the potential negatives of overuse of digital platforms.
Facebook itself commissioned a report which found that passive engagement on social can lead to negative mental health impacts. That finding puts Facebook, as a business, in a tough position – on one hand, it needs to make you come back to the platform and use it as much as possible to boost its usage stats (and attract more ad dollars), but on the other, there are user welfare concerns with the same.
In this respect, Facebook’s new tracking tools seem somewhat like a red flag being waved by a matador – yes, they seek to address the core issue, but not really.
As noted by Techcrunch:
“Facebook and Instagram’s versions are particularly toothless. There are no options to force you to ease off your usage, just a quick daily limit notification to dismiss. iOS 12’s Screen Time at least delivery’s a weekly usage report by default so the feature finds you even if you don’t go looking for it. And Android’s new Digital Wellbeing dashboard is by far the most powerful, graying out app icons and requiring you to dig into your settings to unlock apps once you hit your daily limit.”
Really, the apps themselves are not responsible for how you use your time – if you choose to spend your free hours mindlessly scrolling through Facebook, that’s up to you. The providers can give you access to tools to highlight the potential problems with this, but they can’t necessarily enforce any ‘rules’ around use. It is possible that they could do more, as TechCrunch notes, and Facebook could also provide more insight into how, specifically, you’re spending your time in its apps, which may help to guide your usage. But the tracking dashboards are, looking at the other side of the argument, at least a first step.
So long as people go looking for them. Will you check out your Facebook usage stats?
I’m willing to bet the majority of users of both apps won’t bother – because who wants to know how much time you’ve wasted? Who wants to be shown the hours they could have spent doing something more productive? Hence, the red flag analogy – yes, Facebook is providing tools to help, but really, they’re somewhat meaningless in the broader scheme. You’ll keep on using Facebook and Instagram the same way regardless.
That’s not to denigrate Facebook for making the effort – and who knows, maybe they will prove beneficial, and will limit our time spent, and the negative impacts. But I wouldn’t count on it.
As you’re no doubt aware, Facebook Stories aren’t as popular as Instagram Stories, the most successful version of the format which Facebook copied from Snapchat (at least in western markets). But, even so, Facebook itself remains convinced that Stories is the format of the future, including on their main platform.
At their F8 developer conference earlier this year, several Facebook executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, noted that the Stories format is on track to overtake the News Feed as the most popular social sharing option, and that that will happen sometime this year.
Given that Instagram Stories is now at 400 million users, and WhatsApp ‘Status’ is up to 450 million, the growth of the option is clearly evident – but Facebook Stories, at 150 million daily actives, is still lagging behind.
But that slower rate of growth doesn’t appear to have dampened any enthusiasm for the potential of Facebook Stories in Menlo Park, with The Social Network releasing a new blog post promoting the potential of the format for businesses.
As noted by Facebook:
“The rise of stories is clear: people want fast, immersive and fun ways to share photos, videos and text with their friends and family – and stories offer just that. People use stories to share and discover content they’re interested in for movements as big as Pride and moments as small as the coffee they’re drinking. We designed stories on our platforms to fulfill people’s need to interact and share in engaging and playful ways on the vertical screen.”
I did laugh a little at the ‘we designed’ note – though probably not as funny to those at Snap Inc.
In the post, Facebook outlines the potential of Stories for brands, and their capacity to help marketers connect with their audiences, noting that a third of the most viewed stories on Instagram are from businesses.
But ads in Stories are where Facebook suggests there’s the most brand potential.
“Businesses are already seeing results using ads in Instagram Stories. For example, Tropicana ran video ads in Instagram Stories for its summertime product promotion campaign, achieving an 18-point lift in ad recall and 15-point lift in purchase intent among males. OpenTable used ads in Instagram Stories to drive online restaurant reservations, resulting in a 33% lower cost per reservation compared to other ad formats. And Overstock ran video ads in Instagram Stories to acquire new customers and increase sales, and generated an 18% higher return on ad spend and a 20% decrease in cost per acquisition.”
Right now, however, you can’t run ads on Facebo
Just a week ago, Instagram launched its new video sharing platform ‘IGTV.’ Now the company is rolling out new features like group video chat, new camera effects with custom AR filters, and redesigned explore section. So, let’s tell you about them brief:
Instagram’s Video Chat: How to use it?
The video chat option is available in the Direct Messaging section. To start a one-on-one video call, open an existing message or start a new thread. Then tap the new camera icon at the top right.
You can also make a group video call with up to four persons by creating a group that includes the recipients you would like to chat with. While chatting, you can minimize the window to multitask on Instagram by viewing photos, sending texts on DM, or post stories.
The camera icon turns blue when a video chat goes active and for joining an ongoing conversation, just tap the blue camera icon. Tapping on the red phone icon will end the calls.
In case you want to prevent a user from video calling you, blocking them would do the trick. You can also choose to mute users if you do not wish to receive notifications from them.
Explore Section: What’s new? What’s changed?
Instagram gets millions of visitors each day who check out the Explore tab to discover interesting picture and motion content. Now the platform has made it easier to find out specific content by creating topic channels.
On opening the Explore tab, you will see a list of channels which will show contents of a specific genre. The first one is “For You” that offers curated posts based on your personal interests.
There are other topic channels such as Food, Humor, Fashion, Beauty, Art, etc., and a list of hashtags to explore more specific and trending content topics.
In case you want to remove a channel from the list, just tap and hold the channel and select ‘Mute’ from the popup menu. It will stop showing content from that specific channel, and you can unmute it at any time by visiting the end of the list.
New Camera Effects
Another interesting update is the custom AR filters for Stories. For the first time, Instagram allowed third parties to create filters and they have been launched by celebrities Ariana Grande, Baby Ariel, YouTuber Liza Koshy, and famous channels like BuzzFeed and NBA.
These new Instagram filters can be used to augment a picture or selfie with objects and virtual effects. In case you come across a new AR filter being used on an image or video in other users’ stories, you will be offered an option to add it to your effects toolkit and try it out.
Instagram is also addressing the issue of online harassing and bullying on the platform by launching a new “bullying filter.” Based on machine learning tech, this filter will hide language that may seem offensive in nature.
CREDIT : FOSSBYTES