My Five #202

Another week, another My Five… and another messaging app. Find out what Google’s been up to and enjoy the latest social media burn with this week’s round up.

By 

Libby Bearman

, 

published on 

Five things worth sharing from the last week or so, brought to you by a different member of the Browser Media team every Friday.

This week’s My Five is by Libby.

1. Google plays possum

At the beginning of the month, there was a Google Local algorithm update which lead many businesses to believe their Google My Business listing had vanished. Turns out they’ve gone nowhere, they’ve just been filtered.

According to Joy Hawkins of Search Engine land, this is the biggest shake up of Google Local since Pigeon in 2014.

Businesses that fall outside of physical city limits have historically struggled to rank for location-specific terms, but Possum’s meant their visibility has improved. If you want to know a little more about this latest update, I suggest you check out Hawkins’ webinar:

2. Allo, allo, allo

Google’s launched its “smart messaging app”. On Wednesday the English-only version was released on Android and iOS, and using AI to generate auto-responses, it also includes Google Assistant, so users can quickly complete tasks all in one place… due to it “listening in” on all your interactions. Great.

It’s fair to say that its previous attempts at winning the messaging apps battle, like Google Talk, Google Chat and Google’s Hangouts, have struggled to come close to Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. There has been some backlash against WhatsApp’s privacy policy, but Allo is already suffering a scathing review from Edward Snowden:

3. Takei that, Trump

I hate writing about Donald Trump, but I couldn’t resist highlighting this sweet social media burn by George Takei after Trump’s dig at Obama: