My Five #293

In this week’s My Five we’re naming and shaming copycats on Twitter, Putin tickles the ivories and something’s shunted Uranus.

By 

Matt Batterham

, 

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 Matt.

1. Copy that

The World Cup is brilliant for many reasons, not least because it provides an endless source of excellent, original content. Stuff like this:

 

And this:

And this:

 

But for every good piece of content on the internet that exists, there’s a thousand poor imitations or outright rip-offs. Plagiarism is a massive problem across social media, but the fact it goes unpunished almost all of the time means the perpetrators continue to do it – as long as those sweet likes keep rolling in, who cares right? You don’t, however, expect such behaviour from the likes of Virgin Media, who were called out earlier this week for posting what appears to be a rip-off of @Coldwar_Steve’s England X1 image shown above.

The brand is playing ignorant but the similarities between the two posts (humour aside) are obvious and haven’t gone unnoticed.

Less surprisingly, The Sun’s been at it too – but the less said about that rag the better.

2. Cool Stories, bro

Instagram has been rolling out updates for fun in recent weeks, with IGTV and the “You’re All Caught Up” feature being the most obvious examples. In its most recent announcement, which revealed Instagram Stories now supports music, the company casually dropped in that Instagram Stories now has more than 400 million daily active users – more than 100 million more than it did last November. That’s impressive growth even by Facebook’s standards, and serves as further confirmation that Instagram is dominating the stories space. Snapchat, for comparison, is currently rocking around 191 million daily users.

3. Something shunted Uranus

I’m no space expert, but I do know a bit about Uranus. At least I do now, having seen it plastered all over the internet this week. For instance, Uranus is cold, Uranus is hostile, and Uranus spins at a jaunty angle. These unique characteristics have long puzzled scientists, but a new study by researchers at Durham University might explain why Uranus is so different to other planets in our solar system.