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 Victoria.
1. Facebook and Instagram go down for 40 minutes, world goes mad
On Tuesday morning, I awoke to devastating news.
People across the UK woke up to check Facebook and Instagram, and to their horror, discovered that they were both down. Widespread panic set in after users found themselves unable to post photos of their breakfast taken through a filtered lens, with users resorting to using Twitter to find out what in God’s name was going on.
Fortunately, after 40 minutes or so, both social media sites were back up, and feeds were once again graced with images of breakfast muffins and posts asking ‘U OK hun?’
Hacker group Lizard Squad hinted that they were responsible for the downtime, but it was later confirmed to be a server error. Little liars.
Given the coverage this story was awarded despite the short amount of time the two sites were down, I can only imagine how bad things would be if the whole internet disappeared for the same amount of time…
http://www.southparkstudios.co.uk/clips/vqskzi/its-just-gone
2. Oh, won’t you stay with me?
Sam Smith’s grammy nominated tear-jerking-whinge-fest (or chart hit, whatever) ‘Stay with me’ is actually Tom Petty’s ‘I won’t back down’. Well pretty much, anyway. The courts agreed it was this week, so Mr Petty and his buddy Jeff were awarded 12.5% of the songwriting credits.
To be fair to Sam Smith though, there are a lot of songs that sound very much like other songs. There’s only so many notes after all.
3. Shiver Me Timbers
Nobody is entirely sure what is going on, but torrent site The Pirate Bay has resurfaced this week, and it now features a countdown timer, which is due to end on February 1st.
The Pirate Bay was taken offline last month following a police raid in Sweden, but it’s looking increasingly likely that the site will be back in a matter of days, though in what capacity is yet to be seen.
4. Twitter gets snazzy new features
Two major new features have been introduced to Twitter this week. One feature allows group direct messages, perfect for those moments where you want to share something a little too wrong to be published for the world to see, but not wrong enough to not share with a group of close friends won’t judge you. Or, as Twitter suggests, use it to ‘show emoji & be yourself’.
The second feature is 30 seconds of video, which if I’ve done my maths right, is a massive 15 seconds longer than Instagram, and a whopping 24 seconds longer than a Vine.
5. Sweet Linkbuilding
It’s been about a month since Sir Alan Sugar said ‘You’re Hired’ to that Mark bloke, and construction of the Climb Online website is underway.
Now, I’m kinda hoping that this isn’t going to be one of Mark’s offerings to clients (and that instead it’s a negative SEO attack), because this link is about as pony as they come.
It’s an exact match anchor for a commercial term (Search Engine Optimisation), which has been plonked in some blog comments, amongst a sea of other comment spam, on a domain in no way relevant to online marketing, oh, and it’s in French. Sweet linkbuilding bruv.
