Hot take: I don’t think we should break up Facebook. But plenty of people do. (Facebook itself, unsurprisingly, doesn’t.) Moving on…
Facebook is introducing Birthday Stories, which function like an event story insofar as they compile content from multiple users to tell a singular story, and even feature birthday song stickers. They’ve also got some new tools for small businesses, including automatic ads, appointment functionality, and new video editing tools within the platform (you can do text overlays! Fun!).
Facebook’s been testing a WhatsApp payments tool in India, and is now creating a new team to develop the feature’s international rollout, with primary offices in London and secondary staff in Dublin.
Instagram introduces @shop , an of-course-shoppable account to highlight shops and makers from across the platform. They also might be developing a Stories sticker that plays a music video snippet with some lyrics over it (though this whole story might just be one epic Rick Roll).
Instagram is also introducing some of Facebook’s fact-checker technology (that’s not really where I go for news and information… but people are, I guess?), and is going to be flagging anti-vaccination posts - though exactly what effect that “flagging” will have, I’m not sure.
MailChimp is introducing a bevy of new features, including websites (domains, templates, and hosting), ad retargeting on Google and social media, social posting, smart recommendations, recurring postcards, and a CRM (they already integrated well with several existing CRMs, but now are straight-up introducing their own), in the hopes of becoming a one-stop shop for small businesses’ digital needs. Not exactly social media, but worth having on the radar, as the new platform increases their integration with social media platforms.