Welcome to Connected Church News!
Top 5 latest Digital, Social Media & Web3 News in 5 minutes, to help your ministry stay on top of industry trends.
This week, we have news about Snapchat, LinkedIn, NFT, Web3, Meta, Google.
🗞️ News 1: Google Releases Multiple New Features for Android and Wear OS
Source: Google
Google announced the release of multiple new features for Android and WearOS. WearOS is the operating system for smart watches that run on Google platform. These features had multiple angles to it. Three out of the nine features focused on Google Keep and making you more productive by using the note taking app of Google, which is Google Keep on your watch, on your phone and with widgets. There were other cosmetic announcements like display animations, but one of the very useful features that they announced is the ability for you to customize chrome on your Android phone for your vision preference. If there are visually challenged people who would like to have font size increase or display the content on Chrome in a certain manner, you now can customize it. The announcement says you can easily increase the size of content, including text, videos, images, and interactive controls. Seems like quite a useful feature.
🗞️ News 2: Meta says Facebook, Instagram are now Part of ‘Take-It-Down’ Program
Source: Meta
Meta had an important announcement about the safety of young people and teens on Facebook and Instagram. So if you’re in any kind of youth ministry or working with younger people as nonprofits, this is something you might want to pay attention to. The announcement says that, both Facebook and Instagram are now part of, or founding members of, Take It Down. “Take It Down is a program, a new platform,” the announcement says, “designed to proactively prevent young people’s intimate images from spreading online. Meta also says that they support National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, NCMEC in the development of Take It Down, and building on the success of their existing platform where they are helping stop the spread of intimate images online. A good step. I also recommend if you are in this space to checkout this Take It Down program and the programs of NCMEC as well
🗞️ News 3: LinkedIn Releases New Features for Profile Display & Newsletters
Source: LinkedIn Pulse
LinkedIn has announced some useful new features and updates to the way they display LinkedIn profile and also a couple of new features for newsletters. The bigger announcement in this is the way they are structuring your LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn has been growing in engagement, so if you’ve not checked out new developments on LinkedIn, it’s probably time for you to check it out. And LinkedIn has been improving the way the platform looks and feels. So part of that growth is what they’ve announced now, where you can have more visual elements. Like for example, you can select the images, videos, and visual items that show up on your profile when people search for you. You can reorder them. It looks much bigger and more visual because earlier it was more text. Now it’s a little more visual as we go into an era of short videos, images. Good improvements from LinkedIn.
🗞️ News 4: Snapchat Launches ‘My AI’ a Chatbot with ChatGPT Integration
Source: Snapchat
Snapchat has announced that they are adding AI into their Snapchat+ subscription plan by releasing a new tool called My AI, which is a chat bot that’s integrated with Chat GPT. And the announcement says, My AI can recommend birthday gift ideas, it can help you plan a hiking trip, it can suggest a recipe for dinner, and so on. What I like about this whole generative AI industry evolution is instead of, people going randomly into ChatGPT and asking questions individually, these abilities of AI are being built into tools that we use on a regular basis. And I think that is the best application of generative AI. Because you go into various tools with different intent, with different requirement. And when there is an AI assistant right there waiting to help you, it just makes a lot of sense.
🗞️ News 5: [Web3] Yuga Labs Announces New Bitcoin-based Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT
Source: CoinDesk
In our Web3 news, we look at a big announcement from Yuga Labs, which is the promoter of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT. The announcement says that they are launching a new Bitcoin-based NFT program inside the BAYC ecosystem. The Bitcoin-based NFT wave is continuing to spread and when big names come in, that’s when the momentum kicks off. The announcement says that this is going to be called a Twelve Fold. It is a collection that will feature 300 generative art NFTs, created by Yuga Labs and placed on a 12by 12 grid. And it’ll also include 3D elements as well as hand drawn features. If you are into NFTs or if you’re just exploring that space, do check it out. I am personally starting to experiment and explore this space of Bitcoin NFTs and seeing how this trend is going to move forward in the days to come.
Author of The Connected Church. Social Media and Digital Marketing Consultant for Nonprofits, Faith-based Organisations, Churches, and Ministries.
