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 YouTube, Instagram, Amazon, Meta, WhatsApp.
🗞️ News 1: Twitter says Verification is Required to Run Ads; Revises Policy Norms
Source: Twitter Email | Twitter Blog
Two news items from Twitter that you may have to pay attention to. One, especially if you’re running ads. Twitter emailed all its users saying that if you want to continue running ads, you need to have either a blue check mark as an individual, or if you’re an organization, you need to have a verified organization badge, so something that might impact your advertising strategy. The next announcement is about the changes in their policy terms. Going forward, when Twitter sees a tweet that violates their policy norms, they will add a badge, different types of badges to the tweet letting the viewer know that this tweet has violated the terms, and they will also restrict the reach. There area few more details that they’ve given about how their policies have changed. As ministries, it’s important for us to understand when a social media platform changes their policy.
🗞️ News 2: Google Showcases BARD’s Coding Ability & DeepMind Research Partnership
The race to dominate the AI space continues in the tech world with Google making couple of announcements, one about Google Bard’s ability to help with coding. Google says that Bard can help with code generation, code debugging and explanation. It can even translate your code from one language to another. And there are other details that might be interesting if you are in the coding space, do check it out. We will link to it in the show notes. The second announcement is about their partnership, especially research partnership with this company called DeepMind, that they have been partnering for a while. DeepMind partners with various tech organizations. And now the CEO of Google and the CEO of DeepMind have released statements about this new partnership that will help them research deeper in the AI space and come out with solutions that might benefit both the organizations.
🗞️ News 3: Meta Opens ‘Horizon World’ Social VR Space to Teens, Amidst Concerns
Source: Meta
An important news from meta, especially if you are a nonprofit, church, or a ministry focusing on the youth ministry space, then this is something you might want to pay attention to. Meta has announced that they are opening up access of their social VR, virtual reality, space called Horizon Worlds to teenagers in US and Canada. And the age group of this new audience is going to be 13 to 17-year olds. As you can imagine, ever since this news started floating around in February, 2023 they have been facing pressure from lawmakers and child right activists to stop this and not move forward because of the various implications that it might have on teenagers. But in spite of it last week, they have made the announcement that they are going ahead. Something for you to look at if you’re a ministry focusing on teenagers.
🗞️ News 4: WhatsApp Releases ‘Keep In Chat’ Feature within Disappearing Messages
Source: WhatsApp
WhatsApp continues to add new features to the app. Last week, they announced a new feature called Keep In Chat. This is a sub feature of an existing facility called Disappearing Messages. If you’re a WhatsApp user, you know that disappearing messages can be sent between users and the user will be able to open it just once, and then once the timer runs out, the message will vanish from their screen. Now the recipient has an option called Keep In Chat, even though you’ve sent a disappearing message, they can request you to allow them to keep it. So the moment they make the request, as a sender, you will have a notification saying, can you allow them to keep it? And only if you approve it, it’s going to be retained. This is sort of the opposite to what a disappearing message is, but I’m guessing WhatsApp just wants to keep things flexible.
🗞️ News 5: ENS (Ethereum Name Service) adds Fiat Payments Options for Web3 Users
Source: Coindesk
Ethereum Name Service ENS is an organization that lets you book at domain name with an extension .eth which has multiple uses for the web3space. Now ENS has partnered with MoonPay, which is one of the Web3payment organizations, which also offers fiat currency payment, which means you can use regular bank accounts and non cryptocurrencies to make payments and book your domain name. If you as an organization have not thought about or checked out the options to book a ENS domain name for your ministry, then this might be a good opportunity for you to do that even if you do not have a crypto or a wallet setup.
Author of The Connected Church. Social Media and Digital Marketing Consultant for Nonprofits, Faith-based Organisations, Churches, and Ministries.
