Snap (formerly Snapchat) has a travelling vending machine

This has to be the most fun thing to happen in the social media world this week: The company previously known as Snapchat has a Spectacles-spewing ‘bot’. And by “spewing”, we mean “dispensing”. And by “bot”, we mean “vending machine”.

Spectacles is Snap’s sunglasses with an integrated video camera. The company launched the product in September, without revealing when and where these wearables will be available. Time reports the public can finally get their hands on a pair – if they happen to find themselves close to a Snapbot.

Snapbots are colourful vending machines that dispense Spectacles, according to Spectacles’ Support site. The vending machines have popped up in locations in the US in the last week – but never stay in one place for long.

True to the nature of the Snapchat app’s expiring selfies and videos, there’s no knowing where a Snapbot will pop up next or whether Spectacles will be sold outside the US anytime soon.

Video call with WhatsApp

On Monday, 14 November, WhatsApp announced video calling. The rollout of the new feature was expected to happen in the days following the announcement. The capability will be available to WhatsApp's more than one billion users across Android, iPhone, and Windows devices.

According to a post on the company's blog, the feature has been requested by users for years. In the post, it also said it promises “to keep working hard every day to improve the service.” Thanks, WhatsApp.

Facebook uncovers a metrics bug – again

Following an announcement in September that it has been miscalculating a specific video metric, Facebook has now also uncovered bugs on its Page Insights. Page Insights is available to the managers of Facebook Pages and lets them track activity on their page.

In a post on its Facebook Business site, it writes: “On one of our Pages dashboards, one summary number showing 7-day or 28-day organic page reach was miscalculated as a simple sum of daily reach instead of de-duplicating repeat visitors over these periods.”

It also found bugs in other complex metrics such as ‘video watches at 100%', average time spent per article in Instant Articles, and Referrals in the Facebook Analytics for Apps dashboard.

Ingrid Lunden, writing for TechCrunch, explains why the metrics announcement is both good and not so good, “While four problems in a pool of 220 may not seem like a lot, it’s a sign of how Facebook’s platform is getting increasingly complex. But given what a force Facebook is today in online advertising, there is also an important need for transparency and trust for those who are putting their content (and ad spend) onto the platform. And some of this is overdue, considering that Facebook has broken new ground around a whole new set of products and parameters in the digital ad market.”

Twitter (finally) takes a stronger stand again trolls

On Tuesday, November 15, Twitter said it “had some challenges keeping up with and curbing abusive conduct”. It’s now taking a new approach to abuse, bullying, and harassment.

It will focus its efforts on three areas: controls, reporting, and enforcement. To this end, it is expanding its “mute” feature to notifications. “We’re enabling you to mute keywords, phrases, and even entire conversations you don’t want to see notifications about, rolling out to everyone in the coming days.”

Twitter is also giving users a more direct way to report hateful conduct – whether for yourself or on behalf of others. This feature will improve the company’s ability to process these reports – and hopefully reduce the burden on the person experiencing the abuse. The company says it is aiming to “strengthen a culture of collective support on Twitter”.

It’s also made a couple of other improvements but explains that this is not a quick fix, “We don’t expect these announcements to suddenly remove abusive conduct from Twitter. No single action by us would do that. Instead, we commit to rapidly improving Twitter based on everything we observe and learn”.