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Caption: If you have the new features, you will see this prompt after navigating to your profile in the Facebook app. Molly McHugh
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Caption: Your picture now sits in the middle, and you’ll see an invitation to “introduce yourself” with a new, short bio. Molly McHugh
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Caption: You have 101 characters to work with here—including emoji.
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Caption: You can add up to five feature photos that will sit underneath your profile picture and bio. Molly McHugh
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Caption: The camera icon in the profile pic allows you to upload one of the new looping videos. They can be a max of seven seconds. Molly McHugh
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Facebook has rolled out its new mobile profile options for some lucky users, and if you’re among them, it means you have access to the new GIF-like profile pictures.
You won’t know you have the new profile unless you go check your profile on the mobile app (right now, it’s available for iOS only). Hit the “More” tab, then select your name to head to your profile. If you have the new creative suite, you’ll immediately notice your profile picture sitting in the middle of the page. There will be a prompt asking if you want to add a new summary bio—hit edit and enter whatever emoji (or, you know, words) your heart desires.
Onto what matters: Your looping profile video. There should be an icon flashing between the camera and the video symbol on your profile picture. Hit that and choose whether you want to take a video or upload one.
Videos can only be seven seconds, so you’re best off going to your gallery beforehand and editing something down (or taking a new video). If you have a new iPhone 6S or 6S Plus, then this is the perfect opportunity to show off Live Photos.
The only other thing left to do with your fancy new profile is add your featured photos. Below the About Me section, you will see five spaces for photos of your choosing.
While all of this is viewable across Facebook, it’s only edit-able via the mobile app. But don’t worry, it will still show up via the web app—here’s what it will look like:
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The design process can be unnecessarily messy. There’s sketching and digital files, handwritten notes, emails, and whiteboards. It’s hard to keep track of your own thoughts let alone your teammates’.
Fortunately, new tools have been popping up that help designers clear things up. The most recent is 10,000ft Insights, desktop and tablet software from 10,000ft and design studio Artefact that helps teams organize and visualize their design process by gathering all those disparate pieces of information in one place.
10,000ft Insights is a little like Wake (another tool we recently wrote about), in that its aim is to make design decisions more transparent. Everyone involved in a project—designers, engineers, business team—should have a clear picture of what’s being developing and how they can contribute. The idea is that by streamlining the design process and tracking methodology early on, it will lead to more and better ideas and insights.
The software from 10,000ft lets you arrange all of your content, called Sparks, into Pinterest-like boards. These Sparks can be anything—image inspiration, sketches, prototypes—and you can add notes, links, and files to each one.
Artefact and 10,000ft also built a series of “design thinking” tools into the software, to help facilitate brainstorming and organization. You can sort your Sparks into various columns and categories, a matrix tool helps you SWOT those ideas, a voting tool gives you quantifiable feedback, and then the decision-making tool helps teams synthesize all of your findings.
It’s interesting to watch as “design thinking” becomes systemized and rolled out to all aspects of a company. We’ve heard a lot about the importance of design in business, and tools like 10,000ft and Wake are manifestations of that new focus.
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Then One/WIRED
Today during a Q&A at Facebook headquarters, CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that the social network is indeed working on some kind of Dislike button. “People have asked about the dislike button for many years,” he said. “We’ve finally heard you and we’re working on this and we will deliver something that meets the needs of the larger community.”
Last December, during another Town Hall Q&A, Zuckerberg spoke about the Dislike button, acknowledging that the singular Like button created issues in the News Feed. For instance, when you see a post about a relative who’s passed away, or a break up, or a natural disaster, you want to show support… but Like doesn’t really apply to those situations.
At the time, Zuckerberg hedged the issue a bit, though, hinting a little that a Dislike option may appear in the future—and it seems that the future is approaching quickly. His wording today indicates that it’s unlikely the word “dislike” would be the name of what we actually get; there have previously been rumors of buttons with words of support or sympathy. Interpretation as to what “meets the needs of the larger community” remains, but it certainly sounds like we are moving outside the singularity of the Like.
You can continue watching the Q&A below.
Today’s Q&A with Mark live from Facebook HQ will begin at 11:30 PT. Tune into the live stream here.
Posted by Q&A with Mark on Tuesday, September 15, 2015
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Visor
Recho
Recho does one very simple, little thing: It lets you leave a voice message tied to a location. When other people using the app hit those coordinates, Recho will tell them there’s something to listen to. You can use the app to discover different “rechoes” around you, if you actively want to listen in on someone’s location-aware thoughts. You can also share interesting soundbytes with your Recho followers. It’s a little weird and novel, but ultimately a new way to think about digital exploring a place.
Visor
You should always do your research before heading into the great unknown. Parking, hours of operation, menus—all important intel. Visor looks into how crowded a spot is, a crucial factor for many of us deciding if that beer fest or restaurant opening is even worth it. Visor answers questions like “how long is the wait?” and “is there any parking?” so you can make a decision before leaving the comfort of your couch.
GIGA Selfie
OK, bear with me on this one, because it’s not available to everyone, everywhere—yet. But the idea is interesting enough to talk about. GIGA Selfie is a promo from Tourism Australia that wants to replace the selfie stick. Here’s how it works: You stand on a GIGA platform, open the app to take a selfie, which then also prompts a long-distance camera some 360 feet to also take your photo, so that you don’t have to crane your arm to try and include the scenery and your precious mug. These GIGA-enabled platforms will be found throughout the country, so book your travel plans accordingly.
Listerine Smile Detector
Brand apps usually aren’t worth a download, but Listerine Smile Detector actually has a heartwarming purpose. The app helps people who are blind or losing their sight “feel” smiles. The app uses facial recognition to find a face and then vibrates in the user’s hand to let them know that the person their talking with is smiling, a more subtle method than putting their hands on another person’s face, and enriching a conversation.
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infltr
Infltr
Instagram’s 23 filters not enough? Infltr has infinity filters! (Sort of: 5 million, actually.) The app lets you shoot in a filter, and you simply tap the screen to change to a new one. If you enjoy swiping through all of a photo app’s options to decided on the perfect choice, you might become overwhelmed by Infltr’s 5 millions of filters. But there’s something refreshing about using an overlay you haven’t seen before. It will certainly break you out of your Mayfair dependency.
Yemoji
How no one combined Kanye and emoji into a standalone app until this point is a testament to how much we love plain old Unicode. You might think that Kanye has two modes (shrug and stone-faced), but Yemoji proves there is a Kanye expression for nearly every situation. Surprised Ye, sad Ye, angry Ye—it’s all there. If we could get a hair toss Ye, then it would really round things out.
Venmo Groups
Venmo is easily one of the best unintended social networks on the Internet. Scroll through the public feed of transactions sometime if you want to be simultaneously amused and terrified. Now Venmo is beta testing a groups feature, so you can easily pay for things with your friends using fun/lewd emoji in the description field.
VRT
Vertical video finally gets the home it deserves (which is not with giant black boxes around it on YouTube). There’s nothing flashy here: It’s just a nice, simple, unobtrusive home for vertical videos. As it should be.
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Back in June, Facebook introduced us to its Moments app, an A.I.-infused service that helped friends easily share photos they took while together or while at the same event. Moments is intended to be an antidote to all the “hey text/email/message me that picture” nonsense that typically follows a party or vacation.
Now, Moments is moving beyond simple stills: Facebook added a video feature that takes photos and turns them into customizable movies (or slideshows, rather). It sounds a little like Google Photos, in that these Moments videos will select the best photos. Google Photos’s Assistant feature can make you slideshows with a soundtracks, and also does a nice job of automatically choosing your best images to create other enhancements like GIFs and panoramas1. Facebook says the photos are chosen based on storytelling. “It’s primarily optimized for a diversity of photos so it can capture a beginning, middle, and end of the ‘story.’ It also chooses a personalized set of photos to select the ones you and your friends are in.” Eventually, this will improve to include Liked photos and make sure to keep duplicates out.
Here’s an example of what the videos look like:
The update is available today for iOS and Android.
1UPDATE 3:03 PM ET 08/25/15: This story originally said Google Photos’s Assistant feature did not include videos, but it does in fact sometimes create slideshows automatically.
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BeepApp
GiphyCam
As if there weren’t enough GIFs on the Internet, now there can be more—and they can be of your face. The new app from Giphy makes it super-easy to GIF yourself or anyone around you, add some animated stickers, or make it a meme. Will you become the next viral GIF? Probably not, but that doesn’t make it any less fun.
Wondr
Wondr lets you have anonymous chat sessions with your Twitter followers, which might sound horribly unnecessary, but could actually be a great crowdsourcing tool. If you want input from the very smart people who follow you who also might not want to be identified, Wondr boots up an anonymous discussion with ease. And you can also use it to let your followers chat with you—if you’re that cool.
BeepApp
This is just mean: Beep is for kids only, because the sound it uses as a notification is too high for us Olds to hear. The app’s splash page explains it’s great for “youngsters,” so clearly it was not made by a teen. The best reason to download Beep is to see if you are cool anymore, and also to annoy any obnoxious youth in your vicinity.
Rizon
Golden Hour is a magical time—anyone who’s taken even one photography class has heard its praises sung. It’s when the sky gets all dusky and (surprise) gold, and everything looks like an angel threw up on it. Rizon calculates when this time is approaching, letting you know when the best time for shooting is. It lets you add multiple locations, too, so you can keep all your photog friends in the know.
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Yesterday Pew released it’s latest Internet survey, this time taking a look at social media and messaging. This is actually the first year that the research center has looked at mobile messaging apps as different than regular old texting. The TL;DR is what you likely think: More of us are using the Internet, more of us are using messaging apps, everybody loves Pinterest, and LinkedIn is majorly by white men. But the proof is in the pudding, or in this case the charts and graphs Pew created to give us a look at the state of the social Web and mobile messaging.
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Whitagram
Shower Texts
Reddit’s r/showerthoughts is one of the Web’s best places for all of life’s most random ideas. If you want some of this content on demand, a new app called Shower Texts will send you one a day. It’s sort of like the occasional late-night messages you get from your stoner friend, but without typos or any obligation to reply.
Wander
Wander, originally a Tumblr-esque sort of travel bloggish site-app-thing has pivoted into a mobile app for travelers. It’s sort of like Instagram devoted entirely to travel and scenery photos, and uses highly visual user journals meant to inspire your weekend plans… or just give you a serious case of wanderlust.
Bar Roulette
Use this app with caution: Bar Roulette is an app that calls you an Uber and takes you to a surprise mystery bar. Now Uber already has a less than stellar reputation in regards to safety, so adding an unknown night life location into the mix certainly can’t make things better. However, if you’re feeling like you need a little spontaneity in your Friday night, this could be a fix. Just bring a friend.
Whitagram
Whitagram feels like a very pretty mix of VSCO and Over: It’s just simple, bare-bones editing plus some fun clip art and text overlays—that manage to not be horribly cheesy.
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Microsoft Translator
App browsing still doesn’t have quite the same cachet as window shopping, but it should—the sheer amount of time spent staring into our smartphones is indication enough that we very much care what’s going on inside. We’ve selected some new titles worth installing.
Genius
The Rap Genius rebranding continues with the launch of the Genius mobile app. The service has transitioned from hip hop lyric library to a annotated pocket guide to pop culture, which it’s showing off with a new look and more fully-fledged function. It’s available for iOS and Android now.
Realmoji
While Realmoji isn’t an app you can download directly to your phone, it is some of the most fun you’ll ever have texting with a bot. After you enter your phone number on the site, Realmoji will text you. Then, you just need to select an emoji of your choosing, and it will respond with a real photo that represents that emoji. Think of it as a photographic emoji interpreter.
Microsoft Translator
This app runs on the Apple Watch and Android Wear, so plenty of you can just go ahead and skip to the next entry. Everyone else, welcome! The dream of speaking into your wrist and getting instant translations has been realized thanks to Microsoft, and the slick UI certainly doesn’t hurt the experience.
Dreamify
Google’s DeepDream technology has been mesmerizing the Internet since it launched, and now there’s an Android app so you can easily turn your mobile photos into trippy hallucinations. The app is currently only available for Android phones, but it’s coming to iOS soon.
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How To Get A Sweet New ‘GIF’ Facebook Profile Pic