This week, your favorite social media platforms got serious, secretive, and more sensitive. LinkedIn wants to put the “help wanted” section out of business with their new referral feature, Twitter was briefly taken down by an unknown assailant, and Facebook is now muting your painful memories. Here’s a look at what you might’ve missed in social media news this week.
LinkedIn Strengthens Power of Connections
On Wednesday the professional networking site unveiled a new tool that will make it easier for employees to recommend first-degree connections for open positions at their office.
“I’m thrilled to introduce LinkedIn Referrals – our brand new referrals product that makes it dead simple for employees to make quality referrals, and helps you unlock your employees’ networks to hire the best talent faster,” LinkedIn’s head of talent solutions Eddie Vivas explained.
The feature will notify users if any of their connections are matches for an open job and automatically send a summary of the matches every two weeks. “Referrals” will cost $10 to $12 annually per user and will be available starting November 1st.
Twitter Tanks for Ten Minutes
On Thursday the Twitter website went down for roughly ten minutes. The outage occurred across the UK, Japan and parts of America. “Something is technically wrong,” a notice on the Twitter website said, but a reason for the brief blackout has still not been given. In Twitter’s early days the site had several major server issues that were dubbed “fail whale” due to the marine mammal icon that appeared when the site crashed. While the whale has since disappeared and the server issues have become few and far between, the same user panic remains strong. Once the site was back in business Thursday morning one user tweeted, “Twitter was down briefly, and no one on Facebook noticed or complained. I felt so alone.” Congratulations to everyone who survived the latest social media snafu!
Facebook Helps You Forget the Past
When you login to Facebook every day, you may get a fun reminder of an old photo you uploaded or a momentous milestone, but these memories aren’t fun for everyone. To avoid painful reminders, the social network now lets you filter these memories. Under Preferences you can now enter a name or specific date and get rid of the reminder. This is one of many features Facebook is rolling out to make social media more sensitive. It recently confirmed its new “Reactions” feature, which gives users the option to express love, laughter, happiness, shock, sadness and anger via different emojis.
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