Hello Everyone! Welcome to another weekly web industry update post. Google maps has made some important feature updates to provide customized experience for web and Android users. Wikipedia has new mobile network in USA. Microsoft has launched to visual studio 2015 for the community. Twitter has announced the event-targeting feature and Instagram has enabled the search option for the web users. The most important news for the web industry is that Google has finally rolled out the Panda 4.2 Algorithm Update. All these and other interesting newsflash of the week (18th July 2015 to 24th July 2015).
Google Maps has finally updated the most awaited features for web and android device users. You can view your location history through latest “Your Timeline” feature of Google Maps. This update also enables you to add the custom location name on Map. Location history was previously available for web and android users but the company has removed the feature due to some technical reasons. You can get this feature back on your devices if you have the latest version (9.12) of Google Maps installed in your device.
Ruben (@rgomezric) first captured and shared the image on Twitter of Yahoo again testing with Google like search result interface. As we all know Yahoo, Google and Bing keep on testing different things to provide better search experience. Yahoo has tested with same kind of interface in January as well. It is no new to all that Yahoo was showing Google powered search results few week back. Now it is interesting to see, how much success Yahoo get powering this Google like interface.
Jimmy Wales (Founder of Wikipedia) has announced a new mobile network in USA as a part of his newest venture. He has named this mobile network as “The People’s Operator”. USA is not the first country to get access of TPO network. The People’s Operator was first launched in United Kingdom in 2012. This new mobile carrier in USA will automatically donate the 10% of your bill to a charity. It is expected to gather “billions” of dollars for charitable cause.
The latest version of WordPress 4.2.3 is available for download now. And company strongly recommends updating the version. According to company it is a security release for all earlier versions. Previous version 4.2.2 along with earlier versions were affected by cross-site scripting vulnerability. Developers have solved the issue in this update. You can update the current version of the WordPress directly from the dashboard.
Microsoft has officially launched the latest version of Visual Studio after at least a year of testing. This latest version of Visual Studio 2015 is featured with integrated development environment (IDE) and updated .NET framework. Millions of developers use visual studio everyday. Since it’s launch in November last year over 5 million users have downloaded the Visual Studio till the date. Visual Studio 2015 is especially featured with new debugging and diagnostic features bundled in a single tool.
YouTube CEO stated that “We are a mobile company” at the Anaheim Convention Center. According to YouTube More than half of the total watch time and total views come from the Mobile devices. And the mobile revenue is also growing by 100% year-on-year. This is the reason why world’s second largest search engine has redesigned the mobile application interface and made it more interactive. The company has also announced that they are going to open the YouTube spaces in Toronto and Mumbai like they currently have in Los Angeles.
Google has confirmed with the Search Engine Land that they are rolling out the new interface of the Hotel Finder. Google has launched the Hotel Finder back in 2011 and has done several upgrades to make the functionality better. Many users have experienced Google testing with new interface over past one month. Google has finally confirmed the update on Wednesday. Google spoke person told Search Engine Land, “We began rolling out the new interface and it should soon be fully visible by all users.
Twitter is a leading social networking platform for real-time marketing. Twitter has recently announced a new event targeting feature that will takeout the guess work for marketers from targeting people following live events on Twitter. This new feature will simplify and automate the process of targeting people following any live event like Super Bowl, FIFA World Cup etc. It will also provide the detail insights about how the event targeting campaign has performed.
As we all know, Facebook is focusing more on Video Content now. Recently the social media platform has launched the new set of tools to publish and manage the videos on profile and newsfeed. This new set of feature allow you to exclude video from the newsfeed and it also makes it possible to embedding videos on third party websites. You can make the videos secret and also categorized the videos. It also let you add the custom thumbnail for your video. All these updates make Facebook very much similar to YouTube as YouTube already provides all these features to publishers.
Finally, an algorithm update for webmasters! Google has informed Search Engine Land that they have rolled out Google Panda 4.2 Update this weekend. It has been the most awaited update by the Webmaster community as Google’s Gary Illyes has said “Panda Refresh coming very soon!” earlier in June and then the update was delayed because of some technical reasons. Google has told that the update is rolling out extremely slowly and my take months to complete rollout.
Instagram has made it easy to find the things that interest you via it’s own “Instagram Search Engine”. Instagram has updated the search feature for the website as of now. Users can perform the keyword search and they will be able to see the users with the same name and the tags for the any keyword they enter. It will also show the similar usernames and hashtags with the amount of content with each tag in search result. Search history will help you get back your previous searches. It is yet to come for mobile apps. Users may get is soon.
So, these are some of the hottest news of the week. I will catch you again next week with weekly web and tech industry news round up. Till then happy surfing and have a wonderful weekend.
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