The death of “lol”, GIFs as a language and that one app you can’t live without

“lol” is slowly dying out as chuckling millennials search for other ways to express their enjoyment on social

“A new report from Facebook into how users express laughter shows that “haha” and its variants are by far the most common terms used on the social network. They accounted for 51.4 per cent of mirth in the anonymised comments and posts looked at by Facebook’s data team, with the ‘laughing’ emoji claiming 33.7 per cent, and “hehe”, 13.1 per cent. The once-mighty “lol” only appeared in 1.9 percent of the text sampled by Facebook – a staggering fall for an expression that was once synonymous with online txt speak.

“Although not surprising for such a venerable term, “lol” proved slightly more popular with older users. Differences between generations were not heavily pronounced, but it was emoji that were most popular with users with the youngest median age, while “haha,” “hehe,” and “lol” were favoured by progressively older individuals. The data also showed that emoji were more popular among female users, with “haha” showing a small male bias, and “hehe” distributed nearly evenly among the genders. Not many people were regular chortlers though: in the week’s worth of data Facebook looked at, 46 per cent of those that laughed in the seven days did so only once, with the vast majority laughing fewer than five times.”

To read the full article, visit The Verge.

Could animated GIFs replace emojis as our standard response in conversations? Or are they nothing more than an irritating web fad?

“The GIF is on the rise. The New York Times reported today on the new popularity of GIFs, which have seen a notable upswing in use increasing since 2012. Social networks are making it easier than ever to integrate GIFs into posts. Facebook announced true support on the site this past March, and Twitter did the same last summer.

“As the New York Times notes, this increasing propensity toward GIF use may signal the rise of a new language made possible by mobile and text-driven communication. Linguists already say that emojis are a new language. Will animated GIFs prove the same?“

To read the full article, visit Social Media Today.

Forget emojis and GIFs, it’s social apps that users can’t bear to be without in 2015

“What’s the first thing you do every morning when you wake up? For many of us, it’s checking-in with our social media networks, as evidenced by new data from mobile ad platform, Opera Mediaworks. Utilising insights from their client base of over 1.1 billion users (including 90% of the top Ad Age Global Advertisers) across 19,000 sites and apps, researchers from Opera found that social media apps are the most commonly used “first app of the day” for users in the US, with entertainment apps most common for “last app of the day” use.

“Researchers also found that apps in the “News and Information” category had the highest loyalty, with the most consistent first and last app of the day usage across the period, while sports apps were the only category to have a larger morning than evening audience.“

To read the full article, visit Social Media Today.