Facebook has announced that it’s removing the group chat functionality that it launched in October last year, which was designed to facilitate more intimate discussion between group members, separate from post comments. The reasons why Facebook has chosen to remove the option are not entirely clear. As noted by TechCrunch when the feature was launched, group chats are able to host up to 250 group members, who are not necessarily connected as friends, but are connected through a group. That means that any member of any group which hosts one of these chats has the capacity to spam these threads with their messaging, which would send a prompt to both Facebook and Messenger for each chat member.

Twitter’s new video marketing policy

Twitter is launching a new video ad option in the form of six-second video ad bidding, which will see advertisers only charged if and when their video ad is in view for six seconds. According to EyeSee, which conducts studies of audience engagement based on advanced eye-tracking technology, three-seconds is actually the hot spot for video ad recall and response. The idea is that this will provide a more flexible option for advertisers, enabling them to optimise for completed views, while also putting more reliance on Twitter's system to showcase their content to relevant audiences who are more likely to watch.