NEW RESOURCES

The South Korean government has launched a new Web site to track commercial building prices. “There are 940,000 commercial buildings listed on the site, along with the value of every transaction made since January 2006, when the government first began mandating sales be reported.”

The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) has launched a new credit trends tool. “The beta version of the tool covers the mortgage, credit card, auto loan, and student loan markets. The first Consumer Credit Trends release shows a sharp uptick in mortgage originations from August to October compared to last year, growth in credit card lending to lower-income consumers, fewer auto loans to borrowers with lower credit scores, and a slight slowdown of new student loans.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Instagram will now let you bookmark posts. “Starting today, users will see a new bookmark icon underneath the posts in their feed. They just need to tap on that icon to save the post to a new tab on their profile that’s private. Nobody will be able to see the posts they have bookmarked.”

Did you miss the Dorsey / Snowden interview? It’s now available online (the article gives a summary as well as a link to the interview.

You can now livestream on Twitter without Periscope, which I think means that’s about it for Periscope. “‘Live’ will now appear as an option alongside photo and video from your camera roll when you post a new tweet. Selecting live will begin a new Periscope stream just as it does in the app. And streams started on Twitter will be visible within the Periscope app as usual. ”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Wow, I didn’t know Facebook was banning Snapchat QR codes from profile pictures. “Using Snapchat code, which allows users to scan to add them as a friend on the app, violates Facebook’s ‘branded content’ policy. Facebook does not allow publishers to promote ‘third parties’ like Snapchat.”

Medium has released its first year in review. “Overall, the number of posts nearly quadrupled from 1.9 million in 2015 to 7.5 million this year. More than 2 billion words were posted to the site. People spent more than 3.6 millennia reading on Medium.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Sophos has a good explanation of why Yahoo’s MD5 password hashing was such a terrible idea. (Or why hashing but not salting passwords was such a terrible idea.)

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Nieman Lab: API or Die. “If you don’t use APIs in 2017, your media business will die. Now that the over-dramatic opening is out the way, here’s what I think is going to be a significant shift in the use of platforms in 2017: the opening up of APIs, everywhere.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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