Mfarhanonline Social Media News: What do you get when you combine a photo-sharing mobile platform like Instagram with more geo-location awareness and a Reddit-style voting system for stories breaking all over the world? Answer: Signal, the app citizen journalism may well have been been waiting for. The Signal app is currently in private beta launch, and will hit app stores for the iPhone in the next few months. You can sign up to test the app here . Signal is the brainchild of Lebanese entrepreneur Mark Malkoun, who says it will address the fundamental limitations of sharing stories on social media . “Initially, Twitter and Facebook were designed to get news from people or brands or celebrities,” Malkoun told Mfarhanonline . “Now, if something is happening say three miles away from you, say something really important, Twitter won’t systematically inform you unless you follow someone who happens to be there.” Facebook has since expanded to allow people to subscribe to others, and anyone could still search for news on Twitter via hashtags. Still, actual news can become muddied in other posts that have nothing to do with these news stories, Malkoun said. And needing to follow or subscribe to people first still gives weight to “power users.” But what if you just happen to be at the right place at the right time when it comes to breaking news? With Signal, the emphasis is on quick and easy photojournalism. Users capture media that they then upload to the app with a geo-tagged location and a short caption of around 60 characters. And if multiple people happen to be covering the same story, an algorithm for the app pushes the photos together, so the content becomes classified under the same story. Signal’s strategy hinges on an idea that has already turned Instagram into one of the hottest digital platforms — one! worth $ 1 billion to Facebook. As Instagram’s 50 million users can attest, there’s a strong desire to share visual, mobile stories with the world. When users open the app, they can view news photos according to their location, most recent upload or what others have voted top news. You can choose to see the top stories by country, continent or the world as a whole.
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