This week in social is all about content: New platforms, new ways for brands to get their paws onto personal content, and how all content is quickly becoming a part of a bigger story that the platforms are creating for us.

First, I want to talk about a new social network that’s making its run: Beme. It’s started by a YouTuber/filmmaker out of NYC named Casey Neistat, and the problem that he set out to solve was that the majority of people don’t have the skills, or time, or software to be telling their own stories online, and when we do, it’s an edited, filtered, inaccurate version of our real lives. Specifically, creating video can be a pain in the ass, writing blog posts takes time, and instagram posts are so over-edited that we’re barely recognizable. Casey set out to make it possible for all of us to quickly and easily share our thoughts, feelings, or surroundings with our friends and followers in a way that actually resembled real life.

The catch: People don’t seem to be into it (yet). The app requires you to cover up the sensor by your camera to activate it (usually by holding it against your chest), then it will record what’s on the other side and post it automatically. No reviewing, no editing. Reviews so far are far from glowing.

It may be that Beme is ahead of its time and that the negative reviews are just people pushing back because the app is letting their friends see what their lives are actually like, or maybe most of the time, the unedited content that’s right in front of us is just uninteresting.

Beme has some big names behind it with a ton of reach, so expect it to at least make some noise, but I don’t expect it to be taking over as the Istagram-killer anytime soon.

The Gamers Are Taking Over

Remember a few months back when the big Meerkat vs Periscope debate was raging on over who would become the king of live-streaming phone-to-phone video? There hasn’t been a clear winner yet, mostly because we haven’t all rushed to live stream the little details of our lives, but the world’s second largest video site has already mastered live streaming, and could be coming to dominate a bigger space.

Twitch is the gamers’ social network. Is where you go to stream the game that you’re playing, watch your heroes play their games, or even cheer on your favourite gamer-stars in one of the professional leagues (seriously).

Right now Twitch reports over 100 million users per month who watch each other live stream their gameplay, and this week they introduced Twitch Creative as a category, where you can watch artists, musicians, really anyone, while they create. There’s live chat and a bunch of other features that make Twitch a much better product than the social guys, so I’d be nervous if I were at Periscope or Meerkat – Twitch has already figured out all of the things that they’re working on, and has enough users that it could take over the whole live-streaming game. The real question will be: Do people actually want to create and watch live streaming video?

Everything is a Story

If you’ve been watching Snapchat, you’ve seen it move from the direct messaging, self-destructing app for teems, to becoming a lens to the world where you can see countries, sporting events, festivals, and really anything else worth creating content around.

The stories have been incredibly successful, and that same trend is starting to show up in other places: Moments is Twitter’s attempt to stay relevant by aggregating what’s happening into a rich, embeddable experience, and just this weekend, Instagram surprised everyone by dropping a Snapchat-like feature on its audience for Halloween.

Just as quickly as it showed up, it was gone, but the unnamed featured took over users screens, showing only videos that had been created about Halloween in a full-screen, skippable experience.

It seems that the Instagram crew is testing out some sort of curated story feature – no word yet on