Snapchat testing a TikTok-style navigation in Discover

Snapchat testing TikTok-style navigation in Discover Snapchat was launched in circa 2012 with the objective of communicating a full range of emotions through images. May years later, it has a range of features built around conversations originating from visual imagery. Although Snapchat has always been counted among the top social media apps with approximately 230 million daily active users across the world, it has never witnessed a moment of meteoric rise as other apps including Instagram and TikTok. As TikTok’s popularity now appears to be headed towards a downfall, other…

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You can Now Delete Unopened Sent Messages on Snapchat

Snapchat will now let users delete sent messages before they’re opened, as reported by 9to5Mac. The company rolled the feature out to some people yesterday, and everyone should have it within the next few weeks. To delete a sent message, simply press and hold on the media (text, audio, photo, etc.) you’d like to get rid of and a pop-up will appear asking if you’d like to delete. Just tap, and the content in question will disappear. The person you sent the message to will still get a notification that…

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Snapchat’s controversial redesign isn’t helping it make more money

Snapchat’s stock price plummeted during after hours trading yesterday following its first quarter earnings report. The stock dropped by more than 15 percent, or roughly a sixth of its worth. Although the app grew its global users by four million or so since the last quarter, it made less money per user. During the prior quarter, the company made $1.53 per user globally, or $286 million in total revenue. This quarter, that dropped to $1.21 per user and $231 million in revenue. Still, that’s a major growth from just over…

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Snap reportedly laying off around 100 engineers

Snap is about to undergo another round of layoffs, with this one seeing a cut of around 100 engineers, according to Cheddar and CNBC. While that’s a small portion of Snap’s total headcount — around 3,000 people — it reportedly represents about 10 percent of the company’s engineering team. The cuts are expected to come within a week and will be the first focused on engineering. Snap hasn’t commented on the report. This is the fourth round of layoffs at Snap in the past year, though the first three were…

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Snapchat CEO says the redesign is here to stay

Despite a lot of backlash over a big redesign for the Snapchat app, the CEO Evan Spiegel vigorously defended the redesign and basically said people need to get used to it. Spiegel said at the Goldman Sachs Internet & Technology Conference that even people complaining about the app was a sort of validation that the changes the company wants to happen are, indeed, happening. Snap aimed to try to separate the idea of communication and broadcasting with Snap into similar buckets, rather than the features being kind of mixed up…

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Snapchat redesign faces backlash

The redesign of the app was to make it easier to use but as the update rolls out to more users, Snapchat is getting criticism that the new interface is difficult to navigate. “I might start using Instagram Stories now,”  said Ashley Vasquez, a 21-year-old Snapchat user who is a senior at the University of Maryland in College Park. A Change.org petition asking the company to remove the new update has amassed more than 590,000 signatures by Monday afternoon. Other users began sharing a workaround for reversing the update by…

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Facebook Gaining Popularity among Old People as the Young Leave

A report shows that Facebook is for old people as teens and young adults are ditching the social network while the over 55s are joining. In 2018, 2.2 million 12- to 17-year-olds and 4.5 million 18- to 24-year-olds will regularly use Facebook in the UK, 700,000 fewer than in 2017, as younger users defect to services such as Snapchat, according to eMarketer. A surge in older users means over-55s will become the second-biggest demographic of Facebook users this year. The report says that while Facebook has so far been successful…

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Google Can Tell if Someone is Peeping at Your Phone

Your days of peeking at someone else’s text conversations on the train might be numbered. At the Neural Information Processing Systems conference in Long Beach, California, next week, Google researchers Hee Jung Ryu and Florian Schroff will present a project they’re calling an electronic screen protector, where a Google Pixel phone uses its front-facing camera and eye-detecting artificial intelligence to detect whether more than one person is looking at the screen. An unlisted, but public video by Ryu shows the software interrupting a Google messaging app to display a camera…

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Snapchat acquires social map app Zenly to allow users to track their friends

Snapchat has acquired Zenly, a French startup that makes a social map so people can see where their friends are hanging out, for $200m in cash plus additional stock awards. Zenly’s app lets users see where their friends currently are on a map using constant GPS in the background. People can then message these friends in the app to make plans to hang out. Snap Inc. will however allow Zenly to run somewhat autonomously. Zenly has said that its product updates will be the main drivers of user growth, which slowed…

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Stories Search makes Snapchat a real-time YouTube

Snapchat is shifting from a social network limited to content shared by people you follow to an ephemeral, real-time database of what’s going on now everywhere. It started as a social network that was limited to content being shared by people you follow but now it is increasing its dimensions. It is now trying to become a platform where you can follow a real-time database of what goes on around the world. Today the company announced ‘Search for stories’ and this feature is surely going to give YouTube and Twitter…

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