Snapchat WHAT Is Your Problem And Google Strips Things Back

Snapchat...WHAT were you thinking?!

It’s getting hard to write about Snapchat in these blogs without using expletives, but here it goes…

Snapchat seem to be on a downward spiral of self-destruction and, with slip up after slip up, it seems even more likely that the app may enter the graveyard of lost apps even sooner than predicted.

First of all they choose to do a redesign that was neither wanted nor needed in the eyes of the consumer, and until recently the consumer were the driving force behind the app.

Since the redesign, millions of users have complained, dismissed and thrown the app away in favour of other, better photo sharing apps, such as Instagram, and even Facebook stories have seen a slight rise in popularity (who’d have thought it?!)

Then there was THAT tweet from Kylie Jenner, once queen of Snapchat, which sent Twitter and the internet into a sheer frenzy, claiming the tweet was the cause of the $1.3 billion loss to Snap (the parent company of Snapchat) in just one day. Most at this point had already started writing their eulogies to the app.

With Evan Spiegel fighting back saying he will absolutely, unequivocally NOT be changing the app back and people can either get used to it or leave (which just about everyone has) the stubborn CEO dug himself further into the grave.

This week, yesterday to be precise, another news story broke which I will call ‘Rihanna gate’ for the purposes of keeping this short.

At this point you’re probably thinking ‘Why would Snapchat be taking on bad girl Ri Ri?’ Albeit unintentionally, this is exactly what happened when a mysterious advert on the news discovery screen appeared called ‘Would You Rather?’

The tasteless advert featured images of both Rihanna and Chris Brown with the two ‘Would you rather?’ options being ‘Slap Rihanna’ or ‘Punch Chris Brown’. Yes, your eyes are not deceiving you, this actually happened (and everyone knows what went down and that domestic violence is NOT a subject to make light of).

Featuring such a ridiculous advert may not have been down to Evan Spiegel himself, but there is a strong team of people who have to ‘approve’ news pages and adverts before they go live, so we’re wondering which poor sucker is about to lose his/her job here.

To add a further blow to an already substantial and pretty much unhealable wound, Rihanna didn’t even address the app via the app. She chose to use Instagram stories to make her thoughts clear, which speaks volumes really!

In her Instagram story Rihanna said:

"Now SNAPCHAT I know you already know you ain't my fav app out there! But I'm just trying to figure out what the point was with this mess! I'd love to call it ignorance, but I know you ain't that dumb! You spent money to animate something that would intentionally bring shame to DV victims and made a joke of it!!! This isn't about my personal feelings, cause I don't have much of them...but all the women, children and men that have been victims of DV in the past and especially the ones who haven't made it out yet…you let us down!"

She added:

"Shame on you. Throw the whole app-oligy away."

Since the post, Snapchat has gone on to lose another £430million!!!

With domestic violence and all the #MeToo movements that have been around recently, you’d be crazy to even think about approaching a subject like this, even if it was an attempt at dark humour.

There are no excuses this time, Snapchat ran out of those a long time ago... so who’s ready to start taking bets on when Snapchat will die its death?

Google strips it down

Google has stripped back the search results page to only show you exact answers without additional results. This only applies to certain searches of course, for example if you are searching for a time zone or “What is the time in Glasgow now?” Google will only show you one answer unless you want more information, then you have the option to select the ‘Show all results’ button.

The test comes as according to Google, with the queries where this shows up, searchers rarely use full search results. If the searcher wants those results, they can find them by clicking on the ‘Show all results’ button.

This is great news for those of you who don’t like having to scour through all the blue links to find a correct and plausible answer.

We shall have to wait and see whether this test will become permanent.

Google also brings AI to iOS

Google is bringing its AI-assisted image recognition app to the iPhone. The company will add Google Lens to the Google Photos app on iOS over the coming days. A natural next step for Google, Lens is essentially a search engine that uses images instead of words.

First announced last year, users simply have to point their smartphone camera at an object and Lens gives them contextual information about it. The feature also produces descriptions of objects from previously captured images. Lens can pull up details about landmarks, restaurants, buildings, paintings in a museum, plants, animals, and advertisements, pretty amazing and exciting if you ask us!