Heena Sharma Blog

  Popular social media platform Snapchat has reached over 500 million monthly active users, with roughly 40 per cent of its community located outside of North America and Europe. In India, Snapchat has seen over 100 per cent (year-over-year) growth in daily active users (DAUs) in each of the last five quarters, the company announced during its third Snap Partner Summit virtually late on Thursday. Snap also announced new features, latest updates and Augmented Reality (AR) experiences, like new AR tools and camera experiences, the next generation of Spectacles and launched 'Story Studio' -- a new standalone app offering powerful editing tools to creators on mobile. "Built with Creators in mind, Story Studio will offer insights into trends happening on Snapchat. It is launching later this year on iOS and will be available for free," the company said in a statement. Read More

  Popular social media app Snapchat that launched in-app Spotlight in November last year to take on Chinese short-video making app Tiktok , has seen the platform growing to over 100 million monthly active users in January. Spotlight is a dedicated place within Snapchat where users can watch short, entertaining videos backed by music in a vertically scroll, TikTok-like feed. "We are seeing over 175,000 video submissions per day on average, in part, due to our incentive program for creators, where we distribute over $1 million per day to the top performing videos," Snap CEO Spiegel. "Our product and ranking teams have been able to quickly improve our ability to match Spotlight viewers with the right content and we are now working on a broader rollout of Spotlight to our entire community," he said on a call with investors on Thursday. Spotlight combines a simple submission flow that allows people to submit their best Snaps in just one tap with a rigorous revie...

Twitter has made it possible for its users to now share their tweets directly on Snapchat. Till date, one had to take a screenshot of the tweet and then share that on the photo-sharing platform Snapchat. Currently available for iOS users, press the share button on a public tweet (private tweets aren't supported) and select the Snapchat icon from the share carousel, reports The Verge.   The users can then create a snap of the tweet and share it with people, or add it to their stories on Snapchat. "Twitter also says that a small group of iOS users will be able to test sharing tweets to Instagram Stories soon"., the report said on Thursday. The feature will be rolled out to Android users later, according to the report. Earlier this month, Twitter turned off its threaded replies experiment as it made conversations hard to read and shut down its beta app called twitter, designed for experiments like threaded replies. Read More    

  Snap Inc on Monday rolled out a feature, " Spotlight ", that would allow users to share short-form videos publicly in its Snapchat app, adding a service that would compete with ByteDance-owned TikTok and Instagram Reels. Users, who could previously share snaps or stories with friends, can now share them directly to Spotlight and garner more followers, Snap said in a blog post https://press.snap.com/introducing-spotlight. The company said it would give about $1 million every day throughout the remainder of 2020 to users whose snaps make it to the top of the platform, in a bid to boost engagement with the feature. Facebook Inc earlier this year launched Instagram Reels - the company's version of TikTok wherein users can record short mobile-friendly videos, then add special effects and soundtracks pulled from a music library. Read More      

Online platforms including Facebook and Alphabet Inc's Google face growing pressure to stop carrying political ads that contain false or misleading claims ahead of the US presidential election. In the United States, the Communications Act prevents broadcast stations from rejecting or censoring ads from candidates for federal office once they have accepted advertising for that political race, although this does not apply to cable networks like CNN, or to social media sites, where leading presidential candidates are spending millions to target voters in the run-up to the November 2020 election. The following is how social media platforms have decided to handle false or misleading claims in political ads: Facebook Facebook exempts politicians from its third-party fact-checking program, allowing them to run ads with false claims. The policy has been attacked by regulators and lawmakers who say it could spread misinformation and cause voter suppression. Critics including...

Anticipation has long been building about the impending takeover of the tech world by Chinese digital giants like Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and JD. Efforts so far, however, have been largely disappointing. The most popular messaging app in the West is WhatsApp, not WeChat; people use PayPal, not Alipay, for digital payments; Google dominates the search market, not Baidu. Indeed, Google, Facebook, Instagram, Snap, Spotify, and Amazon, have barely noticed the competitive impact of their Chinese equivalents. While China has found great success in global hardware markets, they have had much less success with software. That is, until now. You may not have heard of it, but TikTok became one of 2018’s most downloaded mobile apps for Apple and Android devices in the US and Europe, unseating the likes of YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat. TikTok has already been downloaded more than 80m times in the US, logging 4m downloads from the App Store in October alone. It is also one of the mo...