Ever sent a text or email out too quickly and immediately regret it with a sick feeling in the gut for various reasons, and wished you could reach into your screen and retrieve or delete it ASAP?
Some platforms such as Outlook, WhatsApp and Instagram already allows you to do that to a certain extent, but the latest to provide this relief is Facebook’s Messenger app. This will be an additional feature to their messaging service that allows users to unsend or delete messages permanently.
Although this update is new to the general public, this feature was already available to Facebook’s own executives. The social network giant regrets that this feature was not made available to their regular users sooner and are looking at ways to enhance their messaging platform.
HTC’s Olympic swimmer’s selfie ad banned on grounds of theoretical inaccuracies
HTC’s epic diving selfie commercial that features British Olympic medalist, Tom Daley has now been banned in the U.K. even though it’s been promoting on social media since mid-2007. The ad features Tom Daley jumping off a diving board into a pool while taking selfies with an HTC U11 on the way down. He then comes up from the pool with the phone still in working order. The phone is technically waterproof but HTC has been criticised for promoting the use of the device whilst swimming – which ironically has also been warned against to do so by the brand.
The British ad industry’s self-regulatory agency, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), alleged that the commercial “misleadingly implied the product would work in a pool with chlorinated water” and that ordinary members of the public would not be able to perform such a stunt without causing damage to the phone.
HTC had acknowledged that “there were too many variations of water temperature and chemical composition” to be able to say that the U11 could be used in most swimming pools, and has since removed the ad from all its global accounts.
Snapchat is back with their Chronological Stories feed
In an unexpected move to undo the previous update of an algorithm-personalised redesign, Snapchat has now reverted back to a chronological Stories feed. For now, this update is only available for a few users.
In the previous algorithmic version that sorted feed for users, most recent Stories were placed at the top – with the intention of making them predictable and helping users keep up-to-date with friends hanging out. In the same version, there were also separate Stories and Chat tabs.
Abolishing this algorithmic ranking redesign and re-adding the chronological Stories feed might be good news for some, but also means that it prioritises people who are highly active on the platform, ensuring that you’ll never miss out on Stories from these daily Snapchatters. For the daily active users, this update will be most relevant for them, with the greatest likeliness of seeing their closest friends’ stories despite their frequency or infrequency of posting.
At the same time, this unlikely move by Snapchat demonstrates their preferential siding with their loyal and highly engaged users. For now (and as always), we are still hoping that Instagram will bring back their chronological newsfeed.
