Snapchat

Leaked Snapchat Code Hints at New Voice and Video Chat Features

Snapchat’s in for a serious makeover, if these screenshots discovered in the mobile app’s existing code are to be believed. A handful of developers at Snapprefs, a group unaffiliated with Snapchat that helps users add more features to the app via the Xposed framework, dug up the screenshots in Snapchat’s code and leaked them to…

Nursing Home Workers Are Posting Naked Photos of Residents on Snapchat 

Nursing home workers across the country are posting embarrassing and dehumanizing photos of elderly residents on social media networks such as Snapchat, violating their privacy, dignity and, sometimes, the law. This story was co-published with the Washington Post. ProPublica has identified 35 instances since 2012 in which workers at nursing homes and assisted-living centers have…

Email Is the New Generation Gap

Two weeks ago, we surveyed 3,670 people online about how they communicate. We discovered a remarkable difference between people over 41, who say they often talk on email more than they do in real life, and younger people who love in-person meetings and use a variety of apps. Is this our first digital generation gap?…

Snapchat’s New Lenses Feature Is Utterly Horrifying

In tandem with a novel way to waste money, Snapchat now offers a new way to scare the shit out of your friends. It’s called “Lenses” and I never want to use it again. Lenses is basically some facial recognition software that’s hacked to distort your expression if various, usually horrifying ways. To activate it,…

Snapchat Will Now Sell You Replays for $1

If you like spending money and looking ridiculous, you’re going to love today’s Snapchat updates. The ephemeral messaging service now offers the option of being a little less ephemeral. For a penny shy of $1 you can buy three extra replays for a message. You can also take weirder selfies. The new “Replay” feature always…

Go Install This Chrome Extension For Sending Self-Destructing Gmails

Gmail’s Undo Send feature gives users of Google’s free email service up to 30 seconds to change their mind on a sent email before it leaves their outbox. But a new Chrome extension called Dmail lets you send messages with a self-destruct timer—or the ability to remotely delete them whenever you want. If you send…

Facebook’s Testing New Snapchat-Style Features in Its Photo Editor

Facebook is testing new Snapchat-style features that allow you to add filters, text and goofy stickers to your photos to, ahem, delight you friends. TechCrunch reports that the new features are already being tested by some users, as they’ve been rolled out to a select few installs of the Facebook iOS app. There, they provide…

Twitter’s Secret Project Lightning Sounds a Bit Like Snapchat

Twitter has a secret. The microblogging service will soon release a “major new feature” called Project Lightning that will bring human-curated content based on live events to one user-friendly place. BuzzFeed’s Mat Honan recently got a sneak peek, and you know what? Project Lightning is kinda like Snapchat. At a very basic level, Project Lightning…

Snapchat Is Adding Two-Factor Authentication, Finally

Snapchat’s security problems — and the company’s rather laid-back approach to fixing them — are infamous. But as of the latest version of the app, everyone’s favorite sexting app is making a big step in the right direction, thanks to the addition of an SMS log-in verification. The two-factor system works exactly as you’d expect,…

The First-Ever Cat Convention Pretty Much Broke the Internets

Last weekend, CatCon took the internet by storm. 10,000 people descended on the convention in L.A., which featured appearances by celebrity cats, cat-centric panels, and all the cat swag you could shake a stick with a dangling feather at. The internet’s love affair with our cat friends is long documented (and we’ve been posing cats…

Snapchat is Hiring Journalists to Document the 2016 Presidential Race

In its latest attempt to brand itself as a media entity, Snapchat is now hiring journalists to cover the 2016 presidential race. To Snap the race, more accurately. The wildly popular photo-sharing platform has been working to fashion itself a news service since earlier this year, when it launched “Discover”, a feature that doesn’t actually…

What Kinds of Apps Will the Kids of Tomorrow Use After Snapchat Dies?

Today we learned that the only person in the office excited about Microsoft’s Outlook updates was one of the youngest amongst us. Who can predict what the kids today will be into? More importantly for our purposes, what will the youth of tomorrow be using social tech for? https://gizmodo.com/we-talked-to-a-man-who-is-actually-excited-about-micros-1706111468 The post-millennial generation are digital natives…

Snapchat’s Delivering the News, and Everything Else You Missed Yesterday

The app that’s been the sexting ticket for tweens worldwide has been aggressively repositioning itself, recently as a news source. Find out more about Snapchat’s plans—and other tech news you might’ve missed—in today’s BitStream. Apps and Devices Snapchat launches a—wait for it—news division. And they’ve landed CNN political reporter Peter Hamby to head up the…

All the Ways That Your Livefeed Is a Lie

There’s nothing new about streaming video from your phone, or posting live news updates from important events. But now companies are trying to make the experience of streaming your life more real than ever before — and they’re doing it by telling us very dangerous white lies. Image by Alexander Supertramp via Shutterstock Livestreaming started…

If You Could Only Use One Social Network, What Would It Be?

Few of us have the mental bandwidth to care about the latest hot new social thing. When Foursquare split its app, I never downloaded Swarm in protest. I never signed up for Ello. Do I sound too get-off-my-lawn when I say screw Snapchat? The never-ending influx of new platforms makes me wonder: If I had…

Don’t Worry — Snapchat Is Not the Future of Journalism

For the past ten days, I’ve been getting my news from Snapchat. I’ve learned stuff about internet dating, celebrity plastic surgery, Ukraine peace talks, and Bitcoin mines. But mostly, I’ve learned what old media thinks app media really wants. And it’s not pretty. First, some definitional challenges. We used to call print media “old media,”…

Do You Have Skype Sex? 

If you’ve been in a long-distance relationship, you probably know how much it sucks to live your life with the knowledge that you’ve finally managed to lock someone down for sex stuff but you’re just too far away to actually make genital contact. So what do you do? Skype? Snapchat? Confess! Every time there’s a…

Snapchat’s First Webseries Is Exactly as Terrible as You’d Expect 

Snapchat has unleashed its first ephemeral scripted webseries, Literally Can’t Even. The first five-minute episode, “Sip & Surf Party XXX,” is available today on the Snap Channel in the app’s new Discover platform. Keeping with Snapchat’s whole disappearing schtick, you can only watch it for 24 hours and then it’ll vanish, like a rare flower…

Your Favorite Anonymous App Is Not Anonymous At All

Security researchers recentlydiscovered a serious flaw in Yik Yak, the “anonymous” messaging app popular with teens. In surprisingly simple fashion, the flaw offered hackers a way to discover the identities of Yik Yak’s supposedly unnamed users. It also provides a good opportunity to issue this very important PSA: Anonymous apps aren’t anonymous at all, and…

BlackBerry’s newly Snapchattified BBM messenger is now available, so you can mad with some, err, corporate sexting?