How Does Snapchat Stay Relevant? Do You Trust YouTube? And More On This Week's CTRL ALT Delete Segment On CHOM 97.7 FM
Every Monday morning at 7:10 am, I am a guest contributor on CHOM 97.7 FM radio out of Montreal (home base). It’s not a long segment – about 5 to 10 minutes every week – about everything that is happening in the world of technology and digital media. The good folks at CHOM 97.7 FM are posting these segments weekly on iHeart Radio, if you’re interested in hearing more of me blathering away about what’s going on in the digital world. I’m really excited about this opportunity, because this is the radio station that I grew up on listening to, and it really is a fun treat to be invited to the Mornings Rock with Terry DiMonte morning show. The segment is called, CTRL ALT Delete with Mitch Joel.
This week we discussed:
Do you like YouTube? Do you hate YouTube? 4+ billion videos are viewed daily on their platform and yet, YouTube ranked dead last for consumer safety in BI Intelligence’s 2017 Digital Trust survey. Only 4% of survey respondents feel that YouTube is the safest platform to participate in or post on, making it by far the least chosen option. Even Twitter, with serious trolling issues, and a not so warm and fuzzy outlook from analysts, is viewed as safer. In short: we hate it but we can’t look away.
As Facebook and Instagram replicate every feature of Snapchat in an effort to render it useless, Snapchat is fighting back, by changing the core of how it works. A new infinity icon will allow a photo or video message to be replayed forever until the receiver exits the conversation thread. Snapchat messages, called “snaps,” could previously only be seen for up to 10 seconds before they disappeared. Is this is sign that Snapchat is scared of Facebook or, more likely, a new reality that it’s going to be harder and harder to tell Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and even Twitter apart from one another?
Tweets still matter. Just ask Carter Wilkerson, a 16-year-old high school junior in Reno, Nevada. Last week, he became the owner of history’s most-retweeted tweet, knocking Ellen DeGeneres and her famous Oscars selfie off her perch. When he sent his fateful tweet on April 5, he thought it might be a fun joke for his friends. He asked Wendy’s how many retweets it would take for him to get free chicken nuggets for life. Wendy’s said 18 million. Het got 3.4 million and that was more than enough for Wendy’s, Ellen and even a lot of money to some good charities. See, Twitter can still be used for good.