3 Things your Boss wants to know about this Week - Snapchat, Bots and WeChat

Snapchat takes over Twitter

Wow more people are using Snapchat than Twitter for the first time since it launched as reported by the BBC. Snapchat now boasts 150 million users surpassing Twitters 140 million user base. They both have some way to go to catch up with Facebook's 1.6 billion users though, while Instagram is on around 400 million users.

The Bot Bandwagon

There has been a lot of hype about 'Bots' however Techcrunch reports a dirty secret.  At present, the bots that are even remotely useful at non-trivial tasks are largely supported by humans behind the scenes. While the industry continues to promote bots as a panacea for everything from app development to reducing headcount, companies are quietly employing human labor to buy time while developers attempt to implement AI solutions that can work autonomously and scale as promised.  Techcrunch advises brands should proceed with caution.

Everyone in China are on WeChat and Only WeChat

It's reported by Techcrunch WeChat is a replacement for the mobile operating system. WeChat is the best example of what a modern mobile OS can be: not just an app, or static platform for apps, but a tight ecosystem that uses a social graph as the fabric for a connected web of services that cover almost every aspect of your digital life, from communication to entertainment to shopping to banking. Chat comes first, but it’s more important as the front door to a series of apps that have nothing to do with messaging. Want to get pizza? Call up Pizza Hut’s official account in WeChat and order via a web app.


In this sense, WeChat is not providing a revolutionary new way to interact with services through chat. In fact, WeChat’s official accounts did start that way, with basic text inputs replacing app taps, but it soon found that the app-within-an-app approach was more effective. Instead, WeChat is providing a better way to interact with mobile services. Dan Grover, an American who works as a WeChat product manager in China, recently made this point in an essay that clears up any misconceptions about how WeChat really works. Grover argued that WeChat has succeeded because it is an effective solution for a broken OS. He cites multiple OS shortcomings, including increasingly meaningless notifications, a lack of baked-in QR code scanners, bloated apps that hog memory, contacts that are disjointed from social graphs, cumbersome authentication systems and an absence of universal payments solutions, to name just a few. WeChat fixes all those problems, while nothing in the U.S. or UK has been able to fix any more than one or two.