Digital Storms : Musical.ly Is Being Shut Down After $1bn Acquisition, Google and Snapchat Takes Huge Leaps

Musical.ly the famous lip sync video platform is being shut down by Bytedance the Chinese company which acquired the application last year for $1bn. They plan to merge it with Tik Tok a similar application for short videos that they have in their portfolio

Musical.ly fans would obviously not be happy with this decision as the Application has been able to garner a faithful following over the course of its existence

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There have been news that Facebook is planning to roll out a similar application to Musical.ly called Talent Show that allows users to show their singing talent

This is quite typical of Facebook as it is notorious for swallowing up Applications that they can't acquire . They succeeded in making Snapchat lose value in the eyes of people by Integrating most of its features into Instagram

The digital world is much a battle ground as communication platforms are a wild race for user data. In the previous economy Oil was the number one resource, but now it is data

Tik Tok the application that Musical.ly is being integrated into has 150 million daily active users and 500 million monthly active users as at June 2018 . Musical.ly has a 100 Million daily users in contrast

A lot of people are weary of Chinese applications and this may take a toll on the level of acceptability that Tik Tok gets world wide

ByteDance says that they will Integrate the best features of both platforms to give users a great experience

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Google Expeditions

For years the Big Red has banned Google from operating within its borders. The Chinese built a firewall that blocked access to certain websites and also popular social media sites like Instagram and Facebook

The Search Engine will blacklist websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest.

There are a lot of protest from many quarters about this decision bu Google to work with a government to keep its people in the dark.

I personally don't see what Google aims to achieve with this. China has always denied its Citizens their right to certain Information as they will like to maintain the status quo, but this is clearly wrong and the fact that Google has finally accepted to dance to their tune means more companies might toe this path

Companies that are operating in China are mandated by Law to monitor and police users and also hand over user data to the Government on demand . They are also required to censor certain Information and take any one put up down on demand

When it comes to the decision to move to China. Google current CEO Pichai said :

“I care about servicing users globally in every corner. Google is for everyone,” he said. “We want to be in China serving Chinese users.”

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GO Snap

Snapchat has been in Turmoil since Instagram successfully plagued it with Identity crisis . Mark Zuckerberg is not someone you can easily compete with.

But the social platform is doing all it can to rise from the ashes and their latest potion in this endeavour is the new voice controlled user lenses

Snapchat is trying a lot of things to get user appeal and Improve Interaction on the Platform. The only thing that they have over Instagram is the Camera and they are banking all their hopes on It

Different types of lenses show based on the word used. Words like 'hi' 'love' and 'wow' activate different types of Lenses

I believe that with time Snapchat will create something that will make it gain back what it lost to Instagram

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Thanks For Reading

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