Ephemeral messaging service Snapchat introduced a new feature for the World Cup final that allowed users in Brazil to upload photos and videos to a shared account, visible to users worldwide.
The feature was part of the service’s ‘our stories’ experiment, where users can offer unique, first-hand experiences of live events. This was first tested out in June at a music festival in Las Vegas, with attendees of EDC (Electric Daisy Carnival) encouraged to upload their experiences to the app’s ‘EDC Live’ account, which broadcast them to users all over the globe.
The World Cup edition of this function – known as ‘Rio Live’ – invited users of the service in Rio de Janiero, the location of the tournament’s final, to share the carnival atmosphere and their excitement as the month-long competition came to a close and crowned its victors, Germany, who narrowly beat Argentina.
Although the EDC test was deemed a success, this one may have flopped, despite being exposed to a greater number of people. The EDC edition required users to add the account ‘EDC Live’ to see the content, whereas for Rio Live, the system added the account to users’ friends lists regardless of whether they wanted to view the content or not, leading to frustration, with many users taking to Twitter to complain that their newsfeeds were being constantly bombarded with images they did not wish to see.
In spite of this feature causing problems for some users, the app still remains one of the most popular, with figures suggesting that approximately 700 million images and videos are sent daily.
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