Manage Persistent Facebook Friending Folk with Your Restricted List

You open Facebook and you see it again: a request from that one person from that one place that is just dying to be your friend for some reason. If you're unsure, you can friend them, but keep them from getting too personal with this trick.

If you know someone is bad news—or just a spammer—go ahead and just block them. When it's someone you'll see regularly, though, it's sometimes better to try and sidestep that awkward landmine. Amit Agarwal at tech blog Digital Inspiration has a simple solution for that annoying guy that thinks you just haven't seen his repeated friend requests. Go ahead and add them so they can sleep in peace knowing you've acknowledged their existence, and then make your way to their profile page. Click the Friends button at the top, then select Add to another list, then choose Restricted.

Now they're your friend, but they'll only be able to see whatever public followers can see on your profile. If your profile is locked down, they won't see much, but at least they'll stop trying to friend you. Maybe even after some time you'll see that they're okay and you can move them back into the friend zone.

Snapchat Pushes You To Watch Friends’ Stories

Snapchat Stories are a huge hit, with the photos and videos you post to your profile now more popular than Snap messages. But they’re still easy to forget about since they’re pull and not push — they aren’t sent to friends directly and don’t generate alerts. You had to seek them out. Until now. Snapchat confirms to me it’s started “sometimes” sending push notifications that remind you that several friends have stories for you to watch. This way you don’t have to nag your friends to peer into the quirky moments of your life because Snapchat will quietly do that for you.

Story notifications fundamentally change the unobtrusive pull nature of Stories, which made them a refreshing alternative to its traditional direct messaging feature or injecting your posts into friends’ Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter feeds. You could share a selfie or glamorous moment without having to feel like a jerk since friends had to go looking for them. The question is whether Snapchat can sustain that casual attitude while playing the secret postman, pinging your friends to drive you, and it, more Story views.

Previously, Snapchat had been one of the most conservative and respectful social apps when it came to interrupting you. No shallow alerts that someone Liked your photo, viewed your profile, or retweeted your quip. It only tugged your pant leg when someone sent something straight to you.

But social is a battle for eyeballs, and no one else showed such restraint. Twitter and Facebook will use any excuse to send you a push or email, with Twitter getting more brazen as of late, telling you when friends all followed someone or a few people were discussing a TV show or current event. Snapchat is well within its bounds to get a bit more aggressive.

Meanwhile, anecdotal evidence I’ve collected suggests early core Snapchat users might be sending fewer direct snaps lately. I’m getting far fewer per day than I did a year ago, my friends report the same, and several have told me their younger family members who were formerly addicted are becoming less keen to blast out funny faces, drawings, and random windows into their life.

Snapchat Stories is thriving, with over 1 billion views per day as of June in part thanks to aburgeoning community of creators who’ve become Snapchat celebrities. It’s also a potential gateway to monetization, which just got their own dedicated section in the app. Yet they’re often viewed after someone returns to the app from a direct snap notification. If those pushes dry up, Stories could get fewer incidental views.

And so, Story pushes. A sign Snapchat may be shifting its priority to making Stories a strong, independent product that don’t need no direct snaps to get by. Most people think of Snapchat as photos that last 10-seconds or less. But the rise of Stories could make their 24-hour self-destruct timer the new standard.

Facebook Slingshots Itself In The Face By Making Reply-To-Unlock Optional

Many thought Facebook’s ephemeral app Slingshot was pointless, but now it’s not even special. It’s just another pokey Snapchat clone. As of today’s update, Slingshot’s core mechanic, the requirement that friends first reply with a photo or video to unlock what you sent them, can now be turned off by the sender. That means people can just blast you their photos without forcing you to do any work, which surely reduces the friction of the app and could open it to a more mainstream audience. But the curiosity that friction created was part of what made Slingshot fun (I actually used it for a few weeks, and *gasp*, enjoyed it).

“Sling a shot to see a shot? Not necessarily! After shooting a photo or video, now you can choose whether to sling it as a locked or unlocked shot” the update trumpets with little apparent awareness of the gravity of the move. Perhaps this will open up Slingshot to a more mainstream

Now it’s just a Snapchat clone with a nicer drawing interface, reactions, and your Facebook friends. Considering Snapchat’s cool factor and strong community, competing directly with it seems like a fool’s game. Perhaps Facebook thinks its polished ephemeral sharing app can succeed in parts of the world where it already has a strong presence and Snapchat is still small. But the change just feels cowardly.

Facebook’s Creative Labs standalone apps are supposed to be allowed to fail. They’re experiments to investigate what users want. That’s good, because ditching reply-to-unlock is akin to an admission of failure of the app’s premise. I would have rather seen Facebook ride out its risky mechanic, and let users decide if it belonged in the deadpool. Instead it’s betting a watered-down version will be more popular, but it’s still years too late.