What is April 19? Is it the one that the old drivers thought, for one night?
Cough, seriously, even the fox girl next to her said that the fruit car was too fast. April 19 is the birthday of the WeChat circle of friends.
How many digital bloggers are repeatedly tortured by chat record migration when frequently changing mobile phones; how many ordinary users accidentally and awkwardly pat themselves when they enter other people's circle of friends in the middle of the night to eat melons... But like it or not, you can't deny the fact that WeChat has become the most used and popular messaging app on the mainland, with more than 1.2 billion users worldwide.
This APP, which has been integrated into our lives, has gone through eleven years, and the circle of friends function that lays the foundation for its user activity is also about to usher in its tenth birthday. Then follow the fruit and see what changes have been experienced in the circle of friends, which we call "ten thousand votes".
The birth of the circle of friends
In April 2012, Apple's WeChat version 4.0 supported the "Circle of Friends" function for the first time, while the Android version was launched on May 25. Guozi remembers that at that time, he was still using the first Android mobile phone in his life: Meizu MX. When the user first opened it, there was a passage on the cover: "As you know, WeChat is not just a chat tool." It all starts with a photo, you take a photo, you have your own photo album, and in the "circle of friends" you can learn about the lives of your friends. As you can see, WeChat is a way of life. ”
From the beginning, the WeChat team has shown its ambition to fully integrate into the lives of users. Looking back ten years later, when we encounter something, the first reaction is to calm down the "clockwork circle of friends", which just proves that WeChat has done it. The early circle of friends only gives users the right to post text, pictures, and music, and allows users to like and comment on each other's circle of friends. Although it looks very similar to the function of QQ space, it is based on "mutual friends", which can provide a "small circle social" on the basis of protecting personal privacy to a certain extent. In the early stage of WeChat's development, being able to join someone's circle of friends naturally represents an identity identity: we are all the way, and I am willing to play with you.
Circle of friends and public account tweets
With the birth of the WeChat public account, at the end of 2013, WeChat added the function of sharing information to the circle of friends. WeChat's huge user base has enabled more and more self-media people, traditional media accounts, and new media for government affairs to shift the update position to the WeChat public account. The native and sticky nature of the WeChat public account also make users develop the habit of sharing tweets to the circle of friends. Since then, the WeChat circle of friends has become another important information acquisition channel after Weibo. Moreover, the WeChat explosion in the circle of friends has also become the source of public opinion fermentation. Because compared with other platforms, it is easier to form a high degree of resonance in the circle of friends, as well as form a follow-up forward, and attach their own insights and analysis of an event. Under the dual impetus of quantity and quality, the screen brushing behavior of the circle of friends has pulled the heat of one public opinion event after another, and has also changed the perspective of our view of the world.
Three days of the circle of friends can be seen
In February 2017, WeChat launched the function of "visible in the last six months" of the circle of friends, which is perhaps the most important function in the history of the development of the circle of friends. A month later, in March 2017, WeChat added the "visible in the last three days" function of the circle of friends. From sharing to hiding, more and more friends are hiding behind that horizontal line: if he has not sent a circle of friends in three days. The launch of this function, with nearly 3 million searches, 680 million reads, and 86,000 discussions, was on the Weibo hot search list at that time, and its popularity was even much higher than that of the WeChat drift bottle offline in the same period.
On the 2019 WeChat Night, WeChat claimed that the "circle of friends can be seen for three days" function, and the number of uses has exceeded 100 million. The world has a long history of suffering and darkness, and it is not a few people who have hidden. The original intention of the circle of friends is to share the beautiful things in life with friends and family members around them. But as we get older and WeChat becomes more widely used, our "circle of friends" is getting bigger and bigger: colleagues, customers, leading teachers, strangers at parties, micro-merchants with shopping needs... In this case, the circle of friends is no longer the first choice to share life, but it may be because of the past circle of friends, and personal privacy is exposed. But delete it, and you will feel sorry, after all, it is a good record. In this way, "three days visible" has become everyone's just need. Limiting the visible range of the circle of friends is the epitome of the circle of friends being too crowded. According to data, nearly 60% of WeChat users, most of the new friends from the work environment, more than 80% of users have worked on WeChat. Even with more professional office communication software such as "DingTalk" and "Enterprise WeChat", WeChat groups have still become one of the main channels for carrying work. To the extent that it is still the case, the WeChat circle of friends has shifted from social acquaintances to pan-social relationships, including occupations. So is this good or bad? In terms of social breadth, pan-social relationships are undoubtedly an extension, which enables the social resources between independent individuals and individual groups to be improved, and the rapid accumulation of social capital, which is what we call "accumulation of contacts". But in terms of social depth, pan-social relationships are also a degenerate manifestation of social interaction. If your WeChat circle of friends is filled with hundreds of so-called friends, you may not be able to reply to every message in time, miss the latest developments they post in the circle of friends, and even forget who this person is and why they added friends in the first place. Personal energy is limited, if you can not maintain important social relationships, lingering in the "know a lot of people" of the general friendship, will only make more and more acquaintances become strangers, so that their social relationships tend to the surface.
What else do you need from the circle of friends?
Although it has grown for ten years, WeChat has always been conservative and slower-paced updates, making its actual performance far behind the needs of the majority of users, especially for the ace function of the circle of friends. As a result, Guozi sorted out some new functions in the circle of friends that everyone has a high voice and hopes to promote on WeChat. Just for one word, you are welcome to add in the comments section. First of all, mutual friends like without reminding. Every time Guozi likes a friend's birthday, graduation, marriage, anniversary, travel, etc., he will usually be the last one, because it is a predictable circle of friends that will be liked by dozens of mutual friends. Although WeChat did not give a solution to this problem, it also opened up the setting of blocking a single circle of friends like reminder. Through the path of [I] - [Album] - [My Circle of Friends] - [Message Box in the upper right corner], enter the historical message reminder, you can select the information you have liked to press and hold, and select "No more notification" in the pop-up dialog box.
Unfortunately, it is only for a single circle of friends, and the fruit still hopes that there can be a switch once and for all. Secondly, the circle of friends editing function. We all know that now there is a re-editing function after deleting the circle of friends. But if someone comments or likes it before you notice a typo, you'll fall into the social embarrassment of "should you delete it and repost it?" On the other hand, next door, Weibo has already launched the editing Weibo function early, although it is only a member-only function, it is also stronger than nothing, right? Considering that the author was rumored after editing, or the comment area after editing was inconsistent with the original text, the editing function of Weibo also comes with a "view editing history" function for readers, which can be said to be very thoughtful. Perhaps, this is also the weChat team's concern, open editing function, must be accompanied by the function of viewing history, invisibly increase the storage cost of the server. Finally, the picture comment function of the circle of friends. Fruit remembers that there was a time when this feature was opened up as a grayscale test. At that time, the circle of friends was not busy, fighting memes and sending funny pictures. As soon as I slid down, it was full of god pictures, and every friend was happily sending and storing new emojis. This feature only existed for a very short time and was quickly taken offline, including the circle of friends that had been sent, and there was no trace of the picture comments that had existed in the period. Guozi guessed that WeChat did not open this function in the end, presumably taking into account the final reading experience, the cost of auditing, and the cost of storage just mentioned in the same way. In the ten years that the circle of friends has gone through, some people are still happy to share their lives like fruits, and some people have opened for half a year to see, or deleted and locked all the history of the past. But in any case, the circle of friends is always a self-pleasure image display, but also the most direct entrance for us to understand new friends. I hope that the next decade of WeChat Circle of Friends will once again bloom a unique light when it is surrounded by new social software.