Here are our Likes and Fails for today, Bolt has officially launched! But only in New Zealand, South Africa and Singapore, though it looks promising. Also a hilarious customer service thread for a Glasgow Hostel went rather awry on Facebook.
Likes
Bolt has now been released, but the catch is, you have to be in Singapore, New Zealand or South Africa to install the app. The app works in a similar way to Snapchat, the very popular photo-messaging service but features a slightly different interface.
The app asks for you to take a selfie to sign up and your phone number, but currently this is just to verify you’re in one of the launch countries. The app opens straight on the camera, and works even quicker than Snapchat as you simply hit the friends face that you want to send it to, and their face works as the shutter button, so it sends straight away. Simple. Though what about editing, well you just pre-edit the photo before you take the snap. The editing tools are slightly different to it’s competitor, there are no drawing tools in Bolt but you can still add text to photos.
What is especially handy is that if you just want a quick conversation, and don’t want to reply with pictures every time, you can just write text on the image that was sent to you and can send it back. Another feature that differs from Snapchat is that the photos don’t auto-destruct, the user can decide when to delete them simply by swiping them away.
It’s an interesting first few countries for the app to launch to, especially as the app was created in the US and arguably would have the biggest market there. There is the possibility that they haven’t initially launched in the US because of the copyright/trademark issues I was talking about yesterday. Once these have been sorted and agreed I’m sure the app will launch in the US, plus they must be fairly confident that they can keep the app name if they’ve decided to launch with the name – even in other countries.
All I can say is that I’m excited to see it in the flesh when it’s released, from what I can see it looks a lot more intuitive than Snapchat, and I like the look of the interface. I think as soon as the muscle memory of Snapchat wears off this will be a great replacement app. I’ll just have to hope that contacts will migrate to the app; though it is always hard for an app to compete against a very dominant leader in the market with a huge user base, especially when predominantly, the apps do the same thing.
Credit to TheNextWeb for their demo of Bolt.
Fails
What should have been a simple customer service issue, has turned into a rather amusing long comment conversation on Facebook. The conversation began when a woman called Lou wrote about her rather bad stay at a guesthouse called the Blue Sky Hostel in Glasgow, which she had stayed in to attend the Commonwealth games.
She posted a review on their Facebook page giving the hostel one star and saying it was the worst hostel she had ever stayed in. She then pointed out a list of things wrong with the hotel and said that the whole place was a health hazard. Well, the owner of the hostel wasn’t having any of this and instead of going the usual customer service route of apologizing and trying to make it better, the owner Todd instead had a go at the woman, even going as far as to call her a retard.
Well, you can guess what happened next, there was a massive back and forth in the comments section and people joined the thread to keep getting notifications from the fiasco, some posting pictures of MJ eating Popcorn, to signify that it was spectacle worth watching.
You should really go and read the whole thing it’s magnificent.