“Best Friends” Out: Just What The World Needed
The best friends feature on Snapchat has been canned- finally.
The popular iPhone app, Snapchat, just released it’s most recent update, and users all around are not happy about it. Previously, Snapchat used to display a “Best Friends” list underneath each user’s name, indicating whom they had been snapchatting with the most. Now, this feature has been removed, and all hell has broken loose. People are outraged with the fact that they can no longer see who is on their top friends anymore, and more accurately speaking, they can no longer spy on people. I for one, love that this feature is no longer a part of the already controversial app, and people that are fuming in their little smart-phone bubble need to calm down. No longer must we worry about who is snapchatting who, or who’s (supposedly) cheating on who, or continue to value something so heavily in our lives that isn’t worth our time.
MySpace
Let’s take a nice little trip down memory lane. Remember Myspace? When it wasn’t a music-specific site? Yeah, the website where you used to create personal profiles to best describe your teenage angst. You developed your own layout, picked a profile song, and put together a “top friends.”
Now, this top friends list was the devil’s advocate when it came to destroying friendships and causing relationship problems. People would base the order on value, get bent out of shape if they weren’t on someone’s top friends, and pretty much have a full-on heart attack if they were removed from this list. I remember my friends always complaining that their friend’s boyfriend was put in front of them on Myspace, and somehow that translated into meaning that they were no longer friends. People would be able to see whether or not couples broke up by simply clicking on their profiles and examining their “Top Friends.” If they were booted over a couple spots, maybe they were fighting. But if they were no where to be found, you knew someone just became single again.
Snapchat
Looks familiar, right? We were introduced to the same concept when Snapchat incorporated the “Best Friends” feature, and we were thrown right back into the same technological-dependent mindset that we left behind with Mypace years ago. Yet again, we started creeping on people’s Snapchat best friends to see whom was breaking up and/or were speaking to who again. Just – like – Myspace. We were dedicating a good chunk of our time to worrying about what others were doing on a stupid app, and acting just like we did in middle/high school.
What The World Needed
The fact that people are actually upset about this update is preposterous. Snapchat did us a favor. They’ve removed something that originally had no link to the application’s purpose, and it’s fabulous.
As a society already devoted to our smartphones, we finally have one less thing to obsess over. In regards to relationships, do people really think that Snapchat was a savvy way to try to catch someone cheating, or better yet, having an “affair?” Please. No healthy relationship should even worry about whose “best friends” with who on a silly app, and if they are, then maybe there are some kinks in that relationship that have nothing to do with Snapchat at all. Having that intense amount of paranoia be caused by something as meaningless as a phone app is simply unhealthy and destructive to anyone’s perception on what is worthy of stress, and what is not.
I think that Snapchat did a good thing here. They did something that Myspace failed to do years ago, they removed the ability for users to destroy their personal life over a feature that kept track of who interacted with who in ten-second increments. Now we can go back to creeping on people and their business through their text message conversations and their Facebook posts (just kidding, don’t do that).
We can finally remove our gaze from our phone for at least a little longer, and stick our nose back into the real world of face-to-face interactions. That is, if we don’t become consumed in something else in the next few days. Gotta love our technological dependency.
