70: WeChat vs TikTok: China's Stories
This week saw a multitude of messaging app announcements. First was WeChat's Open Class PRO featuring a four-hour speech from Allen Zhang. Then, on the same day, Bytedance announced their own messaging app (Duoshan 多闪), what appears to be a clone of Snapchat, and Bullet Messenger announced their upgrade and rebrand to Liaotianbao (聊天宝). All three events, and the recent update to WeChat 7.0, raise interesting questions about the messaging market, WeChat's primacy, and the ascendancy of Bytedance.