Snapchat, the ephemeral messaging app
Standard messaging with Snapchat is a case of “Now You See it, Now You Don’t;” meaning that the app allows you to send messages that disappear without a trace after one second of display. Although existing social media apps are not terribly innovative, Snapchat may be different in that regard. The founders of this Los Angeles suburb-based company founded in 2011 were so sure of their stuff that they turned down a $3 billion offer by Facebook to acquire the company in 2013. Well, Snapchat may be going public in a few weeks, with an estimated capitalization at IPO (initial public offering) of around $20 billion.
Snapchat’s disappearing messages can’t go viral, and you will not be able to fish for “likes” and “follows” and “reshares” of your messages. So, for once in social media, you can really be authentic, and can give others deep access to your life.
In its most basic form, Snapchat is a photo/video-sharing app; that is, you basically use it to send photos, videos, etc. to other people. However, this is not Instagram, the photo-sharing app now owned by Facebook, because unlike the latter, the contents you send with Snapchat disappear within a second. The founders of Snapchat Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy - who were fraternity brothers at Stanford University, California, USA; wanted to make it simple for people to send more photos and videos to one another. So, they make the camera the focus of the app. (The camera is the first thing you see after opening Snapchat, making it faster to send messages compared to other apps, which require a couple of steps to open the camera.) The ephemerality of Snapchat messages makes the decision to send videos or photos easy because you do not have to bother about the images sticking around forever and be used by others for undesirable purposes.
By WhatsApp standard - over 1.2 billion users worldwide - Snapchat has a modest adoption rate, perhaps partly because it was originally developed for teenagers and kids under 25 years of age. Today, older adults are “getting with the program.” The current estimated user level for Snapchat is 150 million, which is actually not that bad. As of now, the market priority of the company is North America and Europe.
Snap - the new name of the original company that had the same name as the app - is seen by many as a highly innovative company, that other companies like Facebook are now copying from. The thought of the fleeting messages is certainly original. Moreover, the company is branching into other areas. Katie Benner in her New York Times article on 30 November 2016 gave a glossary of Snapchat’s parts. The “Chat” lets you send disappearing messages as alluded to above. Snapchat “Lenses” allows you to augment your selfies with other things such as animated butterflies, and you may overlay your photos with location-specific images using the “Filters” function of Snapchat. In the “Live Stories” tool, the Snapchat editors select images and videos to tell stories about places and events. (These contents are taken from the app’s community of users via the power of the service agreement you consented to in using the app!) With this capability, you can watch “Live Stories” from the perspectives of Snapchat users. Snapchat now has the “Memories” feature that allows you to save a personal collection of images and videos - which otherwise would disappear in seconds. There is also the Snapchat Ads, which obviously deals with the bottom line - the manner in which Snap monetizes its operations. Last year November, Snap started selling “Spectacles,” which is a pair of sunglasses with embedded cameras that can record video clips. When you wear these, you can take short videos that automatically upload to the Memories part of Snapchat’s app. Spectacles was one of the most sought-after gadgets of last season.
With innovation come imitation, or copycat apps trying to replicate some of the features of Snapchat. A notable one is Instagram, the photo-sharing app owned by Facebook. The features of Snapchat are obviously too alluring to pass. According to Mike Isaac in the 20 February 2017 issue of New York Times, “The latest sign of that came on Monday as WhatsApp, a mobile messaging application used by 1.2 billion people, unveiled a version of its Status feature that takes a significant number of cues from Snapchat. Similar to Snapchat’s Stories feature, WhatsApp’s Status now lets people share images, GIFs and videos as a status update, all of which last for 24 hours before disappearing.”
Poor Snap; competitors copying the features in Snapchat are already giving the company a run for its money. Instagram’s stories product, which looks pretty much like Snapchat, is said to have become a hit - with more than 150 million people using it daily. In its IPO filing, Snap reportedly cited the direction of Instagram as a potential risk factor to its own growth.