W hat is Snapchat? It’s the social app that’s currently seeing more than 350m photos shared every day. The startup with no revenues that’s received nearly $94m of funding so far, and which reportedly recently turned down a $3bn acquisition offer from Facebook.
It’s the service that may be pulling millions of teenagers away from that social network, but which is also giving parents headaches over sexting and cyberbullying. It’s making VC firms giddy with excitement, but is being sued by one of its own co-founders.
Snapchat is one of the hottest mobile apps in the world, but also one of the most controversial. Here’s a 10-point primer on its past, present and future.
1. Snapchat wasn’t its founders’ https://hookupdate.net/escort-index/hollywood/ first product
Snapchat’s co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy started working together at Stanford University, initially on a website for students called Future Freshman, among other projects. “We would experiment and fail. We must have attempted nearly 34 projects,” Spiegel told the Palisadian Post in August.
The one that clicked was an iPhone app called Picaboo, which launched in late summer 2011, after a friend grumbled about regretting sending a photo from his smartphone. Picaboo aimed to solve that problem with self-destructing snaps, Mission Impossible style.
When sending a photo to a contact, the sender could decide how many seconds it would be viewable for before self-deleting. Even then, people were drawing conclusions about what Picaboo would be used for: “Now we’re not suggesting you use it for sending NSFW (not safe for work) photos,” suggested tech blog Shiny Shiny in .
“In fact we don’t want to tarnish Picaboo, it could be a completely innocent and cute way to send photos to your friends and family. BUT if you just have to get your kit off and take pictures, this is probably the safest way to do it.”
Picaboo, subsequently rebranded as Snapchat, expanded to Android, and added video, as well as the ability to scribble messages on photos before sending them. By 2012, it was ready to become a craze.
“One of the greatest benefits of the service, especially in the early days, was that it was 10 times faster than an MMS (multimedia messaging service) message. So a lot of people just liked it because the interface was so simple. It sent the photos so quickly,” Spiegel told Associated Press this month.
“It was a lot faster than opening up a text message, going and taking a picture or choosing it from the gallery, uploading it – which took a really, really long time – and then sending it to your friend.”
2. Snapchat has grown like the clappers
Throughout its history, Snapchat’s founders have preferred not to provide regular updates on how many people are using the app, opting instead for the metric of how many photos are being shared a day. That figure grew from 20m in , before rocketing to 150m in April, 200m in June, and 350m in September.
Actual users? The most quoted figure has been 5m daily active users, but that’s from the spring of 2013 so it’s quite likely higher now. In erican mobile phone owners were using Snapchat, which would suggest 26m users in the US alone. Among 18 to 29-year-olds, the percentage rose to 26%.
In August, analytics firm Onavo claimed that Snapchat was being used by 20.8% of iPhones in the US, making it the eighth most popular app on Apple’s smartphone in that country, creeping up on Twitter’s 27% share. But, globally, another relevant stat is the fact that since September, Snapchat has been matching Facebook for the number of photos shared a day – 350m.
