Technology Tuesday: Snapchat Gaining Popularity Amongst Users
This week’s Technology Tuesday takes a look at the expanding popularity of the hottest new smart phone application, Snapchat. The app that allows you to send pictures to your contacts for a determined amount of time and then it automatically deletes the picture, is close to 150 million user uploads per day. This ABC News article by Joanna Stern gives you a closer look at the popularity and procedures of the company.
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Snapchat, the mobile chat and photo-sharing app, might just be getting bigger than Instagram, at least when comparing the services based solely on their daily photos uploads.
Speaking at the two-day All Things D: Dive into Mobile conference in New York City, Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel said 150 million photos are uploaded and shared through the service every day. Instagram has said that an average of 40 million photos are uploaded a day on its service.
But, unlike Instagram, the photos don’t last with Snapchat. With the app, which is available for the iPhone and Android phones, you can chat and share photos with friends, but the photos you send disappear after 10 seconds.
So what kinds of disappearing photos do people take the most on the service? The company sees “a lot of selfies,” Spiegel shared on stage. And those selfies, or self-portraits, are of people ages 13 to 25, which is the services primary demographic.
In the past number of months, as Snapchat has grown in popularity, the company has faced criticism that it has turned into a “sexting” app for teens. But Spiegel denied that that’s the main use for the app. “I certainly don’t think that the service is used that way typically,” he said.
He also said his hope is that the community will monitor itself. “Rather than make it about security and privacy, we wanted to create a mechanism where the community could monitor it itself. That’s why we made the screenshot notification, people started created their own rules,” he said.
In Snapchat, although the photo will delete within 10 seconds, users can take a screenshot of what is sent; the app will notify the sender that the receiver took that screenshot and saved the photo.
But Spiegel assured the audience that Snapchat itself does not save the photos to its servers. “After you view it, it’s marked as viewed on our server and then it gets deleted,” he said. “We null the field in the database.”