Snapchat is the latest ‘app craze’ for teenagers and young adults! It is basically a social app used for sharing photos with over 350m Snaps being sent each day, which is an achievement for a company that is barely 2 years old after launching in September 2011.
Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, the co-founders of Snapchat, experimented with as many as 34 projects before they came up with the idea of PicaBoo after a friend grumbled about regretting sending a photo from his smartphone. Picaboo aimed to solve that problem with self-destructing snaps. This was later renamed to SnapChat. It started off as an alternative to Multimedia Messaging Service, but it gained so much popularity because of its quick delivery and easy-to-use interface that it later turned into a social photo app. edit them by adding text and/or drawings, and then share them with their friends on Snapchat.You can add people to your “Friend List” through your contacts or using their username. The sent media are known as ‘Snaps’. The interesting feature of this app is that the sender has the ability to set a time for the recipient to receive and view the snap, when the set time by the sender is up, the media file will not only be hidden from the recipients phone but will also be deleted from Snapchat’s servers. Therefore, the sender has the control over how long should the recipient view the photo or video before it self-destructs itself; the time can be set between 1 to 10 seconds. Snapchat is used by almost every student we know because it allows them to chat with their friends, share pictures easily and send funny videos.
So the user base was growing quickly and Facebook started to take notice. In typical Facebook fashion, they gave themselves 2 options, buy it or beat it, they tried to do both! Facebook launched its Poke app, which was a quickly put together copy of SnapChat, however it didn’t do as well as Facebook had hoped. So when Facebook realised it couldn’t oust Snapchat in the App Store, they tried to buy it. Mark Zuckerberg offered over $1bn in October to the co-founders of Snapchat, but the offer was refused. So this week, the offer from Facebook was increased to $3 billion and to everybody’s surprise, Snapchat refused it as well. The co-founders of Snapchat believe that they will be receiving even better offers in the start of next year, once the usage figures have increased even more! So despite the fact that Snapchat would have been Facebook’s most expensive ever acquisition, Snapchat has still managed to take the bold step by rejecting the $3 billion buyout offer.
Snapchat is currently the sixth most popular free app in the Apple App Store and 9th in the Google Play Store and has millions of users. Its popularity has been increasing ever since the new features were added, and now after rejecting Facebook’s massive offer, with the added publicity of this, there is no doubt that the number of users signing up to Snapchat will increase quicker than ever!