There are times when Snapchat is truly amazing. Women of all ages share risque photos of themselves and then complain if people are turned on by them. Of course there is a flip side to that coin. Men often share the photos that were meant to be private. Looking at these pictures can be fun but when I was young, there was no Snapchat. We had to settle for the drive-in or the old Boy Scout camp. That was amazing too.
So, what is Snapchat?
Snapchat is an image messaging and multimedia mobile application created by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown,[5] former students at Stanford University, and developed by Snap Inc., originally Snapchat Inc. One of the principal concepts of Snapchat is that pictures and messages are only available for a short time before they become inaccessible.
The prototype for Snapchat was started by Brown and Spiegel as a project for one of Spiegel’s classes at Stanford, where Spiegel was a product design major. Beginning as “Picaboo”, the idea was to create a selfie app (application) which allowed users to share images that were explicitly short-lived and self-deleting. The temporary nature of the pictures would therefore encourage frivolity and emphasize a more natural flow of interaction.[6]
When, in April 2011, Spiegel floated the product idea in front of his class as a final project, the classmates focused on the impermanent aspect of the potential product, and balked at the thought of temporary photos.[7] Murphy was eventually brought into the project to write the source code for the application, and Picaboo first launched as an iOS-only app in July 2011. The application was relaunched in September under the name Snapchat.[7]
Originally, Snapchat was centered on private, person-to-person photo sharing. New features, including the ability to send short videos, communicate via video chat, and saving necessary chat information through a press on a message, were added through later updates.
In October 2013, it introduced a “My Story” feature, letting users compile images, known as “snaps”, into chronological storylines accessible to all of their friends.
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