Snapchat’s disappearing act might be a thing of the past. Evan Spiegel, one of the founders of the teen-friendly photo and video app, just announced a new feature that will make your photos a bit more permanent.
Snapchat Stories allows users to weave together snaps into a narrative, and those photos will disappear after 24 hours, rather than Snapchat’s 10 seconds. You can add as many snaps to your “story” as you like, and choose the friends to send it to, on the “My Friends” page. According to Spiegel, Snapchat already sees 350 million snaps a day. They even released this cool video to show how much fun you could be having with your Stories:
In essence, Snapchat’s attempting to replicate Facebook’s news feed with this feature, and the 24-hour nature of Snapchat’s stories might be more attractive to young people, who seem less interested in building and maintaining a Facebook profile. Spiegel adds, “The Internet is a timeless void—you put something in there and it’s there forever and loses a lot of context.”
By creating a 24-hour window, they’re also changing the way users engage with the app, by integrating online and offline personas.
snapchat stories is a pretty bold maneuver since it fundamentally changes the social dynamic of how/why you open the app each time
— matt (@mattbuchanan) October 3, 2013
Perhaps they wanted to change Snapchat’s default setting as a sexting platform, or capitalize on the teen Facebook exile. As of today, it seems people are still getting used to it.
H/T The Verge | Screengrab via Snapchat/YouTube