Stop pretending you know what you're talking about. Do you know how much money is saved by not keeping those pictures? Snapchat handles more pictures per day than facebook[0], which gets almost half a billion per day. I know a few snapchat engineers that concur that Snapchat really does not keep any pictures, which allows them to make interesting optimizations that Facebook (and similar) can't.
It's much easier to send a photo on Snapchat than post one on Facebook and they all disappear so obviously absurd numbers of photos will be sent. Not really a valid comparison.
Wait, I thought SnapChat doesn't save any images. Wasn't that the whole marketing ploy? How would you have files to even hand over? Seems their DB should be virtually empty.
The average Snapchat user isn't going to think about the process of uploading a picture to a central server which is then relayed to the intended recipients and then deleted on the proprietary client-side application (which can be worked around, the problem is that third-party may retain data indefinitely). The average consumer is not that technically literate, consider the people who think Facebook = Internet.
I was at a social apps conference a few months back and some interesting statistics were shown about Snapchat. One of the statistics was that Snapchat allows picture messages to be sent 10x faster than regular SMS. I found this fascinating because this is when I stopped looking at Snapchat as an incognito picture sharing app and more of a new, more efficient communication channel.
I don't know how Snapchat plans to monetize. It might be advertising. It might not be. But it's hard to dismiss Snapchat as being valueless when clearly millions of users are using it every single day.
I'm in college, and I would say 95% of my friends have snapchat. Most of them use it at least once a day. Nobody sends naked pics. Just stuff that you wouldn't necessarily post to facebook. Snapchat's reputation as naked pics only is completely unfounded... it's not like they're sending 450mm nudes every day.
> Stop pretending you know what you're talking about.
Calm down.
> Do you know how much money is saved by not keeping those pictures?
Okay, fine. Even if the pictures aren't stored indefinitely (I'd assume they'd do batch deletions at the end of the day or something when latency isn't as important), all of the photos are encrypted with the same symmetric key which can be found in any Snapchat binary. Which means that they aren't any more private than sending unencrypted images.
Snapchat didn't even delete the pictures, to start with. They just made them unavailable to the interface. Which is similar, and maybe enough.
Given backups and billing records and stored message histories and so on, its not really a question of 'deleting an account'. More like 'making an account no longer visible/available to the current interface'. Nobody thought they'd wipe any disks or anything, in anticipation of a big data breach, right?
Not to defend Snapchat's reputation or anything...but all Dropbox does is 'store files'. Saying snapchat just 'moves pictures' around and therefore shouldn't be valued so highly kind of misses the point. That being said, there are other reasons Snapchat probably shouldn't be valued so highly.
The vast vast vast majority of snaps are not nudes or drunken debauchery. Most of them are just mundane moments of life: I saw a building while walking down the street, or, here's my lunch.
Snapchat is useful and popular because it is a way for people to say hi to their friends without having anything to say. You just take a selfie with a filter, make a face, and you're done. This lets you feel close to your friends without having the pressure of actually having a conversation topic.
The genius of Snapchat is that because photos are ephemeral, the bar to create content is as low as it gets, which results in orders of magnitudes of more content creation and sharing compared to platforms like Instagram. On Instagram, you spend all of your time obsessing over the perfectly angled and filtered photo, hoping to get as many likes as possible. As a result, you'll post on Instagram once a week, but you'll post 5 times a day to snapchat. That's a two-orders magnitude of difference in usage, which is why Snapchat is so successful.
You're missing the point. People are realizing that it's probably not a good idea to have every pic you ever take be out there for the world to see. But they still want to share them with certain people. They (rightfully) don't trust other people to delete them (or lose there phone, etc.) and they don't trust the privacy settings of facebook and the like. Given that, having a mechanism for sending a pic and (almost) guaranteeing it is deleted is a compelling use case. Snapchat could certainly fail, but I think the general use case will be enduring.
There are actual apps you can download that allow you to save a photo or video, not just the screenshot. I'm actually pretty baffled that people still don't know about them. Renders snapchat useless.
i do not understand snapchat and their business model. they started out as a sexting app that deletes the photos and that is where it remained for a long time. i remember news of how "deleted snapchat photos can be undeleted" tutorials and i tried to investigate for fun but i could not understand the UI back then and the tutorials didnt work so i dropped it.
Apparently its pretty big these days in the kids and they have "streaks" as you mention. i hear multiple hundred thousand streaks and other things but to what end?
how is snapchat justifying the storage, bandwidth and processing of data? i mean facebook has ads which they earn, same for twitter but what about snapchat? do they have a sustainable revenue stream because no where i heard snapchat had a paid option.
reddit was user funded for a long time with daily goals and all that so that was not an issue mostly but what snapchat done to address that.
snapchat is all the rage in my city, kids who are now on online classes send snaps because i hear about it. everyone knows how to make that twistface pout or whatever but why?
genuinely curious about it
[0] http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/19/snapchat-reportedly-sees-mo...
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