Snapchat is a photo and video-messaging app available on iOS and Android smartphone’s. It allows
you to send a photo or up to 9-seconds of video, but once opened by the recipient it is only available for a maximum of 10 seconds before it disappears – forever.
Snapchat is a great way to chat to your friends and keep them updated with your life. The captioning and drawing features allow users to add some context and colour to the picture or video, which makes the creation and viewing experience great fun!
With Snapchat you send your picture/video to specific people and it is this privacy that makes it so appealing. With photo sharing apps like Instagram flooding the web with highly filtered images rendered to perfection, we want a place to have a laugh, pull a funny face and pretend like we’re 10 years old without the entire Internet having access.
Snapchat faces direct competition from Facebook after they released a Facebook Poke app. Despite Facebook Poke almost being an exact replica, it is yet to make an impact on the Snapchat phenomenon, which continues to climb up the app ranks and is now valued at around $800m.
However, before you get carried away there are limitations that you must be aware of. It is possible for the recipient to take a screenshot of a Snapchat before it disappears. Although the sender will be notified of the screenshot, there is a risk that users could suffer unforeseen consequences if private images are exchanged, saved and then spread to other social networks. This has been the case with many teenagers ‘sexting’ provocative images to each other, but if you keep it to the innocent ‘selfies’, I’m sure you will have nothing to worry about.
