Though Snapchat has been picked on, picked apart, and blown up in the media, the technical aspects of the service are still somewhat mysterious to the average user. A new research report from a company called Decipher Forensics is looking to shed a little light on how the service “deletes” photos you send through Snapchat.
According to Decipher, Snapchat photos are renamed with a .jpgnomedia… → Read More
Snackchat! Taco Bell tweeted, “We’re on Snapchat” last night, urging their Twitter followers to add them for a “secret announcement” some time today. This is the first major brand to use Snapchat to reach customers and could signal the beginning of Snapchat’s monetization. → Read More
Picture-messaging sensation Snapchat seems to experiencing some growing pains. CEO and co-founder Evan Spiegel said today that over 150 million pictures a day flow through the auto-destructing photo-sharing service, but as the service gets bigger and gains more attention, the worst parts of the Internet are sure to follow.
According to a post on the company blog, some Snapchatters experienced… → Read More
Snapchat has been picking up steam like crazy over the past weeks and months, and today at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel gave us a brief update on just how much traction the transient messaging app has picked up lately.
As of today, Snapchat sees a whopping 150 million images shared each day — that’s up from the 60 million images sent as of this past… → Read More
Teens still love Facebook. No news there. According to a recent study by Piper Jaffray, 33 percent of the 5,200 teens surveyed choose Facebook as their most important social network. Following behind, Twitter has 30 percent of the vote, while 17 percent of teens say that Instagram is the most important social network. What’s notable, however, is that interest in Facebook seems to be… → Read More
In what appears to be a cyclical recurrence of post-success litigation, Snapchat is being sued by a man from South Carolina named Frank Reginald Brown IV, who claims that he originally came up with the idea for the ephemeral picture messaging app.
The idea for Snapchat is simple, yet has been widely misunderstood by older generations: you take a picture or video of yourself (or something else… → Read More
It was just ten days ago that Snapchat launched a private beta version of its Android app, updated to include the video capture feature we’ve come to enjoy on iOS.
Today, however, the company has turned it around, making the Snapchat with video application officially available in the Google Play. Store. Co-founder Evan Spiegel mentioned to us earlier in the month that developing Snapchat for… → Read More
Snapchat has been on a roll lately, scooping up a $13.5 million funding round from Benchmark last week, toying around with monetization features, and becoming the world’s favorite misunderstood mobile app.
But today the train keeps on chugging, as Snapchat has released a beta build of its Android app that includes the ability to send self-destructing video messages along with the usual picture… → Read More
Snapchat, the impermanent messaging app that won “Fastest Rising Startup” at the 2012 Crunchies, has finalized a $13.5 million Series A round led by Benchmark’s Mitch Lasky.
According to The New York Times, Snapchat is now valued between $60 and $70 million. → Read More
Mobile photo messaging app Snapchat just won “Fastest Rising Startup” at this year’s edition of the Crunchies. If startups are really all about growth, then our voters couldn’t have picked a better winner than Snapchat, which didn’t just grow into a massively popular service this year, but also spawned a whole ecosystem of sites that teach its users how to get images out of the service before… → Read More
Even as SnapChat leaves tech reporters and people over 25 scratching their heads — is it the next Instagram, or a massive sexting conspiracy? — the app has succeeded in bringing ephemeral (or self-destructive, if you’re into the whole Mission Impossible thing) messaging to the mainstream. The app has been busy racking up a billion-plus “snaps,” is reportedly raising a huge round of funding, and… → Read More
Facebook’s newest feature Graph Search — a tool which lets users datamine their friends’ and strangers’ photos and interests — merely adds to the site’s stalkerish reputation. Sharing anything on Facebook now carries an even bigger risk of over-sharing, and should make users think long and hard about every little thing they contribute to its data banks. → Read More
Snapchat and Facebook Poke have clearly validated the demand for ephemeral messaging, and perhaps even a desire for added security (whether it’s misguidedly through social networks or not). But SMS seems like the obvious choice for the most private of your messaging platforms, which is why Gryphn technology has launched its own self-destructing SMS platform for Android.
The new update to the… → Read More
Editor’s note: Antone Johnson is a startup lawyer specializing in early-stage consumer Internet and location-based businesses.
Facebook has been accused of creating a slavish copy of Snapchat. Yet Poke may turn out to be a poster child for why most multi-billion-dollar public companies try not to break things, and as a consequence, are often precluded from moving fast like startups. → Read More
It started with an assumption, really. Snapchat, a photo-sharing application that auto-destroys images seconds after being opened, launched in September 2011 with zero media coverage. A homegrown product, built by two Stanford guys, grew to now see over 50 million snaps per day today. In fact, Facebook launched a clone of the app just Friday.
It wasn’t until the company made its first… → Read More
Facebook Poke messages self-destruct after a few seconds, but is Facebook saving these potentially embarrassing photos and videos? No. It’s deleting them. Pokes are encrypted, and Facebook deletes the encryption keys two days after they’re read so they’re unreadable. Key backups are destroyed within 90 days, making a poke completely inaccessible. So send those silly, racy messages with confidence. → Read More
As an old man, I find Snapchat to be baffling at best but Jordan and I duke it out in the Thunderdome that is Fly or Die and come, in the end, to a conclusion. → Read More
Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel responded to Facebook’s new Poke app today with the brief statement, “Welcome, Facebook. Seriously.” He declined to comment further. → Read More
Today, Facebook launched a new mobile app called Poke. It’s strikingly similar to a new photo-sharing app that’s taken the blogosphere by storm, called Snapchat.
Both Snapchat and Poke let you send pictures or videos which are then destroyed within a matter of seconds.
But the social network has officially launched its competitor, and the differences are few but important. → Read More
Facebook has just announced its newest standalone app called “Poke” which lets people send photos, videos, pokes, or text Facebook messages to their friends that expire after a few seconds. The launch confirms AllThingsD’s report from earlier this month. Built in just 12 days, Poke is a big move into the ephemeral messaging space for Facebook, and it could give it even more data on who your… → Read More
Snapchat, an impermanent photo messaging application, soft launched a version for Android today. Co-founder Evan Spiegel tells me users have shared over 1 billion photos (“snaps”) on the iOS application.
Spiegel says that users share over 20 million snaps every day, a figure he says keeps growing. → Read More
When Instagram’s roughly $750 million sale to Facebook closed, it seemed that the photo-sharing chapter in mobile app history closed. Instagram had definitively won, while many startups like Mixed Media Labs’ Picplz and Path either pivoted or completely redid their apps. But if you look at the top charts today, maybe this race isn’t so finished. In fact, there are a couple of younger… → Read More
Earlier this week, Josh Constine wrote an epic piece on Facebook, Google and Apple’s impending messaging war. As Constine explains, we have most likely reached “peak SMS,” that is, text messaging is on the decline and another form of messaging will take its place.
But as the major empires wage total war for glorious messaging spoils, there are far smaller, distant tribes that will make… → Read More
Snapchat hopes to outgrow its bad rap as a sexting app, but first it’s outgrowing the Stanford dorm room where it started. Today it announced it has hired a community manager and two engineers, and has now been used to share 110 million photos that each disappear after a set time limit.
Now its shooting to release a big iOS update by the end of June that will include “password recovery, bug… → Read More
“The minute you tell someone that images on your server disappear, everyone jumps to sexting.”
Evan Spiegel laughed and leaned back into his chair during his first sitdown interview since his iPhone app Snapchat blew up over the last month. Snapchat is #12 on the free iOS photo app charts in the U.S. and just scored some mainstream media attention in The New York Times.
Why? Snapchat… → Read More
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