Introducing the new Snapchat
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https://www.snap.com/en-US/news/post/introducing-the-new-snapchat/
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15807043
Today we’re announcing a new and improved Snapchat - organized around your relationships and personalized just for you!
Until now, social media has always mixed photos and videos from your friends with content from publishers and creators. While blurring the lines between professional content creators and your friends has been an interesting Internet experiment, it has also produced some strange side-effects (like fake news) and made us feel like we have to perform for our friends rather than just express ourselves.
The new Snapchat separates the social from the media. This means that the Chats and Stories from your friends are on the left side of Snapchat, and the Stories from publishers, creators, and the community are on the right.
We’ve also invented something new to make Snapchat feel even more personal: the dynamic Friends page. The new Friends page to the left of the camera displays your friends based on the way you communicate with them.
You can think of it as a more sophisticated Best Friends algorithm that makes it easier to find the friends you want to talk to, when you want to talk to them. We’ve all had the frustrating experience of scrolling endlessly through our Chats to find the right person - now your Friends will be listed in the order that you want to talk to them. It might take a little while for the Friends page to learn the best way to display your Friends, but the results are worth it!
The new Discover page to the right of the camera includes Stories from publishers, creators, and the community. Your subscriptions live at the top, followed by other Stories you might be interested in watching. Over time, Discover will become uniquely personalized for you. While the Stories on Discover are personalized algorithmically, our curators review and approve everything that gets promoted on the page. We believe that this balance of human review and machine personalization provides the best content experience on mobile.
And, as always, Snapchat opens to the Camera, making it the fastest way to share a moment with friends.
Separating social from media has allowed us to build the best way to communicate with friends and the best way to watch great content - while addressing many of the problems that plague the Internet today.
We hope you enjoy these changes as much as we do - it’s a whole new Snapchat!
Happy Snapping!
Love, Team Snap
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While blurring the lines between professional content creators and your friends has been an interesting Internet experiment, it has also produced some strange side-effects (like fake news) and made us feel like we have to perform for our friends rather than just express ourselves.","The new Snapchat separates the social from the media. This means that the Chats and Stories from your friends are on the left side of Snapchat, and the Stories from publishers, creators, and the community are on the right.","We’ve also invented something new to make Snapchat feel even more personal: the dynamic Friends page. The new Friends page to the left of the camera displays your friends based on the way you communicate with them.","You can think of it as a more sophisticated Best Friends algorithm that makes it easier to find the friends you want to talk to, when you want to talk to them. We’ve all had the frustrating experience of scrolling endlessly through our Chats to find the right person - now your Friends will be listed in the order that you want to talk to them. It might take a little while for the Friends page to learn the best way to display your Friends, but the results are worth it!","The new Discover page to the right of the camera includes Stories from publishers, creators, and the community. Your subscriptions live at the top, followed by other Stories you might be interested in watching. Over time, Discover will become uniquely personalized for you. While the Stories on Discover are personalized algorithmically, our curators review and approve everything that gets promoted on the page. We believe that this balance of human review and machine personalization provides the best content experience on mobile.","And, as always, Snapchat opens to the Camera, making it the fastest way to share a moment with friends.","Separating social from media has allowed us to build the best way to communicate with friends and the best way to watch great content - while addressing many of the problems that plague the Internet today.","We hope you enjoy these changes as much as we do - it’s a whole new Snapchat!","Happy Snapping!","Love, Team Snap"]},{"date":{"year":2017,"month":10,"day":10,"hour":8,"minute":0},"title":"Introducing Context Cards","slug":"introducing-context-cards","content":[{"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn4KUvDzQFg"},"Today we’re announcing a new way to learn more about what you see on Snapchat.","Inspired by something in a Snap? Just swipe up for Context Cards!","Context Cards display information about the Snap you’re viewing – powered by amazing content from our partners like TripAdvisor, Foursquare, Michelin, and goop.","Context Cards also provide a way to take simple actions like calling for a ride with Uber or Lyft or reserving a table through OpenTable, Resy or Bookatable. We’ve also integrated Stories into Context Cards, making it easy to see more Snaps from the places that interest you.","With Context Cards, Snaps have become the visual starting point for learning more about the world, empowering our community to get more information about anything that catches their eye.","The billions of Snaps created each day on Snapchat power products like Stories, Search, Snap Map and now, Context Cards. As we learn more about how to improve Context Cards, we’ll be adding more partners and additional information. Stay tuned!","Love,","Team Snap"]},{"date":{"year":2017,"month":9,"day":8,"hour":12,"minute":0},"title":"Introducing Campus Publisher Stories!","slug":"introducing-campus-publisher-stories","content":["It’s been nearly three years since we launched Publisher Stories on Snapchat as a new way for our community to enjoy high quality content from some of the most creative media companies in the world.","Today, we are expanding Publisher Stories to include school newspapers. School newspapers play a critical role in informing and entertaining their campus communities, and they are often where the many leading journalists and editors that we work with got their start.","We are partnering with dozens of colleges and universities, whose editorial teams will begin producing weekly Publisher Stories and distributing them on Snapchat. These Stories will feature Snap Ads to help each school monetize and grow their newspaper through a revenue sharing agreement.","We are honored to partner with talented students across the country to empower the next generation of journalists and we can't wait to see what they create!"]},{"date":{"year":2017,"month":6,"day":28,"hour":8,"minute":0},"title":"Design a Custom Geofilter from Your Phone!","slug":"design-a-custom-geofilter-from-your-phone","content":[{"url":"/images/news/mobile-odg.jpg"},"Each day, Snapchatters submit tens of thousands of Geofilter designs for their engagements and weddings, parties, vacations, graduations, and so much more.","Starting today, we’re making it easier to design a custom Snapchat filter! Snapchatters can now create filters right in the Snapchat app, and customize them with many of the same Creative Tools available to decorate Snaps!","To get started, simply tap “On-Demand Geofilters” in Settings to check out our all-new mobile creative studio. From there, you can pick a theme for your filter and add personal flair with text, Bitmojis, and Stickers.","Once your masterpiece is complete, choose where you’d like your filter to appear and when. Your Geofilter can cover an event or entire block — for an hour or up to ninety days. Pricing starts at $5.99. You’ll hear from Snapchat when your Geofilter is approved to confirm payment and details.","Check out our Geofilters Support Center for more!","Happy Snapping!"]},{"date":{"year":2017,"month":6,"day":21,"hour":8,"minute":0},"title":"Introducing Snap Map!","slug":"introducing-the-snap-map","content":[{"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q-gjHtttGQ"},"We've built a whole new way to explore the world! See what's happening, find your friends, and get inspired to go on an adventure!","It's easy to get started — just pinch to zoom out and view the Map! You decide if you want to share your location with friends, or simply keep it to yourself with Ghost Mode.","If your friends are sharing their location with you, their Actionmoji will appear on the Map. Actionmojis only update when you open Snapchat.","We hope you enjoy the new Map as much as we do!","Happy Snapping!","Team Snap"]},{"date":{"year":2017,"month":5,"day":23,"hour":6,"minute":0},"title":"A Whole New Story","slug":"a-whole-new-story","content":[{"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohN8cv7nUmA"},"Today we’re announcing a new way to create custom Stories – about anything, with any of your friends, even for a specific location! It's perfect for a trip, a birthday party, or a new baby story just for the family.","You decide who can add to the Story and who can view it – you can also choose to Geofence the Story to a location.","It’s super easy to create a new Story. Simply tap the “Create Story” icon located in the top right corner of the Stories page.","Stories disappear if no one has contributed to them in the past 24 hours.","We hope you enjoy creating custom Stories!","Love,","Team Snap"]},{"date":{"year":2017,"month":5,"day":9,"hour":9,"minute":0},"title":"Limitless Snaps","slug":"limitless-snaps","content":["Today we’re making a pretty big change to the way you create and send Snaps. We’re reorganizing the layout of our creative tools, adding a Magic Eraser (you’ll find this under the Scissor tool), and adding a new setting to the timer: infinity!","We’ve all felt the frustration of not being able to fully enjoy a Snap – even after replaying it – and we wanted to give you the option of allowing the recipient to enjoy your Snap as long as they’d like. After your friend finishes viewing the Snap and taps to close it, it will delete as usual.","There’s also a new Loop tool for videos so you can decide if your Snap plays once or loops until your friend is ready to tap to the next Snap.","These changes allow us to continue evolving the Snapchat service and provide a foundation for introducing even more creative tools for making fun Snaps! We hope you enjoy it!","Love,","Team Snap"]},{"date":{"year":2017,"month":4,"day":18,"hour":6,"minute":0},"title":"Introducing New World Lenses","slug":"introducing-new-world-lenses","content":[{"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6x44v8prFA"},"We launched Lenses over a year ago as a whole new way to express ourselves on Snapchat. Since then, we've become puppies, puked rainbows, face-swapped with our best friends — and begun to explore how Lenses can change the world around us.","Today, we’re adding new ways to use Lenses.","While Snapping with the rear-facing camera, simply tap the camera screen to find new Lenses that can paint the world around you with new 3D experiences!","Happy Snapping,","Team Snap"]},{"date":{"year":2017,"month":3,"day":31,"hour":9,"minute":0},"title":"A Story for Everything","slug":"a-story-for-everything","content":[{"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyqQtm4wETA"},"Since we launched Stories in October 2013, Stories have evolved from singular, personal perspectives to include collective narratives created by our entire community with Snaps submitted to Our Story and curated by our team.","Our Stories have provided behind the scenes Snaps from interesting events all around the world — from the field of the Super Bowl to the summit of Mount Everest! Over time, the number of Snaps that were created by our community and added to Our Story simply overwhelmed our curation team — and inspired us to create something new.","We’ve built a new way to understand what’s happening in Snaps that are submitted to Our Story, and to create new Stories using advanced machine learning. The results have been amazing: you can search over one million unique Stories on Snapchat!","In addition to our professionally curated Stories, you can watch a local basketball game, check out the scene at your favorite bar, view your favorite Fashion Week shows, get inspired by a faraway place, or simply tap through a Story full of puppies — there’s a Story for everything!","The best part of Stories is seeing the world through the eyes of our community. It’s easy to add your point of view — simply take a Snap and add it to Our Story! You might see it included in relevant Stories depending on what you’re Snapping.","We’re rolling out Stories in Search starting today in select cities and we hope you enjoy it as much as we do!","Love,","Team Snap"]},{"date":{"year":2017,"month":1,"day":10,"hour":9,"minute":50},"title":"International Growth","slug":"international-growth","content":["Today, the media reported that we selected London as our International HQ. That is not true. We have one HQ, in Venice, and many offices throughout the world.","We did, however, make a change to the way we operate our business in London. Going forward, we will bill our advertising revenue from the U.K. (and a few other countries) through a U.K. entity. This allows us to pay taxes in the U.K., which we believe is part of being a good local partner as we grow our business.","We want to pay taxes in the countries where we sell advertising, and this is an important step in building the infrastructure to achieve that goal. ","Team Snap"]},{"date":{"year":2016,"month":12,"day":13,"hour":6,"minute":0},"title":"Happy Holidays!","slug":"happy-holidays","content":["The holidays are a great time to hang out with friends and spend time with family – it’s always better together! We couldn’t think of a better time to announce Groups, a new way to communicate with up to 16 friends on Snapchat. ","Groups can be created while sending a Snap, or when you’re making a new Chat. When your friends are present in a Group Chat, we show their name at the bottom of the Chat. Simply tap their name to start a 1:1 Chat, and then easily return to the Group in one swipe! We call this Quick Chat, and it’s the fastest way to keep the conversation going with one friend without spamming the entire Group.","Chats sent to a Group are deleted by default after 24 hours. Snaps sent to a Group can be opened and replayed just once by each recipient. If a Snap isn't opened, it's deleted after 24 hours, just like Chats.","We’ve also introduced two new Creative Tools – Scissors and Paintbrush. Use Scissors to cut out part of a Snap on the Preview Screen to turn it into a sticker! The Paintbrush can be applied to Snaps in Memories, and turns a Snap into an artistic masterpiece! ","We’re so grateful for your support. Thank you for another terrific year – we love building products for all of you! Wishing you a wonderful 2017.","Merry Snapping,","Team Snap"]},{"date":{"year":2016,"month":10,"day":7,"hour":14,"minute":0},"title":"Story Playlist","slug":"story-playlist","content":["When we first built Auto Advance we wanted to make it easier to catch up with your friends by playing all of your Stories in recent updates back-to-back.","Unfortunately, this change made it impossible to individually choose which Story to watch. Sometimes we just want to see what our close friends or family are up to – not all of our friends – and Auto Advance prevented that.","Starting today for select Snapchatters in our Android community and rolling out soon across all Android and iOS, the Auto Advance feature will be removed to give you control of your Story viewing experience once again!","Simply tap on a Story to view it. We won’t automatically advance you to the next Story in recent updates.","We haven’t given up entirely on this idea of making it easier to catch up with friends – so we took what we learned from Auto Advance and built Story Playlist.","Story Playlist is an easy way to select the Stories you want to watch and seamlessly view them full screen in the order you selected them. ","Tap on the Story thumbnail to the left of your friend’s name to add their Story to your playlist. Hit the play button at the bottom of the screen to watch!","Happy Snapping!","Team Snapchat"]},{"date":{"year":2016,"month":9,"day":24,"hour":0,"minute":1},"title":"Introducing Spectacles!","slug":"introducing-spectacles","content":[{"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqkOFLBSJR8"},"We’ve been working for the past few years to develop a totally new type of camera. We call it Spectacles!","Imagine one of your favorite memories. What if you could go back and see that memory the way you experienced it? That’s why we built Spectacles.","Spectacles are sunglasses with an integrated video camera that makes it easy to create Memories.","We’ve created one of the smallest wireless video cameras in the world, capable of taking a day’s worth of Snaps on a single charge, and we integrated it seamlessly into a fun pair of sunglasses – available in 3 different colors!","Spectacles connect directly to Snapchat via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi and transfer your Memories directly into the app in our brand new circular video format.","Circular video plays full screen on any device, in any orientation, and captures the human perspective with a 115 degree field of view. We can’t wait for you to see it!","Spectacles will be available soon.","Happy Snapping!","Team Snap"]},{"date":{"year":2016,"month":9,"day":24,"hour":0,"minute":1},"title":"Snap Inc.","slug":"snap-inc","content":[{"url":"/images/news/snap-inc.png"},"Today we are changing the name of our company to Snap Inc.","It has been five years since Bobby and I started working on Picaboo, the little app that became Snapchat – and we’ve been so lucky to build an incredible team that has continued to expand upon Snapchat and create products like Stories, Memories, Lenses, and so much more!","When we were just getting started it made sense to name our company Snapchat Inc., because Snapchat was our only product! Now that we are developing other products, like Spectacles, we need a name that goes beyond just one product – but doesn’t lose the familiarity and fun of our team and brand.","We decided to drop the “chat” and go with Snap Inc!","Changing our name also has another benefit: when you search for our products it will be easier to find relevant product information rather than boring company information or financial analysis. You can search Snapchat or Spectacles for the fun stuff and leave Snap Inc. for the Wall Street crowd :)","We hope that this change will improve your experience with Snapchat and Spectacles, and create a structure that allows us to continue making great new products for you and your friends!","Evan"]},{"date":{"year":2016,"month":8,"day":2,"hour":9,"minute":1},"title":"Geostickers","slug":"geostickers","content":[{"url":"/images/news/geostickers.png","fullWidth":false},"Today we’re excited to introduce Geostickers! Geostickers are special stickers available in some of the biggest cities around the world — send them in Chat or stick them on Snaps!","Geostickers are available now in Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Washington DC, Honolulu, London, Sydney, São Paulo, Paris, and Riyadh. You’ll need to have your location services enabled to see them!","Happy Snapping!"]},{"date":{"year":2016,"month":7,"day":19,"hour":5,"minute":32},"title":"Bitmoji!","slug":"bitmoji","content":[{"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf5SGWriJy0"},{"url":"/images/news/bitmoji.jpg"}]},{"date":{"year":2016,"month":7,"day":6,"hour":8,"minute":58},"title":"Introducing Memories","slug":"introducing-memories","content":[{"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm1RfWn0tQ8"},"Memories is a new way to save Snaps and Stories on Snapchat. It’s a personal collection of your favorite moments that lives below the Camera screen. Just swipe up from the Camera to open Memories!","It’s super easy to find the Snap or Story you’re looking for in just a few seconds by typing keywords like “dog” or “Hawaii” — that way you can spend less time searching and more time enjoying your Memories.","You can use Memories to create new Stories from Snaps you’ve taken, or even combine different Stories into a longer narrative! It’s fun to celebrate an anniversary or birthday by finding a few old Snaps and stringing them together into a new Story :)","We’ve also created a new way to send Snaps from Memories to your friends, or even post them to your Story. If you post a Snap you took more than a day ago to your Story, it will appear with a frame around it so that everyone knows it’s from the past.","We realized that Snapchatters want to feel comfortable showing their Memories to friends while they’re hanging out together, so we made it easy to move Snaps and Stories to My Eyes Only — and avoid awkward moments when a friend stumbles upon a Snap meant just for you.","Memories is backed up by Snapchat. We won’t backup any photos or videos from your Camera Roll, unless you use one to make a new Story or add it to My Eyes Only. In that case, we’ll back up only the photo or video that you used.","We’ll be rolling out Memories selectively over the next month or so — it’s a big change for our service so we want to make sure everything is running smoothly! You’ll receive a Chat from Team Snapchat when Memories is ready for you to use.","Happy Snapping!"]},{"date":{"year":2016,"month":3,"day":29,"hour":8,"minute":59},"title":"Chat 2.0","slug":"chat-20","content":[{"url":"/images/news/chat-20.png","fullWidth":false},"When we first launched Chat, our goal was to emulate the best parts of face-to-face conversation. Chat 1.0 was all about the joys of being here — when most apps told you when your friend was typing, Chat let you know that your friend was listening. Two years later, we’ve learned a ton about how people talk, but our goal remains unchanged. We want Chat to be the best way to communicate — second only to hanging out face-to-face.","Today, we’re excited to introduce Chat 2.0. You can start by sending a few chats, and when your friend shows up, start talking or video chatting instantly with one tap. Your friend can simply listen if you want to sing them a song, or watch if you have a new puppy to show them. If they aren’t there, you can quickly send an audio note to say what you mean. And sometimes, a sticker says it best :)","What we love most about the new Chat is how easily you can transition between all these ways of communicating — just like you do in person. When that’s possible, you aren’t texting, calling, or video chatting… you’re just talking. We’ve been working on this redesign for a while — we can’t wait to hear what you think!","We’re also introducing Auto-Advance Stories, the fastest way to catch up with your friends. When you finish a Story, the next one begins automatically — simply swipe to skip ahead, or pull down to exit!","Lastly, we’re refreshing our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, making some things clearer, and building foundations for awesome new products to come. Check out our new Privacy Center for more on that!","Happy Snapping!","Team Snapchat"]},{"date":{"year":2016,"month":3,"day":3,"hour":16,"minute":2},"title":"Why We’re Standing with Apple","slug":"why-were-standing-with-apple","content":["Over 100 million people use Snapchat every day because they feel free to have fun and express themselves. We take the security and privacy of all that self expression seriously. That’s why we’ve filed a legal brief today supporting Apple in its dispute with the FBI.","At the heart of this dispute is a locked iPhone linked to Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the terrorists behind the San Bernardino terror attack. The FBI cannot unlock the iPhone without engineering assistance from Apple, so it got a court order telling Apple to write new iOS code to create a “backdoor” into the phone.","That means a single federal judge has conscripted Apple’s engineers into hacking its own software. Never before has the government asserted—let alone been granted—such a sweeping power to dictate how private companies must design (or dismantle) their own products.","But the concerns here go far beyond any one company’s freedom to engineer its products. The real danger with this ruling is the threat it poses to the security of your information and communications. Here at Snapchat, people trust us to send their content in a way that helps them feel free to be themselves. If a court were to suddenly demand that we re-engineer our products to preserve every Snap that’s ever sent, our service wouldn’t be the same. That’s why we’re standing with Apple.","We want to make very clear that we condemn the unspeakable evil committed in San Bernardino, and extend our bottomless sympathies to the victims and their families. Snapchat has zero regard for terrorists or any other criminals. And we prove it by cooperating with law enforcement when we get lawful requests for assistance. In the first six months of 2015 alone, we processed more than 750 subpoenas, court orders, search warrants, and other legal requests. You can find all the details in our transparency report.","But there’s a big difference between giving the government information we have and being forced to redesign our products to allow access that no one currently has. If one judge can force Apple to create a backdoor into its phone, another judge could make us breach our data protections too.","There’s something else that really bothers us about this ruling. The only basis the government could come up with for this expansive new power was a statute that was passed in 1789. That’s not a typo. A law written more than 220 years ago by the very first Congress—a body of legislators that could scarcely imagine phones, much less smart phones—is the one and only justification for the government’s bold bid to circumvent the democratic process.","There’s an important conversation that we as a nation need to have about how to balance the undeniably important interests in national security with the equally important interests in preserving the privacy and security of personal information. We welcome that conversation. But it’s one that should take place as these things usually do: through democratic exchanges before Congress. Allowing a single judge to impose radical new mandates on tech companies is not the right way to resolve these important debates.","It’s time for lawmakers, businesses, and consumers to have an honest conversation about whether the government should be able to tell businesses how they should design their products.","Evan Spiegel"]},{"date":{"year":2016,"month":2,"day":28,"hour":21,"minute":3},"title":"An Apology to Our Employees","slug":"an-apology-to-our-employees","content":["We’re a company that takes privacy and security seriously. So it’s with real remorse–and embarrassment–that one of our employees fell for a phishing scam and revealed some payroll information about our employees. The good news is that our servers were not breached, and our users’ data was totally unaffected by this. The bad news is that a number of our employees have now had their identity compromised. And for that, we’re just impossibly sorry.","Here’s what happened: Last Friday, Snapchat’s payroll department was targeted by an isolated email phishing scam in which a scammer impersonated our Chief Executive Officer and asked for employee payroll information. Unfortunately, the phishing email wasn’t recognized for what it was–a scam–and payroll information about some current and former employees was disclosed externally. To be perfectly clear though: None of our internal systems were breached, and no user information was accessed.","Needless to say, we responded swiftly and aggressively. Within four hours of this incident, we confirmed that the phishing attack was an isolated incident and reported it to the FBI. We began sorting through which employees–current and past–may have been affected. And we have since contacted the affected employees and have offered them two years of free identity-theft insurance and monitoring.","When something like this happens, all you can do is own up to your mistake, take care of the people affected, and learn from what went wrong. To make good on that last point, we will redouble our already rigorous training programs around privacy and security in the coming weeks. Our hope is that we never have to write a blog post like this again.","Team Snapchat"]},{"date":{"year":2016,"month":2,"day":22,"hour":8,"minute":59},"title":"On-Demand Geofilters","slug":"on-demand-geofilters","content":[{"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_ZjEeEez_0"},"Geofilters are one of our favorite parts of Snapchat. We’ve been blown away by the creativity of the Snapchat community, and we’ve loved watching the personality of each place emerge through your artwork. To date, almost half a million Community Geofilters have been submitted, and every day, Snaps overlaid with Geofilters are viewed hundreds of millions of times!","We initially designed Community Geofilters for public places — but we kept hearing from Snapchatters who wanted a Geofilter for their business or private event, so today we’re announcing something new:","On-Demand Geofilters let you create and publish a Geofilter for your party, wedding, business, or any other place or event. It’s a fun way to help your friends or customers decorate their Snaps, wherever they are!","How it works:",{"ul":["Design — Use your favorite image editor to create a filter. We’ve also provided some templates that are compatible with Photoshop and Illustrator to get you started :)","Map — Pick a geofence where your filter will appear, then choose the time and dates you want your Geofilter to be available.","Buy — Submit your Geofilter. Our team will quickly review it and, assuming all is well, get it up and running."]},"You can buy On-Demand Geofilters for an event or even an entire block — for an hour or up to thirty days! Pricing starts at $5, and depends on a few factors including, among others, the size of your geofence and the time period you’ve chosen. On-Demand Geofilters are available now in the US, UK, and Canada, with more locations coming soon!","Get started at https://www.snapchat.com/on-demand!","For more info and FAQs, please check out our Geofilters Support Center."]},{"date":{"year":2015,"month":11,"day":23,"hour":10,"minute":0},"title":"Story Explorer","slug":"story-explorer","content":[{"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is5MVYepFBE"},"Snapchat Stories celebrate the power of different perspectives. It’s a totally unique way to experience what’s happening all over the world through the eyes of our community.","Sometimes what’s happening goes beyond the Snaps we’ve curated into a Story. Today, we’re introducing Story Explorer.","Story Explorer relies on technology developed by our research team to provide more depth to every Snap in a Story. When you see a moment that inspires or excites you, simply swipe up to see more Snaps of that same moment - from every perspective.","It’s the first time you’ll be able to experience that incredible game-winning dunk from thousands of perspectives throughout the stadium - or feel like you’re right there on the scene when breaking news unfolds. ","Our community makes this possible by sharing Snaps in the moment and contributing so many diverse perspectives - a huge thank you to Snapchatters everywhere for making this dream a reality!","We’re launching Story Explorer on the New York and Los Angeles Live Stories today - with plans to roll out this technology across many more Stories very soon!","Happy Exploring!"]},{"date":{"year":2015,"month":11,"day":1,"hour":19,"minute":6},"title":"Protecting your Privacy","slug":"protecting-your-privacy","content":["There’s been some confusion about the updated Privacy Policy and Terms of Service we rolled out last week. We never want to create any misunderstanding over our commitment to protecting your privacy.","First off, we want to be crystal clear: The Snaps and Chats you send your friends remain as private today as they were before the update. Our Privacy Policy continues to say—as it did before—that those messages “are automatically deleted from our servers once we detect that they have been viewed or have expired.” Of course, a recipient can always screenshot or save your Snaps or Chats. But the important point is that Snapchat is not—and never has been—stockpiling your private Snaps or Chats. And because we continue to delete them from our servers as soon as they’re read, we could not—and do not—share them with advertisers or business partners.","It’s true that our Terms of Service grant us a broad license to use the content you create—a license that’s common to services like ours. We need that license when it comes to, for example, Snaps submitted to Live Stories, where we have to be able to show those Stories around the world—and even replay them or syndicate them (something we’ve said we could do in previous versions of our Terms and Privacy Policy). But we tried to be clear that the Privacy Policy and your own privacy settings within the app could restrict the scope of that license so that your personal communications continue to remain truly personal.","You may wonder why we revised the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. Here are a few of the key reasons:",{"ul":["The main thing we did was to rewrite the Terms and Privacy Policy so that they’d read the way people actually talk. We always try to be upfront and clear with our community.","We added language to the Terms of Service regarding in-app purchases. We needed to do that now that we’re selling Replays—and have some other cool products and services we’re looking forward to bringing to you soon.","To make it a little easier for friends to find you on Snapchat, we’ve clarified what info—like your name—will be visible to other Snapchatters and how you can modify that info."]},"Both the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy are important documents, so we encourage all Snapchatters to read them. For more info, please check out Snapchat Support, including articles like When are Snaps and Chats deleted? and our Community Guidelines."]},{"date":{"year":2015,"month":9,"day":15,"hour":8,"minute":59},"title":"A Whole New Way to See Yourself(ie)","slug":"a-whole-new-way-to-see-yourselfie","content":["We’re thrilled to announce a whole new way to express yourself on Snapchat. When you’re using the camera to take a selfie, just press and hold on your face to activate Lenses. You can play with Lenses before taking a Snap — just select one from the row at the bottom and follow the on-screen instructions!","We introduced Replay in Additional Services almost two years ago, and we’ve used it to relive those amazing moments (or the ones we weren’t paying attention to…) just one more time before they disappear. We’ve provided one Replay per Snapchatter per day, sometimes frustrating the millions of Snapchatters who receive many daily Snaps deserving of a Replay. But then we realized — a Replay is like a compliment! So why stop at just one?","Today, U.S. Snapchatters can purchase extra Replays, starting at 3 for $0.99. You can use a Replay on any Snap you receive, but you can only Replay any Snap once. They’re a little pricey — but time is money! ;)","You’ll also find some fun surprises in this update, including Trophies (tucked above the camera).","Happy Snapping!","Team Snapchat"]},{"date":{"year":2015,"month":7,"day":1,"hour":8,"minute":59},"title":"Tap to View","slug":"tap-to-view","content":["Today marks a pretty big change for Snapchat — you no longer have to press and hold the screen to view a Snap or Story — instead, simply Tap to View! This means no more tired thumbs while watching a several-hundred-second Story… and a little getting used to for anyone who has been Snapchatting for a while. We think you’re going to love it!","There are also some new ways to make friends — including Add Nearby. It’s a quick way to add a group of friends when you’re all hanging out together. If everyone opens Add Nearby, a list of your friends will appear on the screen. Just tap to add.","Snapcodes also got a serious upgrade :) You can add a selfie to the center of your Snapcode, so that it’s easier for friends to recognize you when you add them on Snapchat. If you see a Snapcode in another app, just take a screenshot. You can add screenshotted Snapcodes through Add Friends.","Last but not least, we recently rolled out two-factor authentication to improve Snapchat security. Once you enable it, bad guys will have a much harder time if they try to hack into your account.","Happy Snapping!","Team Snapchat"]},{"date":{"year":2015,"month":5,"day":4,"hour":9,"minute":57},"title":"Snapcodes","slug":"snapcodes","content":["We introduced Snapcodes in early January as an easy way to add friends on Snapchat. Simply point your Snapchat camera at a Snapcode and tap your screen to add!","The response has been incredible. Snapchatters scan millions of Snapcodes each week!","Today, we are making it easier to share and personalize your unique Snapcode by offering downloadable vector files and branding guidelines on our website.","Happy Snapcoding!"]},{"date":{"year":2015,"month":4,"day":2,"hour":10,"minute":34},"title":"Our Transparency Report","slug":"our-transparency-report","content":["We’re excited to announce our first transparency report, a comprehensive look into the data requests we receive from governments around the world. In this report we detail the number and types of requests each government is making of us.","While the vast majority of Snapchatters use Snapchat for fun, it’s important that law enforcement is able to investigate illegal activity. We want to be clear that we comply with valid legal requests.","Privacy and security are core values here at Snapchat and we strongly oppose any initiative that would deliberately weaken the security of our systems. We’re committed to keeping your data secure and we will update this report bi-annually.","Team Snapchat"]},{"date":{"year":2015,"month":1,"day":27,"hour":7,"minute":29},"title":"Introducing Discover","slug":"introducing-discover","content":[{"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbOMqA2AOIk"},"Snapchat has always celebrated the way that you and your friends see the world. It’s fun to experience different perspectives through Snaps, Stories and Our Story. ","Today we’re introducing Discover.","Snapchat Discover is a new way to explore Stories from different editorial teams. It’s the result of collaboration with world-class leaders in media to build a storytelling format that puts the narrative first. This is not social media.","Social media companies tell us what to read based on what’s most recent or most popular. We see it differently. We count on editors and artists, not clicks and shares, to determine what’s important.","Discover is different because it has been built for creatives. All too often, artists are forced to accommodate new technologies in order to distribute their work. This time we built the technology to serve the art: each edition includes full screen photos and videos, awesome long form layouts, and gorgeous advertising.","Discover is new, but familiar. That’s because Stories are at the core - there’s a beginning, middle, and end so that editors can put everything in order. Every edition is refreshed after 24 hours - because what’s news today is history tomorrow.","Discover is fun and easy to use. Tap to open an edition, swipe left to browse Snaps, or swipe up on a Snap for more. Each channel brings you something unique – a wonderful daily surprise!","Happy Discovering!","Love,","Team Snapchat"]},{"date":{"year":2015,"month":1,"day":27,"hour":7,"minute":29},"title":"Using Discover","slug":"using-discover","content":[{"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guGvV8LCx7o"}]},{"date":{"year":2014,"month":12,"day":2,"hour":5,"minute":24},"title":"Community Geofilters","slug":"community-geofilters","content":["Our team has had a ton of fun drawing Geofilters and using them to decorate some of our favorite places around the world. From coffee shops in Venice to coastal towns in Oslo, we hope you’ve enjoyed discovering each little piece of art! Recently, we’ve had more and more Snapchatters ask us to help them create their own Geofilters - for marriage proposals, favorite cities, and even birthday parties!","Today we’re thrilled to announce our Community Geofilter website. Now it’s easy to draw a little piece of art and put it somewhere meaningful to you and your friends. We can’t wait to decorate the world with our Community Geofilters - just in time for the holidays!","Love,","Team Snapchat"]},{"date":{"year":2014,"month":11,"day":17,"hour":12,"minute":24},"title":"Introducing Snapcash","slug":"introducing-snapcash","content":[{"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBwjxBmMszQ"},"Today is a big day for us - we are launching our first product created in partnership with another company. We’re huge fans of the folks at Square and have been big admirers of Square Cash since it launched – just type a dollar amount into the subject line of an email and send cash to friends. Genius!","We loved it so much that we wanted to create something with them that felt Snapchat-y. So we built a Snapcash prototype and shared it with the team at Square. Luckily for us, they were just as excited as we were and wanted to build it together.","The product you’re seeing today is fast, fun, and incredibly simple. After you enter your debit card, it’s securely stored by Square, who will swiftly process your payment and send cash directly to your friend’s bank account. Just swipe into chat, type the dollar sign, an amount (e.g. $11.25), and hit the green button.","We set out to make payments faster and more fun, but we also know that security is essential when you’re dealing with money. Square has a ton of experience in this area and our teams have been hard at work to make Snapcash a great experience for everyone. For now, Snapcash is available to Snapchatters in the United States who have a debit card and are 18 or older.","We hope you enjoy Snapcash as much as we do.","Happy Snapcash-ing!"]},{"date":{"year":2014,"month":11,"day":17,"hour":12,"minute":23},"title":"Refreshing our Privacy Policy","slug":"refreshing-our-privacy-policy","content":["As part of our Snapcash launch today, we’ve refreshed and strengthened our privacy policy. We’re committed to letting you know how we’ll collect, use and share your information when you use our services. When you open the latest release of Snapchat, you’ll see a link to the new policy (along with our updated Terms of Use). In addition to the changes we’ve made for Snapcash, we have improved the policy in other ways. As always, we encourage you to read the privacy policy. When you do, you’ll notice that we’ve ditched the legalese and tailored our policy to make it simple, straightforward, and easy to read - the way it should be."]},{"date":{"year":2014,"month":11,"day":11,"hour":18,"minute":14},"title":"Update on Third-Party Apps","slug":"update-on-third-party-apps","content":["We last wrote about third-party applications a few weeks ago when a third-party app that offered to save Snaps was compromised. At that time, we promised that we would continue to improve the security and reliability of our service and today we’re announcing a change in the way we treat third-party applications.","We’ve enjoyed some of the ways that developers have tried to make Snapchat better. Unfortunately, some developers build services that trick Snapchatters and compromise their accounts.","We want to prevent that from happening in our community. Starting today, we will notify Snapchatters when we have detected that they may be using third-party apps and we’ll ask those Snapchatters to change their password and stop using unauthorized apps.","Most of you will see no difference in your Snapchat experience today. We’ve got some incredible new stuff on the way.","Happy Snapping!"]},{"date":{"year":2014,"month":10,"day":17,"hour":11,"minute":43},"title":"Advertising on Snapchat","slug":"advertising-on-snapchat","content":["This weekend we’re placing an advertisement in “Recent Updates” for Snapchatters in the United States. It’s the first time we’ve done anything like this because it’s the first time we’ve been paid to put content in that space. It’s going to feel a little weird at first, but we’re taking the plunge.","The best advertisements tell you more about stuff that actually interests you. Some companies spend a lot of time and collect a lot of data about you to figure that out. The product we’re releasing today is a lot simpler. An advertisement will appear in your Recent Updates from time to time, and you can choose if you want to watch it. No biggie. It goes away after you view it or within 24 hours, just like Stories.","We won’t put advertisements in your personal communication – things like Snaps or Chats. That would be totally rude. We want to see if we can deliver an experience that’s fun and informative, the way ads used to be, before they got creepy and targeted. It’s nice when all of the brilliant creative minds out there get our attention with terrific content.","Understandably, a lot of folks want to know why we’re introducing advertisements to our service. The answer is probably unsurprising – we need to make money. Advertising allows us to support our service while delivering neat content to Snapchatters. We promise that we’ll use the money we make to continue to surprise the Snapchat community with more terrific products – that’s what we love to do!"]},{"date":{"year":2014,"month":10,"day":17,"hour":11,"minute":11},"title":"Our Campus Story","slug":"our-campus-story","content":["We’re always a little nervous when we launch new products – yesterday was no exception when we launched Our Campus Story – but the Snapchat community totally blew us away! It has been so exciting to see the response at Penn State, UCLA, USC, and UT.","Our Campus Story was the natural evolution of the Our Story product that we launched at EDC this year. Our team heard tons of requests for Our Story at college campuses – so we just had to make it happen.","Some folks have been wondering how to access Our Campus Story. You’ll have to turn on location services so that Snapchat can determine your eligibility. For now, only Snapchatters whose phones indicate they’re in and around campus will be able to post to and view their Campus Story. Keep in mind that the accuracy of any device’s location information can be affected by operating systems and other apps. ","We can’t wait to roll out Our Campus Story to more schools across the world! Tweet @Snapchat or send us a note if you’d like to see your campus on Snapchat!"]},{"date":{"year":2014,"month":10,"day":14,"hour":8,"minute":23},"title":"Third-Party Applications and the Snapchat API","slug":"third-party-applications-and-the-snapchat-api","content":["Over the past few days we’ve fielded a number of questions about our API and third-party applications after a website that offered to save Snaps indicated that their database had been breached. We are grateful that the service provider acknowledged that Snapchat was never compromised, but we wanted to use this as an opportunity to reiterate the unfortunate threats these third-party applications can pose to our community. ","A third-party application is any application that accesses the Snapchat API, but hasn’t been built and maintained by our company. Given the popularity of Snapchat and the size of our community, it’s no surprise that a cottage industry of app-makers has popped up to provide additional services to Snapchatters. Unfortunately, these applications often ask for Snapchat login credentials and use them to send or receive snaps and access account information.","When you give your login credentials to a third-party application, you’re allowing a developer, and possibly a criminal, to access your account information and send information on your behalf.","It takes time and a lot of resources to build an open and trustworthy third-party application ecosystem. That’s why we haven’t provided a public API to developers and why we prohibit access to the private API we use to provide our service. Don’t get us wrong - we’re excited by the interest in developing for the Snapchat platform - but we’re going to take our time to get it right. Until then, that means any application that isn’t ours but claims to offer Snapchat services violates our Terms of Use and can’t be trusted.","Snapchat has always been a fun place to share Snaps with friends. The best way to keep our community safe is a combination of security countermeasures and common sense. We’ll continue to do our part by improving Snapchat's security and calling on Apple and Google to take down third-party applications that access our API. You can help us out by avoiding the use of third-party applications.","Team Snapchat"]},{"date":{"year":2014,"month":8,"day":29,"hour":11,"minute":45},"title":"It’s Live!","slug":"its-live","content":["Today we’re expanding our favorite new product - Our Story - to cover more live events! When we launched Our Story at Electric Daisy Carnival we had our fingers crossed - we hoped the Snapchat community would contribute their unique point of view.","We were absolutely blown away when Snapchatters contributed over 350 hours of Snaps to Our Story during EDC, Rio, Outside Lands, and Lollapalooza. It was so much fun experiencing our favorite events with all of you!","You’ll notice today that there’s a new “Live” section beneath your Recent Updates. That’s where you’ll be able to experience Stories contributed by the Snapchat community at all sorts of events. It’s a great way to check out what’s happening around the world.","We’re so grateful for your awesome (and hilarious!) contributions to Our Story. The world has never experienced this before - it’s truly a product of the Snapchat community."]},{"date":{"year":2014,"month":7,"day":15,"hour":6,"minute":47},"title":"Introducing Geofilters","slug":"introducing-geofilters","content":[{"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJx6R5zbIfk"},"We’ve had a lot of fun drawing up new filters for special locations in Los Angeles and New York. Swipe right on the preview screen to check them out – they’ll change depending on which neighborhoods you’re in! Although you’ll need to enable location services for this feature, we don’t store your location."]},{"date":{"year":2014,"month":6,"day":17,"hour":8,"minute":45},"title":"Introducing Our Story","slug":"introducing-our-story","content":[{"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZeDPfHiBC8"},"Snapchat has always been about sharing your point of view. That’s why our application opens straight into the camera. It’s the fastest way to share little moments with our friends – to let them know where we are or how we feel right now.","When we introduced My Story we never could have imagined how powerful it would be to string those moments together into a narrative. We love watching the day unfold with our friends.","But My Story has always represented a singular, personal experience. We wanted to build something that offered a community perspective – lots of different points of view. After all, our friends often see the same things in totally different ways.","We built Our Story so that Snapchatters who are at the same event location can contribute Snaps to the same Story. If you can’t make it to an event, watching Our Story makes you feel like you’re right there! It’s really easy to use.","We’re making Our Story available for the first time at Electric Daisy Carnival this weekend (and we’re providing free WiFi for Snapchat and Insomniac!).","If you’re at Electric Daisy Carnival, simply add a Snap to “Our EDC Story” that appears in your “Send to…” page. You’ll need to turn on location services to let Snapchat know that you’re actually at the event. We don’t store your location.","If you can’t make it to Electric Daisy Carnival, add EDCLive on Snapchat to check out the event – live – through a series of Snaps! If Our Story gets too long or we see any Snaps that look illegal, we’ll curate EDCLive to provide the best possible experience.","Our Story is already part of the application you have on your phone – there’s no need to update. Happy Snapping!"]},{"date":{"year":2014,"month":6,"day":12,"hour":8,"minute":53},"title":"Our Agreement with the Maryland Attorney General","slug":"our-agreement-with-the-maryland-attorney-general","content":["Today we entered into an agreement with the Office of the Attorney General of Maryland that—like our recent agreement with the Federal Trade Commission—strengthens Snapchat’s already strong commitment to our users’ privacy. Both agreements have much in common. Each resolved investigations that largely turned on how well users understood that recipients of their Snaps could save those Snaps. And each agreement concluded with Snapchat admitting no violation of any federal, state, or local law.","But there is something else that both agreements have in common: They never allege, find, or suggest that Snapchat itself retains our users’ Snaps. That’s important. From day one, we have promised our users that we delete their Snaps from our servers once they’ve been viewed by all recipients. That’s a promise we’ve always honored, and it’s one that neither the FTC nor the Maryland AG has ever questioned.","Instead, both agencies thought our users might not have fully appreciated the extent to which their Snaps could be saved by recipients, whether by taking a screenshot or using some other mechanism. Whatever the merit of that concern, it’s one that is old news by now. As we explained when we entered into our agreement, we long since revised our privacy policy and other public statements to make perfectly clear that—while Snapchat deletes all viewed Snaps from its servers—recipients can always save them.","Our agreement also addresses the Maryland AG’s concern that users under 13 not get to use the app. Notably, the Maryland AG recognizes in this agreement that Snapchat’s terms of service have always provided that the app “is intended for use by people who are 13 years of age or older.” And Snapchat has instituted a number of controls to ensure that that limit is respected. Today’s agreement simply formalizes those controls.","As we said when we announced our agreement with the FTC, Snapchat is—and always has been—devoted to promoting user privacy and giving Snapchatters control over how and with whom they communicate."]},{"date":{"year":2014,"month":5,"day":8,"hour":10,"minute":2},"title":"Our Agreement with the FTC","slug":"our-agreement-with-the-ftc","content":["When we started building Snapchat, we were focused on developing a unique, fast, and fun way to communicate with photos. We learned a lot during those early days. One of the ways we learned was by making mistakes, acknowledging them, and fixing them.","While we were focused on building, some things didn’t get the attention they could have. One of those was being more precise with how we communicated with the Snapchat community. This morning we entered into a consent decree with the FTC that addresses concerns raised by the commission. Even before today’s consent decree was announced, we had resolved most of those concerns over the past year by improving the wording of our privacy policy, app description, and in-app just-in-time notifications. And we continue to invest heavily in security and countermeasures to prevent abuse.","We are devoted to promoting user privacy and giving Snapchatters control over how and with whom they communicate. That’s something we’ve always taken seriously, and always will."]},{"date":{"year":2014,"month":5,"day":8,"hour":9,"minute":2},"title":"Introducing Chat","slug":"introducing-chat","content":[{"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvhiRIT5DvU"}]},{"date":{"year":2014,"month":5,"day":1,"hour":1,"minute":54},"title":"Putting the Chat into Snapchat","slug":"putting-the-chat-into-snapchat","content":[{"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9h30NcVy4E"},"Building Snapchat has taught us a lot about what makes conversation special. When we first started working on an application for sharing disappearing pictures, we had no idea how much we would learn. Our classmates were quick to point out that you could always take a screenshot. That led us to the notion of deletion by default – you keep what you want, and we’ll get rid of everything else!","We also learned that conversation feels better when it’s visual. So we decided to make sure that every time you launch Snapchat we take you straight to the camera. It’s the fastest way to capture and share a moment on your smartphone.","With our last product update, we honored the true nature of storytelling – every Story has a chronological order – a beginning, middle, and end. We built Stories to help Snapchatters create narratives and share them with all of their friends in just one tap.","But until today, we felt that Snapchat was missing an important part of conversation: presence. There’s nothing like knowing you have the full attention of your friend while you’re chatting.","We could not be more thrilled to announce Chat.","Swipe right on a friend’s name in your Snapchat inbox to start chatting. When you leave the chat screen, messages viewed by both you and your friend will be cleared – but either of you can always tap or screenshot to save anything you’d like to keep (addresses, to-do lists, etc.)!","We let you know when a friend is Here in your Chat so that you can give each other your full attention. And if you’re both Here, simply press and hold to share live video – and Chat face-to-face!","Happy Snapping!","Love,
Team Snapchat"]},{"date":{"year":2014,"month":4,"day":13,"hour":17,"minute":14},"title":"2014 LA Hacks Keynote","slug":"2014-la-hacks-keynote","content":["The following keynote was delivered by Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snapchat, during LA Hacks at Pauley Pavilion on April 11, 2014.","I am very grateful for your time and attention this evening. It is absolutely incredible to see so many young people gathered here together to build things. I really appreciate you including me.","People frequently ask me about the keys to success and I’ve always been a bit curious myself.","But it wasn’t until recently that I found the answer. I was fortunate enough to have my palm read by a wise old man in a Hong Kong temple. In addition to learning that I will be married and have a son before I am 30 - he also gave me the three keys to success.","They are as follows:","1. Hard Work","2. Ability","3. Human Relationships","Given that you are all here together at ten pm on a Friday night with the intention to work together for the next 36 hours - I don’t feel the need to elaborate on hard work or ability. You clearly have those in spades.","So what I am going to focus on here tonight are human relationships, not the kind that are developed by exchanging business cards or adding each other on LinkedIn, but the kind that are formed over time, through deep, passionate, and spirited conversation.","I thought I’d share something that we do at Snapchat that I learned at my high school, Crossroads, which they in turn borrowed from The Ojai Foundation - the practice of council. It may sound hokey to some of you, but it is really important to us. It means that once a week, for about an hour, groups of 10 or so team members get together and talk about how they feel. And just like there are three keys for success, there are three rules for council. The first is to always speak from the heart, the second is an obligation to listen, and the third is that everything that happens in council stays in council. We’ve found that this particular combination is incredibly useful for learning not only how to express what we feel, but for understanding and appreciating the feelings of others.","A friend told me that you know you love someone when they’re the person you want to share your stories with and I’d add that they’re likely the person you most want to listen to.","So without discounting the importance of speaking from the heart or listening thoughtfully, I want to talk about the notion that what happens in council stays in council. Ensuring that the feelings expressed during council aren’t shared publicly creates a space for us to make ourselves vulnerable. It allows us to share our deepest, most unique thoughts - thoughts and feelings that might be easily misunderstood in a different context. Put more simply: we respect the privacy of council.","Unfortunately, privacy is too often articulated as secrecy, when, as Nissenbaum points out, privacy is actually focused on an understanding of context. Not what is said – but where it is said and to whom. Privacy allows us to enjoy and learn from the intimacy that is created when we share different things with different people in different contexts.","Kundera writes, “in private we bad-mouth our friends and use coarse language; that we act different in private than in public is everyone’s most conspicuous experience, it is the very ground of the life of the individual; curiously, this obvious fact remains unconscious, unacknowledged, forever obscured by lyrical dreams of the transparent glass house, it is rarely understood to be the value one must defend above all others.”","In America, before the Internet, the division between our public and private lives was usually tied to our physical location – our work and our home. The context in which we were communicating with our friends and family was clear. At work, we were professionals, and at home we were husbands, wives, sons or daughters.","There are few better at understanding the difference between public and private expression than celebrities, whose public personalities can generate significant interest in their private lives. When ones privacy is threatened, when the context in which one shares is collapsed, public and private become clearly distinct.","While walking through an airport recently, I was struck by a Newsweek Special Issue that promised to reveal Marilyn Monroe’s “Lost Scrapbook.” Indeed, a journalist had found a scrapbook that she had created for a photographer and friend.","The journalist writes about the scrapbook, “It’s Marilyn being natural, having messy hair and not worrying about what somebody might think of her or how they might look at her. She’s not looking at the composition of the pictures. She’s looking at what she’s doing in the pictures. She likes having fun.”","The pages are colorful, with Marilyn’s thoughts and feelings scrawled beside the imagery. Next to one photo of herself in a bathrobe surrounded by production gear, she writes, “a girl has no privacy when she works.” Marilyn felt that her scrapbook was a private place to share with her photographer friend. It wasn’t part of her public persona.","The Internet encourages us to create scrapbooks of our feelings that are shared, potentially without context, for the enjoyment of our friends, or our “audience.” Our feelings become expressed as information – they are used to categorize and profile our existence. ","On the Internet, we organize information by its popularity in an attempt to determine its validity. If a website has been referenced by many other websites, then it is generally determined to be more valuable or accurate. Feelings expressed on social media are quantified, validated, and distributed in a similar fashion. Popular expression becomes the most valuable expression.","Social media businesses represent an aggressive expansion of capitalism into our personal relationships. We are asked to perform for our friends, to create things they like, to work on a “personal brand” - and brands teach us that authenticity is the result of consistency. We must honor our “true self” and represent the same self to all of our friends or risk being discredited.","But humanity cannot be true or false. We are full of contradictions and we change. That is the joy of human life. We are not brands; it is simply not in our nature.","Technology has perpetuated the myth of the transparent glass house and created a culture that values popular opinion over critical thought. We have allowed ourselves to believe that more information equals more knowledge. And increasingly, we live in a time when, as Rosen describes, “intimate personal information originally disclosed to our friends and colleagues may be exposed to—and misinterpreted by—a less understanding audience.”","Every time we express ourselves, we do so with the understanding that things we say might become permanently and publicly known. We are encouraged to express ourselves in ways that are accepted by the largest possible audience. We lose our individuality in favor of popular acceptance.","My concern is that we have developed a generation of people who believe that successful leaders are those with followers. I believe that the best leaders are those that stand for something, who have a point of view. And that point of view must be developed, not alone, but in private, or risk becoming normalized in search of popular support.","For encouragement, I’ve often relied on these words spoken by Roosevelt at the Sorbonne, who declares, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”","We have built a society where all too frequently the men the in the arena are fighting not for their lives, not for their family, nor for their point of view – but for the spectators and for the applause. And we, the spectators, sitting in the arena, happily entertained, drunk and well fed – we are full – but are we happy?","Kundera writes that “when it becomes the custom and the rule to divulge another person’s private life, we are entering a time when the highest stake is the survival or the disappearance of the individual.” ","I believe that time is now.","I will leave you with words from the final paragraph of a speech that was to be delivered by President Kennedy, on the day he was assassinated. On that day, Kennedy would have spoken during a time of war. Tonight, I ask you to listen as we face the battle to prevent the destruction of the individual.","“We, in this country, in this generation, are — by destiny rather than by choice — the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of “peace on earth, good will toward men.” That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago: “except the Lord keep the city, the watchmen waketh but in vain.”","We are all here to erase the stigma that says hacking has to do primarily with exposing things that others do not wish to have exposed. I challenge all of you to create a space this weekend, during this very important time, which honors and respects the thoughts, feelings and dreams of others. We have come here to find comfort and joy in sharing and creating – we must build thoughtfully for our future generations that they may discover the joys of human relationship and individual expression, as protected by privacy."]},{"date":{"year":2014,"month":2,"day":11,"hour":17,"minute":42},"title":"Introducing Team Snapchat","slug":"introducing-team-snapchat","content":[{"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeQ0alGlsPg"}]},{"date":{"year":2014,"month":1,"day":27,"hour":11,"minute":13},"title":"2014 AXS Partner Summit Keynote","slug":"2014-axs-partner-summit-keynote","content":["The following keynote was delivered by Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snapchat, at the AXS Partner Summit on January 25, 2014.","I was asked to speak here today on a topic I’m sure you’re all familiar with: sexting in the post-PC era.","[Just Kidding]","I’ve always thought it was a bit odd that this period in our history has been called the “post-personal computer” era – when really it should be called the “more-personal computer” era.","I read a great story yesterday about a man named Mister Macintosh. He was a man designed by Steve Jobs to live inside the Macintosh computer when it launched, 30 years ago from yesterday. He would appear every so often, hidden behind a pull-down menu or popping out from behind an icon – just quickly and infrequently enough that you almost thought he wasn’t real.","Until yesterday, I hadn’t realized that Steve’s idea of tying a man to a computer had happened so early in his career. But, at the time, the Macintosh was forced to ship without Mister Macintosh because the engineers were constrained to only 128 kilobytes of memory. It wasn’t until much later in Steve’s career that he would truly tie man to machine – the launch of the iPhone on June 29, 2007.","In the past, technical constraints meant that computers were typically found in physical locations: the car, the home, the school. The iPhone tied a computer uniquely to a phone number – to YOU.","Not all that long ago, communication was location-dependent. We were either in the same room together, in which case we could talk face-to-face, or we were across the world from each other, in which case I could call your office or send a letter to your home. It is only very recently that we have begun to tie phone numbers to individual identities for the purpose of computation and communication.","I say all this to establish that smartphones are simply the culmination of Steve’s journey to identify man with machine – and bring about the age of the More-Personal Computer.","There are three characteristics of the More-Personal Computer that are particularly relevant to our work at Snapchat:","1) Internet Everywhere","2) Fast + Easy Media Creation","3) Ephemerality","When we first started working on Snapchat in 2011, it was just a toy. In many ways it still is – but to quote Eames, “Toys are not really as innocent as they look. Toys and games are preludes to serious ideas.”","The reason to use a toy doesn’t have to be explained – it’s just fun. But using a toy is a terrific opportunity to learn.","And boy, have we been learning.","Internet Everywhere means that our old conception of the world separated into an online and an offline space is no longer relevant. Traditional social media required that we live experiences in the offline world, record those experiences, and then post them online to recreate the experience and talk about it. For example, I go on vacation, take a bunch of pictures, come back home, pick the good ones, post them online, and talk about them with my friends.","This traditional social media view of identity is actually quite radical: you are the sum of your published experience. Otherwise known as: pics or it didn’t happen.","Or in the case of Instagram: beautiful pics or it didn’t happen AND you’re not cool.","This notion of a profile made a lot of sense in the binary experience of online and offline. It was designed to recreate who I am online so that people could interact with me even if I wasn’t logged on at that particular moment.","Snapchat relies on Internet Everywhere to provide a totally different experience. Snapchat says that we are not the sum of everything we have said or done or experienced or published – we are the result. We are who we are today, right now.","We no longer have to capture the “real world” and recreate it online – we simply live and communicate at the same time.","Communication relies on the creation of media and is constrained by the speed at which that media is created and shared. It takes time to package your emotions, feelings and thoughts into media content like speech, writing, or photography.","Indeed, humans have always used media to understand themselves and share with others. I’ll spare you the Gaelic with this translation of Robert Burns, “Oh would some power the gift give us, to see ourselves as others see us.”","When I heard that quote, I couldn’t help but think of self-portraits. Or for us Millennials: the selfie! Self-portraits help us understand the way that others see us – they represent how we feel, where we are, and what we’re doing. They are arguably the most popular form of self-expression.","In the past, lifelike self-portraits took weeks and millions of brush strokes to complete. In the world of Fast + Easy Media Creation, the selfie is immediate. It represents who we are and how we feel – right now.","And until now, the photographic process was far too slow for conversation. But with Fast + Easy Media Creation we are able to communicate through photos, not just communicate around them like we did on social media. When we start communicating through media we light up. It’s fun.","The selfie makes sense as the fundamental unit of communication on Snapchat because it marks the transition between digital media as self-expression and digital media as communication.","And this brings us to the importance of ephemerality at the core of conversation.","Snapchat discards content to focus on the feeling that content brings to you, not the way that content looks. This is a conservative idea, the natural response to radical transparency that restores integrity and context to conversation.","Snapchat sets expectations around conversation that mirror the expectations we have when we’re talking in-person.","That’s what Snapchat is all about. Talking through content not around it. With friends, not strangers. Identity tied to now, today. Room for growth, emotional risk, expression, mistakes, room for YOU.","The Era of More Personal Computing has provided the technical infrastructure for more personal communication. We feel so fortunate to be a part of this incredible transformation.","Snapchat is a product built from the heart – that is the reason why we are in Los Angeles. I often talk with people about the conflicts between technology companies and content companies – I’ve found that one of the biggest issues is that frequently technology companies view movies, music, and television as INFORMATION. Directors, producers, musicians, and actors view them as feelings, as expression. Not to be searched, sorted, and viewed – but EXPERIENCED.","Snapchat focuses on the experience of conversation – not the transfer of information. We’re thrilled to be a part of this community.","Thank you for inviting me today and thank you for being a part of our journey. Our team looks forward to getting to know all of you."]},{"date":{"year":2014,"month":1,"day":13,"hour":9,"minute":10},"title":"Snap Spam Update","slug":"snap-spam-update","content":["We’ve heard some complaints over the weekend about an increase in Snap Spam on our service. We want to apologize for any unwanted Snaps and let you know our team is working on resolving the issue. As far as we know, this is unrelated to the Find Friends issue we experienced over the holidays. ","While we expect to minimize spam, it is the consequence of a quickly growing service. To help prevent spam from entering your feed, you can adjust your settings to determine who can send you Snaps. We recommend “Only My Friends” :)","We appreciate your patience and we’ll keep you posted.","Love,","Team Snapchat"]},{"date":{"year":2014,"month":1,"day":9,"hour":6,"minute":52},"title":"Find Friends Improvements","slug":"find-friends-improvements","content":["This morning we released a Snapchat update for Android and iOS that improves Find Friends functionality and allows Snapchatters to opt-out of linking their phone number with their username. This option is available in Settings > Mobile #.","This update also requires new Snapchatters to verify their phone number before using the Find Friends service.","Our team continues to make improvements to the Snapchat service to prevent future attempts to abuse our API. We are sorry for any problems this issue may have caused you and we really appreciate your patience and support. ","Love,","Team Snapchat"]},{"date":{"year":2014,"month":1,"day":7,"hour":8,"minute":41},"title":"The Frame Makes the Photograph","slug":"the-frame-makes-the-photograph","content":["A common thing we hear about social media today is that near-constant picture taking means not ‘living in the moment’. We should put the phone down and just experience life rather than worry ourselves with its documentation. This sentiment wrongly assumes that documentation and experience are essentially at odds, a conceptual remnant of how we used to think of photography, as an art object, as content, rather than what it is often today, less an object and more a sharing of experience. But not all social media are built the same, and I think we can use a distinction in social platforms: those that are based in social media versus those that are more fundamentally about communication.","Researcher Sherry Turkle discusses this in a recent New York Times op-ed, describing how very-famous comedian Aziz Ansari greets his fans on the street. They want a photo with him, some documentary proof, but he instead offers conversation about his work, leaving many fans unsatisfied. Turkle extrapolates this encounter as representative of how social media works in general, which, I think, is a significant misunderstanding of, and disconnection from, how people use social services today. Meeting a famous person is that special moment you may want proof of; conversation might be nice, but with a celebrity it will be a one-sided affair, they will likely not remember you or keep the conversation going at a later date. To compare everyday sociality online as akin to meeting a celebrity, as Turkle does, is inaccurate. Sure, meeting Ansari might be a situation where some desire a document more than conversation, but everyday digitally-mediated social interaction is often less about the media object but rather centered in a back-and-forth reciprocal dialogue, something different social services can encourage or preclude, depending how they’re designed.","The way to understand photography as it happens on social platforms is not to compare it to traditional photography, which is about creating an art object, but instead as a communicating of experience itself. It’s less making media and more sharing eyes; your view, your experience in the now. The atomizing of the ephemeral flow of lived reality into transmittable objects is the ends of the traditional photograph, but merely the means of the social snap. As photos have become almost comically easy to make, their existence alone as objects isn’t special or interesting, rather, they exist more fluidly as communication; a visual discourse more linguistic than formally artistic. As such, social photography should be understood not as a remove from the moment or conversation but a deeply social immersion.","Turkle centers her analysis on selfies—those photos you take of yourself—arguing that we are trading the experience of the moment for its documentation. But when viewing selfies as not an abundance of self-portrait photographs but rather a sharing of experience, a communication of this is who I am, I was here, I was feeling like this, the commonality of selfies isn’t surprising or anti-social at all. Selfies, largely, are not recording the exceptionally rare events with famous people but exactly the opposite, the everyday moments that weave the fabric of life in all of its variety. An immaculately framed and perfectly lit photo of the beach makes for a good art object can be a pretty boring speech act given how that same shot multiplies in social feeds looking kind of the same. Instead, the selfie is the image-speak that is uniquely yours, no one else can take your selfie, it is your own voice-as-image and is thus especially intimate and expressive. It’s intensely in the moment and that’s exactly why we desire to share and view them.","","Through this example of modern photo sharing, the distinction being made here is between social services that are primarily fixated on content versus communication. All social media is both, of course, but not all media focus on both equally. ","Today’s dominate social services are very concerned with the media object, the singular slice of experience that is pulled apart, made discrete, placed in a profile or stream, and given all sorts of metrics to quantify how many people appreciate it. More simply, dominant social media organize their sites and your experience around these media objects, be they photos, videos, chunks of text, check-ins, and so on. They are the fundamental unit of experience for you to click on, comment on, and share. A photo is posted, and the conversation happens around it, side-by-side, on the screen.","Alternatively, one key component of ephemeral social media—appreciated by its users but unexplored in most analyses—is that it rejects this fundamental unit of organization. There are no comments displayed on a Snap, no hearts or likes. With ephemerality, communication is done through photos rather than around them.","That media object, say, a photo, is the ends of dominant social media, but merely the means for services that are ephemeral, letting the media object fade away and making disposable the very thing that other services are built upon. Like the proliferating selfies, the actual photographic object is merely a byproduct of communication rather than its focus.","By diminishing the importance of the media object, by making it disposable, the emphasis is placed on communication itself. This goes a long way to explain the intimacy of a Snap versus a static image shared on another site. Other services, even their direct messaging components, are organized by and around persistent media objects. This is the media based sociality that gives social media its name.","An image becomes a photograph, in part, by having borders. The frame makes the photo. Tellingly, a Snapchat usually exists unframed, full-screen, more moment than an art object. Less than sharing experience-trophies and hoping communication happens around them, an ephemeral network leaves the art objects to fade in favor of focusing on the moments, the experience, the communication; more social than media, more social than network.","Perhaps the reason most of our dominate social media have been fixated on content, on media objects, is because content can be stored. Sociality is treated like information that can be indexed as search engines do to the Web. Photos and the rest are recorded, kept, organized into profiles to be measured and tracked and ranked. It made sense, that’s largely what people used desktop computers to do. Perhaps it was the rise of the mobile phone, where people do less information searching and more communicating that revealed this as a flawed model for organizing anything social. I’m concluding on a highly speculative note here, but it is certainly time to rethink sociality based so fundamentally on media objects.","One can still understand the appeal of the media object and why we continue to want to produce and consume those beautiful moments placed within a photo border. The band you are watching at their most intense, the sun setting, the family gathering, meeting a famous comedian: there’s certainly a place for the important photo, saved permanently. As I often argue, ephemeral and permanent social media work together rather than in opposition. Even Snaps are often turned into great pieces of art.","But as easy as it is to appreciate the importance of those special moments, it is equally easy to underestimate the seemingly banal moments in-between. Those who study the social world appreciate the complexities of the seemingly trivial. What is often thought to be the boring, mundane parts of everyday life are instead profoundly important. Minor social groomings make up the textures of our lives: saying hello, smiling, acknowledging each other, our faces, our stuff, and our moods from good to bad. Permanent social media have a difficult time capturing these important trivialities in a comfortable way. And this is exactly where ephemeral social media excels; built for everyday communication in its fleeting, often fun, always important nature. By not trying treating social life as just about capturing moments as trophies, ephemeral social media is more familiar, it emphasizes everyday sociality, and that is anything but trivial. ","Nathan Jurgenson, Researcher"]},{"date":{"year":2014,"month":1,"day":2,"hour":15,"minute":11},"title":"Find Friends Abuse","slug":"find-friends-abuse","content":["When we first built Snapchat, we had a difficult time finding other friends that were using the service. We wanted a way to find friends in our address book that were also using Snapchat – so we created Find Friends. Find Friends is an optional service that asks Snapchatters to enter their phone number so that their friends can find their username. This means that if you enter your phone number into Find Friends, someone who has your phone number in his or her address book can find your username.","A security group first published a report about potential Find Friends abuse in August 2013. Shortly thereafter, we implemented practices like rate limiting aimed at addressing these concerns. On Christmas Eve, that same group publicly documented our API, making it easier for individuals to abuse our service and violate our Terms of Use.","We acknowledged in a blog post last Friday that it was possible for an attacker to use the functionality of Find Friends to upload a large number of random phone numbers and match them with Snapchat usernames. On New Years Eve, an attacker released a database of partially redacted phone numbers and usernames. No other information, including Snaps, was leaked or accessed in these attacks.","We will be releasing an updated version of the Snapchat application that will allow Snapchatters to opt out of appearing in Find Friends after they have verified their phone number. We’re also improving rate limiting and other restrictions to address future attempts to abuse our service.","We want to make sure that security experts can get ahold of us when they discover new ways to abuse our service so that we can respond quickly to address those concerns. The best way to let us know about security vulnerabilities is by emailing us: security@snapchat.com.","The Snapchat community is a place where friends feel comfortable expressing themselves and we’re dedicated to preventing abuse."]},{"date":{"year":2013,"month":12,"day":27,"hour":15,"minute":31},"title":"Finding Friends with Phone Numbers","slug":"finding-friends-with-phone-numbers","content":["Occasionally computer security professionals and other helpful people reach out to us about potential bugs and vulnerabilities in Snapchat. We are grateful for the assistance of professionals who practice responsible disclosure and we’ve generally worked well with those who have contacted us.","This week, on Christmas Eve, a security group posted documentation for our private API. This documentation included an allegation regarding a possible attack by which one could compile a database of Snapchat usernames and phone numbers. ","Our Find Friends feature allows users to upload their address book contacts to Snapchat so that we can display the accounts of Snapchatters who match the phone numbers found in the address book. Adding a phone number to your Snapchat account is optional, but it’s helpful for allowing your friends to find you. We don’t display the phone numbers to other users and we don’t support the ability to look up phone numbers based on someone’s username.","Theoretically, if someone were able to upload a huge set of phone numbers, like every number in an area code, or every possible number in the U.S., they could create a database of the results and match usernames to phone numbers that way. Over the past year we’ve implemented various safeguards to make it more difficult to do. We recently added additional counter-measures and continue to make improvements to combat spam and abuse.","Happy Snapping!"]},{"date":{"year":2013,"month":10,"day":14,"hour":11,"minute":23},"title":"Who Can View My Snaps and Stories","slug":"who-can-view-my-snaps-and-stories","content":["Two questions we get a lot are “do you keep all of the Snaps?” and “do you look at them?” An earlier blog post detailed how Snaps are stored and when they are deleted, so now with the introduction of Stories, we’d like to share a bit about access.","Storage","As mentioned in our previous blog post, Snaps are deleted from our servers after they are opened by their recipients. So what happens to them before they are opened? Most of Snapchat’s infrastructure is hosted on Google’s cloud computing service, App Engine. Most of our data, including unopened Snaps, are kept in App Engine’s datastore until they are deleted.","Retrieval","Is Snapchat capable of retrieving unopened Snaps from the datastore? Yes—if we couldn’t retrieve Snaps from the datastore, we wouldn’t be able to deliver them to their recipients desired by the sender. Do we manually retrieve and look at Snaps under ordinary circumstances? No. The ordinary process of sending Snaps to their recipient(s) is automated.","So what is a circumstance when we might manually retrieve a Snap, assuming it is still unopened? For example, there are times when we, like other electronic communication service providers, are permitted and sometimes compelled by law to access and disclose information. For example, if we receive a search warrant from law enforcement for the contents of Snaps and those Snaps are still on our servers, a federal law called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) obliges us to produce the Snaps to the requesting law enforcement agency. For more information, see the section of our Privacy Policy that discusses circumstances when we may disclose information.","Since May 2013, about a dozen of the search warrants we’ve received have resulted in us producing unopened Snaps to law enforcement. That’s out of 350 million Snaps sent every day. ","Law enforcement requests sometimes require us to preserve Snaps for a time, like when law enforcement is determining whether to issue a search warrant for Snaps.","Only two people in the company currently have access to the tool used for manually retrieving unopened Snaps, our co-founder and CTO, Bobby (who coded it), and me.","Okay, so what about Stories?","The biggest difference between Stories and Snaps is that unless deleted by the user, Stories are available for 24 hours and can be viewed repeatedly in that time. Unlike unopened Snaps, which are stored until viewed or for 30 days if not opened, Snaps that have been added to your Stories are deleted from our servers after 24 hours. Stories are subject to the same legal requirements for access and disclosure as described above for Snaps.","Community Guidelines","Our Terms of Use and Community Guidelines let you know the rules for using Snapchat. If we receive a report that a user is breaking the rules, we may review the Story they’ve posted and take appropriate action. This may include deleting a Story, showing a warning on an account, or even terminating an account.","Our Privacy Policy contains more information about our practices. We hope this post has given you a better sense of how we operate. We are constantly amazed by your creativity and enthusiasm. Thank you for building such an awesome community.","Micah Schaffer, Snapchat Trust & Safety"]},{"date":{"year":2013,"month":10,"day":3,"hour":0,"minute":0},"title":"Surprise!","slug":"surprise","content":[{"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88Cu3yN-LlM"},"Every Snap received brings excitement and change. Today is no different.","We’re introducing Snapchat Stories. A totally new way to share your day with friends - or everyone. It’s fun and ephemeral, just like Snapchat.","Snapchat Stories add Snaps together to create a narrative. When you add a Snap to your Story it lives for 24 hours before it disappears, making room for the new. Your Story always plays forward, because it makes sense to share moments in the order you experience them.","Your Story never ends and it’s always changing. The end of your Story today is the beginning of your Story tomorrow. And each Snap in your Story includes a list of everyone who views it.","Playing with Stories is the best way to understand it. So for the first time ever, we’re releasing an update simultaneously on iOS and Android. We hope you love it as much as we do.","Happy Snapping!","Love,
Team Snapchat","PS If you enjoyed the Goldroom video above, check out Smallpools and Guards! We’ve really enjoyed getting to know these awesome bands and we appreciate their support."]},{"date":{"year":2013,"month":9,"day":20,"hour":10,"minute":38},"title":"The Liquid Self","slug":"the-liquid-self","content":["Social media doesn’t need to be what it has come to be. Social media is young, growth comes with pains, and we should keep questioning assumptions and push this new media to new limits. My first post here on the Snapchat blog, fittingly, questioned the assumed permanence of social media content. Permanent content is just one option, a choice with far-ranging implications, and it isn’t necessary. Here, I’d like to think about one major consequence of permanence: the social media profile.","The familiar social media profile is that collection of information about you and/or created by you, usually with some other people you’re connected to. Profiles structure identity in more or less constraining ways: real name policies, lists of information about our preferences, detailed histories and current activities all comprise a highly structured set of boxes to squeeze oneself into. Further, as our documented histories grow, the profile grows both in literal size as well as in weight on our minds and behaviors.","The social media profile attempts to convince us that life, in all its ephemeral flow, should also be its simulation; the ephemeral flow of lived experience is to be hacked into a collection of separate, discrete, objects to be shoved into the profile containers. The logic of the profile is that life should be captured, preserved, and put behind glass. It asks us to be collectors of our lives, to create a museum of our self. Moments are chunked off, put in a grid, quantified, and ranked. Permanent social media are based on such profiles, with each being more or less constraining and grid-like. Rethinking permanence means rethinking this kind of social media profile, and it introduces the possibility of a profile not as a collection preserved behind glass but something more living, fluid, and always changing.","","Recording identity into categories on social media isn’t all bad and my goal here is not to argue they should disappear, but rather ask if they can be rethought, made into only an option and perhaps not the default? Can social media be created that doesn’t ask us to work ourselves into as many identity-containers given that humans and identity itself are fundamentally fluid and ever changing?","To get at this, let’s think for a moment about that common, and distinctly modern, cultural truism found in children’s stories, self-help books, and everyday advice asking us to be true to ourselves. We are to discover and remain faithful to that real, authentic version of who we are. It can often be good advice, but if you cringed at reading the word “authentic” any bit as much as I did typing it, then you already know that advice can leave little room for anything other than having just one self, regardless of time and place, and as such runs the risk of discouraging change. There’s another school of thought, one that understands identity as never solidified and always in flux. Instead of a single, unchanging self, we might consider a ‘liquid self’, one more verb than noun.","This is abstract, I know, and we won’t settle this philosophical debate on a blog, but the Internet has played an Interesting role in this tension between identity consistency and change. The tale is a familiar one by now: the Web arrived pregnant with the possibility of rethinking who we are by transcending geographic location, physical ability, as well as things like race, gender, age, even species [though, this detachment was always only a fantasy]. The New Yorker cartoon infamously joked that, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”. As the story goes, however, the Web went mainstream and commercial. It got normal and somewhere along the way spontaneous anonymity became replaced by consistent identity. Now that everyone knows you’re a dog, it’s difficult to be anything but.","Social media has come to put a tremendous emphasis on our own identity, constantly recorded, always accumulating, stored, and presented back to us in an always-available profile of ourselves. Yes, Identity can be a source of importance, meaning, history, and pleasure, but, today, identity is rapidly piling up, exponentially increasing our own contact with ourselves. The profile photo, the background, what you like, what you do, who your friends are all lead to a never ending and always growing self-surveillance that’s paired with a healthy dose of being watched by others, too. What can be in one breath “self-expression” can be in another “self-policing” when who you are (and thus who you are not) become increasingly part of everyday life.","Self-expression, when bundled into permanent category boxes (digital or otherwise), has the danger of becoming increasingly constraining and self-restricting. Given that pressure to be “real”, authentic, and “true to yourself” as mentioned above, this massive evidence of one’s own self can become limiting and impede identity change. My worry here is that today’s dominant social media is too often premised on the idea (and ideal) of having one, true, unchanging, stable self and as such fails to accommodate playfulness and revision. It has been built around the logic of highly structured boxes and categories, most with quantifiers that numerically rank every facet of our content, and this grid-patterned data-capture machine simply does not comfortably accommodate the reality that humans are fluid, changing, and messy in ways both tragic and wonderful.","","While social media is in its adolescence, it has yet to comfortably incorporate adolescence itself. By that I do not mean young people specifically, but instead the type of change and growth that is healthy regardless of age. The default of requiring social media users to permanently record and display themselves damages the invaluable importance of identity play. Put differently: many of us desire social media that is less like the mall and more like a park. Being far less standardized, constrained, and policed, yes, the park is somewhere you might do something a little dumb. Knees get scraped. But mistakes shouldn’t be fully avoided, which is what dominate, permanent social media demand, resulting in constant over-anxiety about what’s being posted. A healthy corrective to existing social media would be to create platforms that provide more room to behave without that behavior always defining who one is and what one can do. The idea of non-patrolled spaces for expression can be frightening, but a lack of such spaces is far more worrisome.","Dominate social media has thus far taken a stand, a radical one in my opinion, for a version of identity that is highly categorized and omnipresent, one that forces an ideal of a singular, stable identity that we will continuously have to confront. It is a philosophy that doesn’t capture the real messiness and fluidity of the self, fails to celebrate growth, and is particularly bad for those most socially-vulnerable. I wonder how we can build social media that doesn’t always intensify our own relationship to ourselves by way of identity boxes. I think temporary social media will provide new ways of understanding the social media profile, one that isn’t comprised of life hacked into frozen, quantifiable pieces but instead something more fluid, changing, and alive.","Nathan Jurgenson, Researcher","Note: The idea that a person should have a single, stable, true or authentic identity is most difficult for those who are more socially vulnerable. Having only one, unchanging identity may not seem all that problematic if who you are is not often stigmatized and penalized. However, there needs to be far more recognition that many people justifiably enjoy and need some social-closets where identity can be played with and not put on bright display because the potential consequences are greater. Race, class, sex, sexuality, ability, age, and all the other various intersections of power and vulnerability need to be part of the discussions around how social media is built, used, and improved."]},{"date":{"year":2013,"month":7,"day":19,"hour":14,"minute":43},"title":"Temporary Social Media","slug":"temporary-social-media","content":["Technology has a way of making time simultaneously important and baffling. Communication technologies from speaking to writing to recording sound and sight disrupt temporality, mixing the past, present, and future in unpredictable new ways. This chaotic atemporality is part social media’s interest–or at least it’s what interests me. Specifically, the fact that the social media built so far has a particular, and peculiar, orientation to time: an assumed inevitability of recording most everything forever.","Most of our personal understandings of, as well as research on, social media presume that what we do online can be and likely is permanent. The photo posted today will be around tomorrow. Sometimes that is a satisfying thought: that we can one day look fondly upon this moment. Sometimes it’s the horrifying notion that something we are doing now will come back to bite us later. While there is some research on the deletion of social media content–for instance danah boyd’s terrific work on “white-walling” where users periodically delete their content–most of our understandings of social media assume content is mostly permanent. For instance, Rob Horning rightly points out, that the “self” is increasingly intertwined with data and social media documentation, arguing,","ubiquitous surveillance will be the fundamental fact about subjectivity from here on out. There will no sense of self that doesn’t take into account how the self has been or will be recorded, how that self will turn up as an artifact of online searches","“Recorded” and “artifact” are certainly appropriate terms now, with the former assuming the latter. But does recording always need to be seen as an inevitable future artifact? Do we need to continue to assume that social media content needs to be forever? I’m curious as to what happens to identity if social media emphasizes less enduring recordings and instead something more temporary. It would be identity less concerned with itself as a constant “artifact”, a less nostalgic understanding of the present as a potential future past and instead an identity a bit more of the present, for the present.","Simply, what if we rethought the whole idea of the assumed permanence of social media? What if social media, in all its varieties, was differently oriented to time by promoting temporariness by design? What would the various social media sites look like if ephemerality was the default and permanence, at most, an option?","It’s easy to underestimate the significance of injecting more ephemerality into social media. But to make social media more temporary fundamentally alters our relationships to online visibility, to data privacy, content ownership, the “right to forget.” It alters the functioning of social stigma, shame, and identity itself.","Beyond the ‘right to forget’, what about the possible erosion of the obligation to remember?","","We think about how the high school student’s name will appear in search results years down the road, or how presidential candidates will run against their own online profiles of past. Indeed, that common declaration, “I’m so glad I didn’t have social media when I was young!” is ultimately a way of asserting how big a problem our present will be when excavated in the future. The message is often that we should be ashamed about what we are doing, that what we are creating now will bring stigma in the future.","It is deeply important to recognize the harm that permanent media can bring–and that this harm is not evenly distributed. Those with non-normative identities or who are otherwise socially vulnerable have much more at stake being more likely to encounter the potential damages past data can cause by way of shaming and stigma. When social media companies make privacy mistakes it is often folks who are not straight, white, and male who pay the biggest price. This is why movements like the right to be forgotten are so crucial.","There is, however, a tension here: we should be careful not to couch the possible benefits of temporary social media as promoting hiding from your past in shame. As I’ve argued before,","When we applaud not having records of our own embarrassing past, a document of how we’ve changed over time as individuals, we are equally celebrating the cultural norm that expects perfection, normalization, and unchanging behavior. What if more people wore past identities more proudly? We could erode the norm of identity consistency, a norm no one lives up to anyways, and embrace change and growth for its own sake. Perhaps the popularity of social media will force more people to confront the reality that identity isn’t and can’t be flawlessly consistent.","Framing data deletion as about hiding from one’s past might actually further the stigma of a little digital dirt, that being human and changing is something to be ashamed of. A healthier attitude towards our documented pasts would be to embrace how different we were before, even if there are significant mistakes. Change could be seen as not a flaw but a positive, as evidence of growth; an identity feature rather than a flaw.","","I’d like to suggest a second a way of understanding temporary social media, not as hiding from the past but as embracing the present. I began writing about Snapchat in an essay for The New Inquiry this past February arguing that one thing ephemeral media like Snapchat does is change our everyday vision from using social media to focus on a series of future pasts to embracing the present for its own sake. While documenting our lives isn’t new, the types and degree is: social media, smartphones, and the rest of our proliferating technologies of documentation encourage people to view the world in the present as a potential photo, GIF, video, status update, check-in to be archived. And, importantly, social media in particular provides an audience for our ephemera, which is partly responsible for our willingness to document ourselves and others so thoroughly. ","This culture of documentation in the age of social media has emerged as particularly nostalgic. Because what we do on social media is so often quite permanent, this ‘documentary vision’ tends to be a sentimental gaze. The faux-vintage photo filters that have made recent digital snapshots look as if they were aged by time are a terrific example of the ‘nostalgia for the present’ that happens when almost any moment can be so perfectly remembered. Permanent social media encourages an understanding of the present as documentable. Conversely, temporary social media is anti-nostalgia, letting the present be good enough right where it is.","Because of this, temporary social media has a complicated relationship with memory. Part of the appeal of permanent social media is being able to look back and remember so much of our lives. But the logic that the more we save the more we remember might break down at some level of hyper-documentation, perhaps remembering things less if they are perfectly recorded. By offloading memories and some of the work of remembering to databases, we don’t really need to remember that vacation because it’s been so thoroughly stored in expanding digital photo albums; archives so numerous that they’ve become increasingly trivial to the point that you may rarely check back in on them at all. Alternatively, not recording something for posterity can mean remembering more. For example, the Snapchat countdown timer demands an urgency of attention; when you look fast, you look hard. The image might not be perfectly remembered but the story it tells and how you feel in that moment become most salient. Permanent social media fixates on the details of a photo, whereas temporary social media fixates on what it meant and what it moved within you.","In this way, temporary social media might also be an antithesis to social media triviality. Typically, to document something was to declare its worthiness of attention; but when documentation expands so exponentially, as is occurring today, the importance lessens. In the near future the near past will be less scarce because the current present is so abundant. Logging into social streams today often feels like a bazaar of banality, the everyday ephemera that populates these sites has deeply eroded any essential link between “document” and “importance”. When photographs were scarcer, photographic documentation inferred some level of importance whereas today the sight of someone photographing their burrito is a joke. The abundance of photographic documentation has created its own inverse: not photographing a moment often conveys importance, for instance, not snapping a picture of your food can demonstrate respect for the establishment and your company. In the age of hyper documentation, the photograph specifically and documentation in general are becoming less about importance and more about banality. Temporary social media creates some much needed scarcity, interrupting the cycle of documentary accumulation by not allowing them to amass. We’ve been hoarders of the evidence of our own lives; there is no important archeology when everything is saved.","","Am I fetishizing the ephemeral, the present, the current moment? To a degree, yes. Social media is young, and I hope it grows out of this assumed permanence of our data. A corrective, an injection of ephemerality, is badly needed and overdue. The present doesn’t always need to be owned, held still and fixed; sometimes it might be best left alone to simply be what it is, letting more moments pass not undocumented and unshared, but just without enforced documentary boxes and categories with corresponding metrics filed away in growing databases. Instead, temporary social media treats the present as less like something that aspires to be curated into a museum but as something that can be unknown, unclassified, not put to work.","None of this is to say we should give up on more enduring documentation. Temporary social media does not really oppose durable social media. As I admit above, many of us cherish artifacts from the past. There is an appeal to a timeline of important life-events. But permanence shouldn’t be the standard, and perhaps not even the default. Let’s better consider time as a variable in a complex social media ecology where things aren’t so often shared forever. Yes, many existing sites have some deletion capabilities on their platforms, but what if more social media has ephemerality built in from the ground up?","These are the sorts of questions and issues I want to work on and encourage others to think more about. The Web doesn’t mean the end of forgetting; indeed, it has demanded it.","Nathan Jurgenson, Researcher"]},{"date":{"year":2013,"month":6,"day":24,"hour":9,"minute":2},"title":"Recent Additions to Team Snapchat","slug":"recent-additions-to-team-snapchat","content":["When we launched Snapchat in September 2011, we were finally ready to share something we loved with the rest of the world. We had created a different way to communicate with our friends - it felt more personal, and it was a lot more fun. We hoped the rest of the world would love it too.","The response has been absolutely mind blowing. Less than two years later, Snapchatters are sharing over 200 million snaps every day. And thanks to our incredible and hardworking team, we’ve been able to support the growth of Snapchat with minimal overhead.","But in order to continue scaling while developing the Snapchat experience, we needed to build a bigger engineering team and figure out how to pay our server bills.","We’re fortunate to welcome IVP to Team Snapchat as the lead investor in our recent Series B financing. General Catalyst, Benchmark Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and SV Angel also participated in the round. We are thankful for their belief in the Snapchat community and we look forward to working with them as we continue to grow.","We have also added Michael Lynton as an independent board member. Michael is a remarkably talented and creative executive who believed in Snapchat way before it was cool. He is a tremendous role model and we are grateful for his time and energy.","Long story short – we’re committed to building a big company around an innovative and fun product. And we know we can’t do it without you. So thank you for your endless support and enthusiasm for Snapchat. It means the world to us.","There are some really exciting surprises around the corner…","Love,","Team Snapchat"]},{"date":{"year":2013,"month":6,"day":22,"hour":11,"minute":52},"title":"iOS Update: Bug Fixes and More!","slug":"ios-update-bug-fixes-and-more","content":["Team Snapchat has been growing by leaps and bounds this month. The arrival of summer has brought with it summer engineering interns and other new members of the team. We’re excited to be picking up the pace of development!","There’s a new iOS version available in the App Store today. It includes some critical fixes for bugs and crashes, so please download it if you’ve been experiencing issues.","We’re also trying out something new in this release. As you may know, Snapchat is for teens and adults– children under the age of 13 are not allowed to create accounts. The previous iOS update introduced age-gating, in which we asked people their age on the registration screen and didn’t allow them to proceed if the age entered was under 13. This was a pretty standard way of handling things, but it didn’t provide a very good experience. So now, in addition to age-gating, we’ve decided to try something a little different.","In the new iOS version, kids under the age of 13 are able to fill out the registration form, however their user information is not sent to us and an account is not created. Instead they are able to use “SnapKidz” a version of Snapchat that includes an interface for taking snaps, captioning, drawing, and saving them locally on the device, but does not support sending or receiving snaps or adding friends. We’re trying it out first on iOS and if all goes well, we hope to include it in an upcoming Android update.","While we were at it, we updated our Privacy Policy. We hope that the new version provides more detailed information about our practices. Don’t worry though, we haven’t changed the way we handle your information, including storing and deleting snaps (see our earlier blog post for details on that). ","We also tweaked our Terms of Use to account for SnapKidz and a few other things that needed updating. We’ll be editing the Terms of Use from time to time as we continue to make it easier to read and understand.","Happy Snapping!","Team Snapchat"]},{"date":{"year":2013,"month":6,"day":6,"hour":16,"minute":40},"title":"NoFace Chillah","slug":"noface-chillah","content":["There is no one face to Snapchat. Every day millions of us in the Snapchat community share how we feel, where we are, and what we are doing. Sometimes its happy or funny, sometimes sad or bored, but most importantly - we communicate who we are in the moment.","Many of you have noticed that in our latest iOS update, v5.0 Banquo, our mascot no longer has a facial expression. This isn’t because we forgot the face - it’s because you are the face of Snapchat","Letting go of the silly grin means that our mascot gets to have all sorts of fun expressions and personalities - reflective of the diverse experiences shared by the members of our community."]},{"date":{"year":2013,"month":5,"day":9,"hour":19,"minute":23},"title":"How Snaps Are Stored And Deleted","slug":"how-snaps-are-stored-and-deleted","content":["There’s been some speculation lately about how snaps are stored and when and how they are deleted. We’ve always tried to be upfront about how things work and we haven’t made any changes to our practices, so we thought it’d be cool to go over things in a bit more detail.","Storing Snaps","When someone sends a snap, it is uploaded to our servers, the recipient(s) are sent a notification that they have a new snap and the Snapchat app downloads a copy of the message. The image or video from the message is stored in a temporary folder in the device’s memory. This is sometimes in internal memory, RAM or external memory like an SD Card—depending on the platform and whether it’s a video or a picture.","Deleting Snaps From Our Servers","When a snap is viewed and the timer runs out, the app notifies our servers, which in turn notify the sender that the snap has been opened. Once we’ve been notified that a snap has been opened by all of its recipients, it is deleted from our servers. If a snap is still unopened after 30 days, it too is deleted from our servers.","Deleting Snaps From the Recipient’s Device","After a snap has been opened, the temporary copy of it is deleted from the device’s storage. We try to make this happen immediately, sometimes it might take a minute or two. The files are deleted by sending a “delete” instruction to the phone’s file system. This is the normal way that things are usually deleted on computers and phones—we don’t do anything special (like “wiping”).","Extra Details","While an unopened snap is being stored on the device, it’s not impossible to circumvent the Snapchat app and access the files directly. This isn’t something we support or encourage and in most cases it would involve jailbreaking or “rooting” the phone and voiding its warranty. If you’re trying to save a snap, it would be easier (and safer) to just take a screenshot or take a picture with another camera.","Also, if you’ve ever tried to recover lost data after accidentally deleting a drive or maybe watched an episode of CSI, you might know that with the right forensic tools, it’s sometimes possible to retrieve data after it has been deleted. So… you know… keep that in mind before putting any state secrets in your selfies :)","Team Snapchat"]},{"date":{"year":2013,"month":4,"day":16,"hour":8,"minute":23},"title":"Snap Spam (Ew.)","slug":"snap-spam-ew","content":["Early this morning, some Snapchatters alerted us that they had received unwanted snaps from people who weren’t their friends. Upon initial investigation, it appears that an individual created multiple accounts and sent snaps to Snapchatters with public accounts. ","Our engineering team responded quickly (nice work guys!) by temporarily turning off new account creation and preventing Snapchatters from receiving snaps from friends that they had not previously added on Snapchat. ","Spam is a problem on many services with large audiences. We know spammers totally suck and we’re working on a long term solution to prevent spam from entering your feed. In the meantime, please adjust your settings to determine who can send you snaps. For a spam-free experience we recommend “Only My Friends” :)","Sorry for the spam - we’ll keep you updated as we work on this issue.","Evan"]},{"date":{"year":2013,"month":2,"day":21,"hour":5,"minute":38},"title":"Video on Android is Here!","slug":"video-on-android-is-here","content":["Over the last four months, Android snapchatters around the world have been sharing experiences through photographs, words, and drawings. Today we are thrilled to announce the arrival of video to our Android community! It is hard to imagine that just a few months ago we were beta testing our app with just a few new friends in Norway. ","Making Snapchat video for Android has been exciting, but has also had its fair share of challenges. The Android phones that many of us use were never designed with Snapchat in mind, and that can be tough when developing a hardware-based application. The video feeds and playback behavior can differ greatly - often with no guarantees or warnings. Some users will still experience difficulties, and we want to work with you to make Snapchat perfect (email us!), but we hope many of you simply come to love video snaps.","But it isn’t just video! We have revamped our notification system to give you more informative, exciting, and customizable notifications from your friends. Snapchat on Android will now have significantly more reliable behavior when you are out and about, and we have improved both camera frame-rates and navigation speed by redesigning portions of our camera.","It is so much fun building this app for the Android Snapchat community. We have a ton of great updates on the way - stay tuned and happy snapping!","Daniel"]},{"date":{"year":2012,"month":12,"day":14,"hour":0,"minute":54},"title":"Our Biggest Update Yet: v4.0 Phantom!","slug":"our-biggest-update-yet-v40-phantom","content":["It’s been a busy couple of months at Snapchat. With over 50 million snaps shared every day, we’ve had to do a lot of work to make sure our service can continue to support a growing community of snappers. Today, we’re thrilled to announce a major update to our iPhone application – video snaps!","Snapchat is all about sharing moments as they happen, and video is a great way to capture those moments. Unfortunately, with most camera applications, by the time you’ve switched from your still camera to your video camera and are ready to go, you’ve already missed the moment. It’s really frustrating. So we built something different – and we think it makes a lot more sense.","Instead of toggling back and forth between a photo and a video setting, we’ve combined them into one button. If you want to take a photo, just tap the button. If you want to capture video, hold the button down. When you’re done recording, lift your finger. Super simple. Video snaps are up to ten seconds long, and like photo snaps, can only be viewed once in the application.","But that’s not all – this update has a lot of great stuff. We’ve made capturing and sending faster with a full-screen preview, added landscape captions (just rotate your iDevice!) and there’s a new settings page to help you manage who can send you snaps.","As always, we appreciate your feedback! Feel free to shoot us an email if you need help or just want to say hi: support@snapchat.com"]},{"date":{"year":2012,"month":11,"day":23,"hour":8,"minute":53},"title":"We’re Thankful","slug":"were-thankful","content":["Yesterday was a huge day for us. Millions of people used Snapchat to share their Thanksgiving festivities and send holiday wishes to their friends and family. We sent and received all sorts of turkey snaps – raw turkeys on their way into the oven, silly turkey drawings, and steaming hot turkeys doused in cranberry sauce!","Unfortunately, all of this excitement was not without a few hiccups. Our servers struggled to keep up with over one thousand snaps sent every second. ","We apologize if you weren’t able to send snaps with the normal speed and ease that we strive to provide every day, and we’re thankful for your continued support of our service. We’ve got some exciting holiday surprises on the way for you!","Love,","Team Snapchat"]},{"date":{"year":2012,"month":10,"day":29,"hour":11,"minute":21},"title":"It’s finally here!","slug":"its-finally-here","content":["Snapchat is now available in the Google Play store for all Android devices running v2.2 or higher.","This isn’t just a copy of our iPhone app. We wanted to create a true Android app, and spent a lot of time making it feel just right. With all of the different devices, each with different camera hardware, it’s tough to develop an app that works really well for every user. We started by rebuilding the camera layer from the ground up in OpenGL to make sure everyone could experience a fullscreen camera preview, even if it wasn’t natively supported on the device. Then we developed a new, ultrafast way to send images and load them in the feed, and combined that with a buttery smooth custom interface. We couldn’t be more excited to bring you a truly first-class Android app.","A huge thank you to all of our fans for your support – we know waiting is never fun – and we really appreciate all of your encouraging emails, tweets, and facebook messages. You guys make those late nights totally worth it.","If you see a bug please let us know! We’ve only been able to test on 250 devices-and that’s just a small fraction of the Android world.","BTW iPhoners…get ready for the craziest Snapchat release yet-coming soon :)",{"url":"/images/news/Android_Release_CamScreenSite.png","fullWidth":false}]},{"date":{"year":2012,"month":10,"day":28,"hour":19,"minute":10},"title":"1 Billion","slug":"1-billion","content":["Our Snapchat community has now shared over 1 billion snaps - with over 20 million unique moments shared every day. We’re absolutely thrilled, and we couldn’t have done it without you. Thank you for your support and belief in our product. We feel privileged to work on Snapchat every day!"]},{"date":{"year":2012,"month":9,"day":26,"hour":13,"minute":50},"title":"Snapchat Turns 1 Today!","slug":"snapchat-turns-1-today","content":["As you know, it takes a village to raise a child (or one really good nanny). In our case, it took a village. We’re humbled and flattered by all the love and support we’ve received from the Snapchat community.","We realize it’s a bit cliché, but this felt like a good time to share three ideas that really matter to us. These ideas will drive the decisions we make while developing Snapchat over the next year.","We believe in sharing authentic moments with friends. It’s not all about fancy vacations, sushi dinners, or beautiful sunsets. Sometimes it’s an inside joke, a silly face, or greetings from a pet fish.","Sharing those moments should be fun. Communication is more entertaining when it’s with the people who know us best. And we know that no one is better at making us laugh than our friends.","There is value in the ephemeral. Great conversations are magical. That’s because they are shared, enjoyed, but not saved.","Thank you again for all of your support.","Love,
Team Snapchat",{"url":"/images/news/SnapchatBday.png"}]},{"date":{"year":2012,"month":9,"day":18,"hour":10,"minute":53},"title":"We’re Sorry","slug":"were-sorry","content":["We’ve been working day and night to accommodate the massive increases in traffic on the Snapchat service and prepare for a major product update. With millions of snaps sent every day, sometimes our servers are slower than we’d like. To address that problem we developed a faster way to write data to our servers. Unfortunately, this morning, when we pushed that change, some account data was corrupted. This affected 0.3% of our users.","We know how much it sucks when Snapchat goes down. It’s our favorite way to stay in touch with friends and make each other laugh. It hurts when we can’t provide our service to all of our awesome snappers.","We really appreciate your support – on Twitter, via email, and on Facebook. We’re reaching out to everyone who has been affected so that we can begin the process of restoring access to those accounts. Please let us know if you continue to experience issues: support@snapchat.com","Some really exciting product announcements are on the way – stay tuned and happy snapping! We’re really sorry we let you down today.","Love,","Team Snapchat"]},{"date":{"year":2012,"month":9,"day":9,"hour":12,"minute":0},"title":"Team Snapchat goes to Norway!","slug":"team-snapchat-goes-to-norway","content":[{"url":"/images/news/Norway.png"}]},{"date":{"year":2012,"month":7,"day":23,"hour":15,"minute":55},"title":"Drawing Contest!","slug":"drawing-contest","content":["We’re excited to announce our first contest, which challenges YOU to send us your most creative and fun snap using the new drawing feature! Feel free to use a caption too.","The top 10 finalists will be featured on our Facebook page and the top 3 will win some awesome prizes! Our grand prize winner will recieve a $100 iTunes gift card and a Team Snapchat tank!",{"url":"/images/news/Gandalf.png"},"Anyone can enter, just take a snap (don’t forget to save it!) and send it to contest@snapchat.com with your name, hometown, and age with the subject as ‘Drawing Contest Entry.’","You can submit up to 3 entries. Entries can be submitted until August 23rd at 6pm PST.","Be sure to check out the full contest rules and prize details below:","http://www.snapchat.com/contest"]},{"date":{"year":2012,"month":7,"day":19,"hour":17,"minute":13},"title":"Happy Birthday Bobby!","slug":"happy-birthday-bobby","content":["Our bestie, co-founder, and resident dark hacking wizard Bobby is turning 24 today! In honor of Bobby’s favorite super hero, Batman, and the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises we’ve been sending silly Batman snaps all day. Join in the fun and send one to Team Snapchat!",{"url":"/images/news/bobby_birthday.jpg"}]},{"date":{"year":2012,"month":7,"day":8,"hour":17,"minute":39},"title":"100 Million!","slug":"100-million","content":["A lot has happened over the past few weeks. We’re thrilled to announce that two terrific and talented engineers (and friends) have joined the team – welcome Daniel and David! We have also hired a wonderful community manager, Dena, who is already helping us get out from underneath our enormous email backlog. If you’re still waiting for support (sorry!) we promise that help is on the way.","We’re currently testing a super fast and fun update that should be out by the end of the month. Password recovery, bug fixes, a faster camera and drawing are coming soon to an iOS device near you! We’ve also got some top-secret stuff in the works.","For our Android fans – we’re hard at work building a great Snapchat experience for all of your devices! It’s not easy but we want to make sure it’s a great product. Shoot us an email if you’re interested in testing a pre-release version.","Last but not least – we want to thank all of you for your continued support of Snapchat. Over 110 million images have been sent through our service! Woohoo! We couldn’t have done it without you.","Evan"]},{"date":{"year":2012,"month":5,"day":9,"hour":19,"minute":11},"title":"Let's chat.","slug":"lets-chat","content":["My co-founder Bobby and I met at Stanford in 2009. I was a freshman studying Product Design and Bobby was a junior working on his B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Science. Our first project was Future Freshman – a site that would forever improve the way high school students applied to college. Or so we thought. The site failed to get traction but we learned something important — we loved working together.","In April 2011 we moved into the not yet lucrative world of mobile photo sharing. With most photo apps on the market advertising ways to make photos prettier or more stylized, we thought there was an opportunity to do something different. We wanted a place to share awkward selfies and funny photos with our friends.","And after hearing hilarious stories about emergency detagging of Facebook photos before job interviews and photoshopping blemishes out of candid shots before they hit the Internet (because your world would crumble if anyone found out you had a pimple on the 38th day of 9th grade), there had to be a better solution.","We quickly got the first prototype up and running and continued to develop it throughout the following summer in Los Angeles. We worked tirelessly - except on beach days - with great input from close friends and family. Then in September 2011 we launched in the AppStore.",{"url":"/images/news/Twitter_Burst_Out_Laughing.png"},"To get a better sense of how people were using Snapchat and what we could do to make it better, we reached out to some of our users. We were thrilled to hear that most of them were high school students who were using Snapchat as a new way to pass notes in class—behind-the-back photos of teachers and funny faces were sent back and forth throughout the day. Server data supported this and we saw peaks of activity during the school day and dips on the weekends.",{"url":"/images/news/Twitter_Dbl_Chin_Emoji.png"},"We still can’t see any of the Snaps sent through our service, but we have tweets, emails, and Snapchat-tagged photos on Instagram to keep us tuned in to what our creative users are doing.","Snapchat isn’t about capturing the traditional Kodak moment. It’s about communicating with the full range of human emotion — not just what appears to be pretty or perfect. Like when I think I’m good at imitating the face of a star-nosed mole, or if I want to show my friend the girl I have a crush on (it would be awkward if that got around), and when I’m away at college and miss my Mom…er…my friends.","We’re building a photo app that doesn’t conform to unrealistic notions of beauty or perfection but rather creates a space to be funny, honest or whatever else you might feel like at the moment you take and share a Snap.",{"url":"/images/news/Twitter_Insecurity_Nonexistent.png"},"We love the app — couldn’t go a day without it — and we’re super excited about the future.","Stay tuned. We have some really cool stuff on the way.","Evan"]}]}},"lang":{"current":"en-US"},"preloadCount":0,"baseEndpoints":{}}}>
