Snapchat

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2011 · Stanford University students, released on the Apple iPhone app store · Also known as Picaboo; Snap; Snap Inc.

What it is

Snapchat is a phone app for sending photos and short videos to friends. By default, a picture you sent showed on the other person's screen for up to ten seconds and then vanished, and the app told you if they took a screenshot. It later added Stories, a run of posts your friends could watch for 24 hours before they disappeared, and Lenses, camera filters that tracked your face and added dog ears or swapped your face with someone else's.

Where it came from

Three Stanford University students, Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown, released it for iPhones in July 2011 under the name Picaboo, then renamed it Snapchat that September. Brown was pushed out within months and later settled with the company for $157.5 million. The app spread through American high schools before most adults noticed it, reached Android phones in October 2012 and added Stories in 2013. Spiegel reportedly turned down a $3 billion offer from Facebook the same year.

How people used it

Teenagers sent each other unflattering selfies all day, often of nothing in particular, because the photo wouldn't last. Two friends who swapped snaps every day built a streak, a day counter with a fire symbol next to it, and many kept streaks going for hundreds of days, handing their login to a friend when they couldn't. People asked new acquaintances to add them on Snapchat, posted Stories from parties and concerts, and used the dog filter to look cute. It was also widely used for sending nude photos on the belief they'd vanish, which a screenshot could undo.

Why it mattered

Before it, putting a photo online usually meant it stayed there under your name, for employers and relatives to find. Snapchat made casual, throwaway photos normal and treated a picture as a quick message to a friend. Its 24-hour Stories were copied by Instagram in August 2016, then by WhatsApp, Facebook and others, and that format became standard across apps. In February 2018 Kylie Jenner tweeted that she'd stopped opening it after an unpopular redesign, and the company's market value reportedly fell by about $1.3 billion.

The jokes around it

• "Add me on Snap": the usual way to swap contacts with someone you'd just met.
• The dog filter: floppy ears and a lolling tongue, so common it became shorthand for a certain kind of selfie.
• Streak saving: people sent a photo of a black screen or a ceiling just to stop the fire symbol going out.
• "Sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore?": Kylie Jenner's 2018 tweet about the redesign.
• The dancing hot dog: a 2017 lens of a cartoon sausage dancing, which people dropped into every photo they could.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People wanted a place to be ugly and boring with their friends without it going on a permanent record. When the app added a daily counter, plenty of them kept it going out of obligation long after they'd stopped enjoying it.

What noah is not sure of

Streaks reportedly arrived around 2015 and the dog lens around 2016, but I'm not sure of the exact dates. The $3 billion Facebook offer and the $1.3 billion fall after Kylie Jenner's tweet come from press reports. The specimen is filed under dead platforms, but Snapchat is still running.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.