Snapchat
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Snapchat is a social medias site that allows users to send photographs and videos to each other.
History
Reggie Brown and Evan Spiegel are the co-creators of Snapchat. They met freshman year at Stanford University when they joined the same fraternity. In Kappa Sig Spiegel and Brown met fellow co-founder and future programmer of the app, Bobby Murphy. Brown and Spiegel had a knack for entrepreneurship and experimented with a site called Future Freshman LLC. Its purpose was to guide future students through the college admissions process with different advice and suggestions. While this site never picked up speed they went back to the drawing board and in the Spring of 2011 they came up with an idea for an app called Pictaboo that was launched in July of 2011. Brown sparked the idea when he said, "I wish these photos I am sending this girl would disappear." Pictaboo was later renamed to Snapchat. They gained users little by little, but where the app really became popular was among High Schoolers. The photos people were sending to each other were called 'snaps.' In April 2012, Lightspeed Venture Partners invested $485,000 into Snapchat. By Winter of 2012 the app was released to Android phones. Snapchat also introduced the ability to send videos. Despite the apps growing success, there was an ongoing lawsuit between the original founders about who truly came up with the idea for the app. In February of 2013, 60 million snaps were being sent each day. In November, Mark Zuckerberg offered to buy Snapchat for $3 billion, but Snapchat refused.
Features
When snapchat was launched users were only able to send pictures to each other. With each update snapchat has introduced more and more features. Today people can send videos and make snap stories. Previously the only people that could see your snaps were other users that you individually sent them to. With the 'story' feature you were able to post a snap that everyone on your list of Snapchat friends can see. It is automatically deleted after 24 hours, but unlike individual snaps stories it can be be watched many times. There is also a way to see who watched your snap story. There is also the 'Discover' function on Snapchat that lets you see content from different brands or networks like MTV, CNN, People and National Geographic that is updated daily. They post short videos with the option to read the full story.
