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Snapchat

264 'Snapchat' stories June 2013 - August 2019
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Snapchat

Snapchat is a social media service primarily based on sharing ephemeral photo and video content. The Venice, California company’s app is extremely popular with millennials, who make up its primary demographic.

Unlike most social photo sharing services, where users are encouraged to build a library of content, Snapchat primarily focuses on content that disappears after set time limits. Users can send snaps directly to friends, or add them to a 24-hour Snapchat Story that all followers can access.

Snapchat is particularly known for its lens feature, which allows users to to add real-time effects to their selfies by means of facial detection. The app is also well-known for its image markup features, such as adding Geostickers — stickers that appear based on the current city of the user — and text to photos and videos.

Criticized for its lack of user-discovery features, some first-time users may find Snapchat difficult to understand, because there are no search or suggestion apparatuses for finding new users to follow.

Recently, the Facebook-owned Instagram added a new Instagram Stories feature to its photo sharing app, which strikingly resembles Snapchat. This is particularly notable when you consider that Facebook, at one time, attempted to purchase Snapchat for 3 billion in cash.

Snapchat employees spied on users by misusing internal tools

Avatar for Ben Lovejoy May 24 2019 - 4:00 am PT
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Snapchat employees spied on users by abusing internal tools

Multiple Snapchat employees spied on users by misusing internal tools, accessing such information as location, phone numbers and their own saved Snaps.

The tools are supposed to be used to help the company fight spam and abuse, and to comply with law enforcement requests, but many staff have access and are abusing it, say former employees …


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Poll: Is the permanent social Internet dying? Should it?

Avatar for Ben Lovejoy May 20 2019 - 4:52 am PT
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Is the permanent social Internet dying?

New York Times staff writer Mike Isaac has written a blog post in which he argues that ‘the permanent social internet is dying.’ That we are increasingly abandoning platforms and formats that create a permanent record of our posts.

As facebook matured, we discovered the unintended consequences of living a life online. An errant, ignorant tweet from our teenage years can get us fired—or worse, canceled. Our parents could have created an entire instagram dedicated to our poopy-diaped years without our knowledge or express consent. Forget running for office if you’ve ever tweeted about, like, anything …


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Snapchat launches new game platform, Stories in third-party apps, developer tools, AR camera features, more

Avatar for Michael Potuck Apr 4 2019 - 11:45 am PT
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snapchat updates

At the first Snap Partner Summit today in Los Angeles, Snapchat unveiled four major announcements for the platform. It has launched its new Snap Games platform, introduced new AR camera features, announced new original content, and unveiled third-party app integrations via App Stories, Bitmoji Kit, Creative Kit, and Ad Kit. Notably, the App Stories tool will bring the platform’s popular Stories to third-party apps like Tinder and more for the first time.


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Snapchat preparing new Foursquare-like location features ‘Status’ and ‘Passport’

Avatar for Chance Miller Apr 2 2019 - 4:37 pm PT
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snapchat location

Snapchat, which has been struggling to keep up with intense competition from Instagram, is turning to location features as a way to differentiate itself. A new report from TechCrunch details that Snapchat is testing new features called “Status” and “Passport” which would allow users to offer more detail about their location.


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