Testing a new social media application! - Assignment 1B

I thought for a while, which would be good application or service to explore. When thinking, it felt like there's no any new social media for me except this, which I finally chose, Snapchat. I've seen my little sister and many of my friends using this application and never actually felt interested about using it, before now. So I downloaded it to my phone and created an account.

Snapchat is this instant message service for your phone, which you can download from your app store. It was founded by Evan Spiegel and Jonathan May. In May of 2014 users were sending over 700 million pictures and videos daily. In November of 2015 Snapchat released, that it has over 100 million users in a day and about 60% of them are publishing their own contents. Over 5 billion videos are being watched in Snapchat daily, according to their Wikipedia-site. In Finland Snapchat has become popular during 2015, when it got plentiful attention from the media. Though the youth has been using it since 2014.

User can take pictures and short videos, add some text and "stamps" for those and then send them either only for your chosen friend/friends or for all users, to your public "MyStory". When you add something to your story, it will be public for next 24 hours and everyone can see it. When you take pictures or videos, they are called "snaps" or in Finnish "snäp". When sending your "snap" you can choose, how long it will be showing receiver, from 1 to 10 seconds. After that chosen time "snap" will be deleted from receiver's application and all servers. If you want, you can save your pictures and videos for your phone. Receiver can only take an screenshot, if he/she wants to save something.

And my experiences? Well, at this moment I've been using it only for couple days. These additional "filling" to your picture is quite nice, I think. There's plenty of those fillings, for example different dogs and flower headwears etc. and some of them are doing something "extra" when you open your mouth or lift your eyebrows. Although they're not really necessary, just some extra to cheer up your pictures or videos. I've only been sending pictures and videos to my sister and I think it's quite simple and everything, but still I prefer WhatsApp to send messages and pictures. Watching my friends stories is quite nice, because that way you can get a quick flash about what your friend has been doing. But still, I think that I would ask about his/her day through WhatsApp. Maybe it will take couple more days to get really comfortable with this application, but at this moment I think that I may not continue using this app in the future. Let's see what happens. I'll try to remember update it here, if I continue using this and what's changed since first impression if that happens.