Snapchat – Thanks and No Thanks for the Updates

One of the most frustrating aspects of social media platforms is major updates. For example, Twitter extending tweets from 140 characters to 280 characters or Instagram changing the timeline and posts no longer showing up in chronological order. The most recently frustrating update has to do with Snapchat. If you have the most up to date version of Snapchat, you know exactly what I am talking about.

Let’s take a step back, though, and look at the evolution of Snapchat. An article by Jenny Karson perfectly describes and explains how Snapchat has changed since day one. Snapchat began in 2011 and was a space only for sending pictures back and forth. Then, in Dec. 2012, Snapcaht released an update allowing users to also send videos to one another. The next phase of Snapchat was a controversial one: once upon a time you were able to view other people’s best friends and as a user you could only have three best friends. A picture of this update is captured in Karon’s article. I say this was a controversial time in Snapchat’s history because having access to people’s best friends created drama, at least from where I’m from it did. I can imagine Snapchat received many complaints about this update, because they took it away. Something I found more exciting than viewing best friends, was the update that was released in Jan. 2013 that allowed users to become artists by having the ability to draw on pictures before sending them. This is an update that has made it all the way to 2018 still, kudos to Snapchat for that one! By Feb. 2013, there were approximately 700 snaps a second.

In Oct. 2013 came the first ever frustrating update from Snapchat: stories. Sure, it was highly annoying that viewing people’s best friends got taken away, but STORIES? The basis of a Snapchat story, if you don’t know, is that you can post a picture for 24 hours that all your friends are able to view. You get to share a moment with more than just a couple of people you choose. The longer this update stayed, the more normalized it became and the less annoying, but rather fun it became. The stories showed up on a separate tab within the app and didn’t interfere with snapping your friends.

In the following months, Snapchat released several small, yet not frustrating updates. For example, the ability to replay snaps and the ability to send chats to people rather than sending pictures or videos back and forth all the time. Geo-filters were also released, which are filters that involve location, events, etc., to personalize snaps even further. Snapchat even released a  live-section, which allows people to follow along with live events and the discover section, which allows people to follow content from popular brands, such as ESPN, CNN, Yahoo News, etc. These updates have stayed with the application up to 2018 so far.

The next biggest, and still not frustrating yet, updates that Snapchat came out with were those of emojis, personalized profile pictures, filters and what Karson calls, “edit mania.” Emojis started to appear next to user’s friends, which had different meanings. Furthermore, Snapchat eventually allowed the option to customize what emojis stand for different things. The first personalized profile pictures consisted of five pictures in a row that replayed as a profile video. Eventually, Snapchat linked with bitmoji to create animated characters that look like you to be you profile picture. Our favorite filter that alter your face came out and were instantly a hit, as well as “edit mania,” which allows users to customize snaps and stories more than they were already able to with some of features such as the temperature outside, how fast a car you're riding in is going, the altitude you are at, etc.

The most recent Snapchat update is frustrating because it combines snap stories with the list of your friends. This update makes it hard to keep track of who you’ve most recently snapped because the people you snap the most appear at the top or people who have stories, rather than in the order of when you’ve sent snaps to people. The picture to the right is an example of how the new Snapchat is set up. I think the longer this update is implemented, the more normalized it will become just as snap stories did. It’s taken some time to get used to, so stay tuned to see if I ever really get used to it!