There isn’t a day that we don’t hear about some celebrity or public figure that takes a racy picture and has it get leaked to public. Heck. Most of us probably even know people that regret taking an offensive pic that comes back to haunt them.
Maybe they should have used Snapchat.
The iPhone app was the brainchild of a couple of Stanford grads, Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, and has gained mainstream attention after being mentioned in the New York Times back in April. Currently, the Snapchat is #12 on the free iOS photo app charts in the U.S.
So, what exactly is Snapchat?
According to Tech Crunch, it’s a free app that “allows users to send others photos and control how long receivers can see them. These photos last for up to 10 seconds, before they disappear forever. If you try to take a screenshot, the app will notify the sender”.
Spiegel has stated that the app “was partially inspired by the Anthony Weiner scandal last spring and a desire to create an app with expiring data,” however, he insists that Snapchat won’t become the next big thing for sexters.
Spiegel, during his first sit down interview since the app exploded, said, “I’m not convinced that the whole sexting thing is as big as the media makes it out to be,” and, “I just don’t know people who do that. It doesn’t seem that fun when you can have real sex.”
We think he’s a little naive, but how did this app become such a hit?
It turns out that high school students in L.A. included Snapchat in their top three apps, along with Angry Birds and Instagram. When Barry Eggers, a managing director at the venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, found this info out he met up with the duo and quickly made a deal to invest in their company.
While there are no exact numbers on how many users Snapchat currently has, they process roughly 25 images every second (Instagram, for example, was processing around 25 photos a second seven months ago when it had 10 million users.)
Spiegel said that the company is working on an Android app, and naturally, trying to figure out how to make money off of it.
Even at the early stages of this app, we’re fairly confident that Snapchat will catch on and will become a hit for sexters. Seriously. How can it not? Since there will be no fear in having a picture of your junk somewhere on the net.
Image Source: Sparking Dawn
Albert Costill
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