The Snapchat app has been a surprise breakout star in 2016, and is now inline with the likes of heavy hitters like Facebook and Instagram.
Back when Snapchat was introduced back in 2011, it was expected to be just a flash in the pan. Fast forward to present day 2016, and Snapchat has around 100 million daily users. This means nine thousand snaps that are shared every second, pretty impressive right? For those of you who haven’t used Snapchat yet, we will be give you the skinny on what it’s all about.
When the app first arrived on the scene, it was still pretty basic. You could send other users pictures or short videos up to ten seconds long. The beauty of Snapchat was that you could not screenshot a pic without notifying the original sender. This meant there was literally no evidence of anything ever sent. This is what led Snapchat getting a reputation for being used strictly for nefarious purposes. Snapchat caught wind of their bad reputation, and made some changes. The new re-vamped Snapchat has a bunch of fun features, and now is mentioned in the same breath as other social media giants. Here we will explore the ins and outs of the new face of Snapchat.
Snapchat’s new filters will turn your sefie into a dogface, a leopard, crying girl and even a police officer. The Snapchat face reader will scan your face and match up their filters accordingly. Many of the filters will allow you to open your mouth and stick out your tongue, giving the illusion of a dog tongue, vomiting rainbows or blowing bubbles. My personal favorite is the horror theme face with running make-up, and the red lips and winged eyeliner. Because it lines up with your face perfectly it is sometimes hard to tell it’s just a filter. Another awesome feature is the “soft” filter, which literally softens your photo, and will give you photo a flawless look and make your eyes appear slightly larger. You can even save Snapchat photos to your phone’s picture library now, which is a new feature. This allows you to send your photos by text too.
When you check out your list of friends on Snapchat, sometimes they have emoji faces next to them. What do they mean? Here’s the breakdown:
Baby Face: You have just become Snapchat friends with this person.
Gold Star: users have replayed This person’s snaps within the last 24hrs. This means they might have interesting snaps.
Yellow Heart: This person is your Snapchat best friend forever. You send the most snaps to each other.
Red Heart: You have been Snapchat best friends for longer than two weeks. Things are getting serious.
Pink Hearts: You have been Snapchat best friends with this person for two months straight. Might as well start planning a wedding!
There are some other basic features that Snapchat uses, like normal color filters and a text-over-photo option. You can even chat with other users. The key to this feature is that conversations get deleted in a matter of minutes, or whenever you close the app. In the end, Snapchat has given us the new technical meaning of “living in the moment.” Because if you look away, chances are that moment has already passed.
