A 23-year-old entrepreneur did. Evan Spiegel, the co-founder and chief executive of Snapchat, rejected a $3 billion cash buyout offer from Facebook. Snapchat is a photo messaging application with which users can add text and drawings to photos and videos and send them to a list of recipients. The sent photographs and videos are known as “Snaps.” Users set a time limit for how long recipients can view their Snaps (ranging from 1 to 10 seconds), after which they are deleted from Snapchat’s servers.
Young People Flock to Snapchat
Research indicates that scads of teens and young adults under 24 left Facebook for Instagram (a Facebook owned product). Now, that group appears to be moving on to Snapchat. Snapchat claims its usage grew from 200 million messages per day in June to 350 million daily messages in September of this year. Some industry insiders believe that Snapchat is the next generation of social networking. The prospect of being burned by something posted on social media makes the ephemeral nature of Snapchat attractive to those who want to share freely on social media but don’t want to be haunted by a permanent social media record.
Snapchat users should know that it is possible to get burned by Snapchat. In a blog post, Snapchat admitted:...it’s sometimes possible to retrieve data after it has been deleted. So… you know… keep that in mind before putting any state secrets in your selfies.
Perhaps all it takes to preserve a Snap is a screenshot. Read New Snapchat “Hack” Lets Users Save Photos Forever.
Time will tell whether or not Snapchat becomes the next big thing. Of Speigel turning down $3 billion, 56% of survey respondents said, “Crazy doesn’t begin to describe how nutty this is. He’ll never see that kind of dough again.”
Instagram Update
As of last week Instagram released it's own version of direct photo messaging. It's too early to tell if it will be the next big thing or if people will simply ignore it. One thing we noticed is that the Instagram version does not have the time setting, which means even though you can select to send a picture to only one person, there is no option for the image to self destruct. We also know that we would never turn down three billion dollars with powerhouses out there like Instagram.
