What Is Snapchat You're at a restaurant eating spaghetti You remember that your cousin loves pasta Your mom opens Snapchat on her smartphone and snaps a picture of you taking a bite Your mom adds text to the snap It says Enjoying your favorite meal Then she sends the snap to your cousin Your cousin sees she has a Snapchat notification and opens the app She laughs as she views the snap After ten seconds it disappears This is the fun of Snapchat Snapchat is a photo and video sharing app The messages users send are called snaps Users edit snaps they create by adding emoticons Geofilters and face changing effects Users can also draw on their snaps add captions and apply filters The possibilities are endless
Snapchatters can send snaps directly to friends Users can also make a string of snaps into a My Story for all of their friends to see Once opened snaps can only be viewed for up to ten seconds Then the images disappear But a user's My Story can be watched over and over for up to 24 hours Through Snapchat users from around the world share original and fun moments with each other
Snapchat Site Bytes Purpose sharing photos and videos Type of Service app App name Snapchat Date of Founding July 13 2011 originally named Picaboo Tech Terms Geofilters Geofilters are location badges that can be added to snaps The badges feature drawings that relate to where the snap was taken Snapchat uses global positioning systems GPS to detect a user's location Then that location's Geofilters become available to the user My Story My Story allows users to combine a series of snaps to form a story These stories can be viewed by all of their Snapchat friends Founders Evan Spiegel Bobby Murphy and Reginald Reggie Brown Compatible Devices Tablet Smartphone
Founding Snapchat Evan Spiegel Bobby Murphy and Reginald Reggie Brown met at Stanford University in California Brown noticed that people sometimes posted photos to social media that they later regretted He wanted to create a way to send photos that disappeared after being viewed Spiegel and Brown decided to make an app for sending disappearing photos Spiegel and Brown asked friend and computer scientist Bobby Murphy to help create the app They named the app Picaboo Picaboo was released in 2011 The app did not gain many followers at first The company changed its name to Snapchat and continued working hard to promote it Soon after Snapchat took off Today Snapchat has more than 200 million users Evan Spiegel Bobby Murphy Account Info Users must be at least 13 to create an account Snapchat can only be used on a smartphone or tablet Once a user creates an account he or she chooses a username Users are given a Snapcode that can be scanned by other users to add them as friends No two Snapcodes are the same Users find friends by username Snapcode or phone number Users become Snapchat friends once both users add each other Only Snapchat friends can send each other snaps or view each other's My Story Privacy settings allow Snapchatters to choose which friends can view their My story
