Here at Thunderbolt, we love all things digital – everything from app development and web design Surrey to social media. That’s why our team makes a point of keeping up to date with new and rumoured developments with some of the social media giants. The latest development to arise in the near future comes from Snapchat, who are continuing to focus more on their additional feature the Snapchat Story, to compete with their existing major competitors Facebook and Instagram.
In the past 24-hours, Snapchat has announced their latest update, called “Snapchat Memories”. Since their launch in 2011 we have seen plenty of updates, some receiving better reactions than others. Some past updates include the replay button and the addition of subscriptions as well as featured adverts. However, the biggest update for Snapchat since its launch was the Snapchat story, introduced in 2014, whereby the user could post a photo to all of their friends for the duration of 24 hours. With the newest addition of Snapchat Memories, Snapchat users can now decide to save their snaps (both pictures and videos) to a new section of the app. From there, the user can also search for other saved photos, which can be saved randomly or chronologically with headings and keyword searches. Sounds similar to Instagram and iPhotos, no?
Within the Memories update, the company has also built a special drawer for hiding those snaps that users might want to keep, but also keep hidden. The “My Eyes Only” section is locked with a passcode, and even Snapchat can’t unlock it remotely, preventing the photos from being leaked or copied.
Overall, the company claims that this newest update will help their users and give the app a further function than just sending and receiving photos. The development clearly signifies their ambitions to move beyond a niche messaging app, and become a fully functioning social media platform that can compete alongside competitors such as Facebook and Instagram. When considering the newest updates the possibility of social media users converting to using Snapchat as their main camera and photo storage system, which would greatly affect Facebook in particular, is a high possibility.