By Karissa Erven
It is the latest craze among teens and adults. Offering many features to help make it more appealing to its audience, Snapchat is one of the biggest social media platforms to date.
Created in 2011, the app started out as another direct messaging site. Users were only able to send quick, 10-second pictures to friends with one line of text on each picture. Today, millions of teens are on Snapchat, which has spiked the interests of other generations and drawn them to the app.
“My mom has a snapchat just so she can look at the discover page. And both of my brothers have one,” Miranda Mcdonald, senior, said.
When it was first introduced, one of the features that the users loved was that it showed who someone’s “best friends” were. They were able to catch up on who their friends were talking to. Now there is no best friends list, but emojis show the user who their best friends are. Depending on the emoji face, they could be sharing a best friend, a new user, or have a “snap streak.”
Serious Snapchatters will go to extreme lengths to keep their streaks going and keep the number next to their name rising each day. Kara Arthurholtz, freshman, once asked a friend to log into her Snapchat to keep all her streaks going while she was away on vacation.
“[Snap streaks] are a fun thing to do with your friends to talk to them everyday. [We] usually just send random pictures to keep it going,” Arthurholtz said.
Keeping up with a streak isn’t the only thing that keeps the users addicted; face filters were introduced so they could spice up their stories. New face filters are added every day and the options users can choose from are rotated weekly to give a variety of choices. As well as the face filters, the most recent update added facetime, voice call, and new stamps for moments when emojis just don’t cut it.
“I enjoy the Snapchat update because it makes your face look cool and funny. I love that I can facetime someone now because now we don’t have the struggle of trying to use Skype,” Abbie Bashaw, senior, said.
