Dear Snapchat, Thanks for the Memories.
Snapchat* made a bold move towards mainstream adoption last week with its introduction of Memories:
Memories is a new way to save Snaps and Stories on Snapchat. It’s a personal collection of your favorite moments that lives below the Camera screen. Just swipe up from the Camera to open Memories!
It’s super easy to find the Snap or Story you’re looking for in just a few seconds by typing keywords like “dog” or “Hawaii” — that way you can spend less time searching and more time enjoying your Memories.
You can use Memories to create new Stories from Snaps you’ve taken, or even combine different Stories into a longer narrative! It’s fun to celebrate an anniversary or birthday by finding a few old Snaps and stringing them together into a new Story :)
Nearly every other photo and video service keeps your media around indefinitely. Snapchat built its early adopter community from a younger demo looking for the opposite — a disappearing medium. This core insight lowered the bar to content creation and led to an explosion of content, with some estimating that the average user received 20–50 snaps per day only 2 years after Snapchat’s launch.
Archival and search, however, are important features for mainstream users. They invest a lot in their digital media and expect to retrieve their photos and videos at will. For evidence of this, look at the explosive growth of Google Photos, which has nailed archival and search and as a result claims 200M monthly active users, only a year after launch. Yet, Google Photos has a core weakness — it’s not where you create your photos. That happens higher up in the funnel, in apps like Snapchat.
Memories should give users the confidence to make Snapchat their default app for photos and video. Gone are the days where you have to save each snap manually to your Camera Roll, and then re-share those snaps to other social networks or archival systems. Gone also is the need to continually free up space on your phone to accommodate your most valuable snaps, since Snapchat now stores them all up in the cloud. And most importantly, snaps are still ephemeral for the recipient — the sender just gains the ability to save them. It’s a smart way to implement archival and search without compromising the core value proposition of Snapchat for its early adopters.
I’m excited because, as more of my social network moves onto Snapchat, it can finally replace the role that Instagram and Facebook play for me with regard to my photos and videos. In a roundabout way, Snapchat has become more “normal” as it approaches its 5th year of existence. It goes to show that there are many paths to the mainstream in social media, and Snapchat has made some great strides on its own journey recently.
* Disclaimer: Lightspeed is the earliest investor in Snapchat, and we are significant shareholders in the company. I’ve attempted to write this post from the perspective of a user, not an investor. (I am also speaking as myself — a real life user of Snapchat — not a representative of Snapchat.)
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