Streaks are underrated
When Snapchat says ‘We contribute to human progress’ in their mission statement, it is often discarded as a corporate jargon similar to ‘making the world a better place’. This is reasonable because puppy filters do not directly correlate to human progress. But it was only after using Snapchat and some of its unique features for a while, I have come to believe that Snapchat, indeed contributes to human progress. It does that in a very intangible way when you look it from an aerial view. But as you zoom in on individual users, you start to see how Snapchat is contributing to human progress by enriching human relationships. I understand that this makes no sense at first but the best way to understand this is to understand a famous Snapchat feature called Streaks.
Although the best way to understand Streaks and its value is to try it out on your own, I will take you through my experience with Streaks and highlight how it contributes to Snapchat’s mission. Another interesting part is that it taught me something about products that I didn’t encounter (or understand) in most literature about products that I have read.
About streaks: Snap is a camera company and Snapchat opens up to a camera. This is to make it really fast to capture something and send that snap to your friends. Now your friend replies back with a Snap. You do this back-and-forth snapping for a few days and a number appears in front of your chat with that friend. This is your streak 🔥. It increments by one every day, given you and your friend sent each other at least one snap within 24 hours.
Let’s go back to the early days of Snapchat and try to reverse engineer how the idea of having a Streak as a feature might have come up.
The context is that Snapchat had zero user investment at its early stage. Everything the user sent was deleted by default. This was the opposite of Facebook and Instagram where users had all their photos, videos, and memories which made it harder for them to leave as they have invested themselves in these apps. Also, Snapchat had no business model back then. The basic idea that Snapchat’s co-founder Bobby Murphy had was that if they can do something that makes people open their camera 10 times a day instead of once a week, they might create a business around it.
Agenda of the meeting must have been to solve two problems, (a) increase user investment and (b) increase usage of the Snapchat camera to build a business around it.
Instead of thinking about solutions for each of these separately, some genius in the meeting came up with one single solution that tackles both the problems- gamificiation of chat using the camera, aka, Streaks. Gamification is the other name of creating habits and tying that with the camera makes the user click more snaps every day. This idea is fascinating — not bloating the user with two different features for two of our problems but rather solving both of them using one feature. But this is not the beauty of Streaks. Not even close. This entire scene played out in my head when I had not even tried Streaks. To me, it was all a business problem and a solution. A top-to-bottom solution. It all changed after I played around with Streaks for two months.
I shared my obsession with Snapchat to a friend and she suggested starting a Streak to stay in touch rather than texting. I started with the intention of playing around this gamification. And every day we would exchange a photo or video of spontaneous things around us. This involved snaps from having a boring day at the office, goofy things her flatmates did, a photo of her blank wall, a selfie etc. A lot of times we exchanged a blank snap just for the sake of keeping the streak alive. But a lot of times, a random snap started a conversation that would go on for hours. Now if you look at all of this on an individual day-to-day basis, it looks pretty simple and not really interesting. But what I realized after two months of doing this is that all these tiny snippets of life we shared with each other for more than 60 days accumulated and I got to know her much better than I would have if we had kept on chatting on Whatsapp. Stay in touch meant that we actually stayed in touch. This was possible because Snapchat allows users to visually communicate with their close friends without any pressure of looking good or the snap staying around somewhere forever.
Streaks did something that I don’t believe any other platform could do- it gave me a first-person perspective of a part of someone’s life for an extended period of time which enriched our relationship in a dimension that I didn’t know even existed. It’s one of those things that the user does not know they need.
After experiencing streaks first-hand, I have an entirely different image of how that meeting might have been.
The meeting might not have been about a business problem at all. It could have been about the fact that ‘we know visual communication brings people closer and enriches their relationship. People don’t know that. How do we make them realize this? This is a bottom-up approach as opposed to the top-to-bottom approach aforementioned. All the ‘be user-focused’ speeches we read and hear came into the picture. The power of visual communication is cumulative and Streaks are a great incentive to convert once in a while visual communication to cumulative daily participation in a close friend’s life.
How does this contribute to human progress? This is a part of a bigger hypothesis that Snapchat believes — the real and online worlds are one and the same. The way you communicate with a friend online should be the same as the way you communicate with them in real life — no pressure, no judgment, very personal, and no permanent copies of whatever you share.
Merging these two worlds is Snapchat’s biggest contribution to human progress. It hasn’t achieved this yet. It is just the beginning but everything that Snapchat does stems from this philosophy, one way or the other. It extends to their Snap Map feature which overlays the real world on an in-app map. And you cannot ignore their experiments with Spectacles. The entire point of Spectacles is to learn how to build hardware that will ultimately overlay computing on the real world around you.
It all boils down to something Snap’s CEO, Evan Spiegel recently mentioned: Snapchat is not just a bunch of features, it has an underlying philosophy that really runs counter to traditional social media.
