Idea: Share your Snapchat Story to selected list of 20 or more people, and prompt when select 20th person or when select maximum who can receive one-to-one notifications for Chat 4.11.2016 (#113)

Purpose is to enable people to share to the friends they want to share to, including given tendency in social networks that people add more and more people over time to point where start to share less such as because of context being lost.

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D.J. Sherrets

5 min readApr 12, 2016

People can use Snapchat to send a photo/video one-to-one to a number of people and/or to post to their Story. The Story is visible for 24 hours, and the one-to-one is available until viewed.
In social media, there is some issue where people add so many friends that the context of who you share with shifts such that people may decide to share less.
For now, Snapchat is relatively newer and so may have less issue with context changes.
But over time, and even now for people who have been users for more than a couple years, there are so many friends that context does start to shift.
Question then is about how many posts there are by people over time and in what cases perhaps people may be sharing less to their Stories.
Snapchat however may be less subject to context problems because the person who posts knows who views their posts, and so would at least know who viewed each post and/or who tends to view each post.
Knowing the audience of your post is important to understanding your comfort in choosing to share.
A problem with sending a photo/video to a lot of people is that may be disruptive because of sending so many notifications.
A problem with posting a video to all friends is that may be hundreds of people on Snapchat for some people, and so there may be some desire to share to a smaller audience but without sending notifications.
A reason for not wanting to send notifications to see who is interested in seeing your posts without causing them to be notified about your posting.

First you make a photo/video then tap next then you select 19 recipients and that is where this design starts. Scroll down and select “Person 20” which causes a pop-up to appear asking if you want to add the snap to your Story for the list of people selected or not.
Tap to “Add to Story List” which changes the selected option from “Send one-to-one” to “Add to Story List.” Tap on “Recipients” at the top to scroll to the top quickly.
Then tap “Send one-to-one” to see the change including making “Add to My Story” available again. Then tap to “Add to My Story List” that activates again.
Select “Last Story” which opens the list of people who were selected. Scroll down, then tap “Select All (59)” which changes to “Selected All (59)” and the total selected goes from 20 to 71 because of the overlap in some people already selected and the people in this list.

Opportunity is to enable people to share to a particular set of people in the Story.
Focus is trying to maintain context for people sharing given that friend lists over time become large enough that sharing feels less private.
Show the last few lists of people who had been viewed with the ability to tap to see more lists, and perhaps defaulting to only showing the last one list used or perhaps last two lists used if those two lists were used recently such as in the last week or two weeks.
Prompt when you select 20 or more people to “Add to Story List” is optional and intended as a way to let people know about the feature. This could be shown only when necessary.
The “Add to Story List” option only appears when you have selected 20 people because idea is to still focus on enabling one-to-one sharing that includes sending notifications, and figuring how many people selected would indicate wanting to share to a custom audience.
When you select the 20th person, then the option can appear, including even if there is no prompt shown.
A reason to not do this is that sharing to a smaller audience is not desired.
An alternative could be to make a feature that lets people selected people to not longer share to My Story.