The success story of SnapChat starts with its development. And development, in turn, cannot be accomplished without at least a preliminary mental representation of the end result. The project was taken by a group of students, and despite their young age, the team was able to team up and think up something new and demanding. Among the designers were Frank Brown, Bobby Murphy and Evan Spiegel — they together studied at the Stanford University.
The application allows users to share video files, photos and pictures with attached text messaging. For these files the users choose the recipients, and, depending on that, choose a time limit specifying the period for which the recipient will be able to view these messages. The developers have not changed this feature from March 2015: one can set the time from 1 to 10 seconds. After this time, the files disappear from the recipient’s device, but they don’t remove from the server SnapChat. It is possible to see this message only once in a day and only the last ones. This system may seem inconvenient, but users of this app do not bother: according to statistics they can send to 700 thousand files, and viewed files can be at about 500 thousand. The functionality was designed for instant reaction of users to incoming messages or not leaving the dialogue in order to be able to see the files.
First talk about the project was in 2011 when a group of developers planned it as student work. However, at that time no one imagined that the product would become not only an independent social network, but would acquire such a resounding popularity.
The program was launched in August 2011. There was not a special advertising of product, but through conversations “on the streets” people started to recognize the principle of the application and became interested in it. Thus, in the day of the launch, everyone was surprised: every second was recorded about 25 send and receive files among casual users.
It was difficult to believe in success, but two years later all has become accustomed to it. According to general estimates, since the period of running the application, there were more than 750 million sending files. A success story of SnapChat doesn’t end at all — the project is still actively developed.
