When Was Snapchat Created?

With over four billion Snaps sent each day and hundreds of millions of daily active users, Snapchat is undoubtedly one of the most used social media platforms in the world. The application allows users to toy with augmented reality-based filters, play games, and send Snaps to friends. While these features are also available on other social media apps such as Instagram, Snapchat was the first media-sharing platform to develop disappearing messages. Most recently, the platform rebranded itself and now functions under its parent company called Snap. Over the years, Snapchat has released many features and has a long history of changes.

Did you know that Snapchat was initially called Picaboo? Back in 2011, three students at Stanford University came together and developed a media-sharing application with the idea of disappearing pictures at its core. At that time, Facebook used to be the most popular social media platform, and it did not allow users to send short-lived messages. Reggie Brown, one of the co-founders of Snapchat, came up with this concept and pitched it to Evan Spiegel. The duo reached out to Bobby Murphy to write the code for their idea as he was a software engineer. Several months later, a social media platform called Picaboo was launched from the living room of Spiegel’s father, or as we know it today, Snapchat. The original name of Snapchat was based on a game in which people hide their faces from a baby and pop back into sight, exclaiming the word ‘Peekaboo,’ which was similar to the platform’s core idea.

Shortly after the application was launched in Jul. 2011, the co-founders received a cease-and-desist notice from a company that had trademarked the name prior. Hence, it was in Sept. 2011 that Snapchat officially came into existence. However, during this process, Brown was forced out of the company by the other two co-founders. In the very beginning, the application was only launched for iOS, and it wasn’t until Oct. 2012 that it arrived on the Google Play Store. In his first-ever blog post published in May 2021, CEO Spiegel wrote that “Snapchat isn’t about capturing the traditional Kodak moment. It’s about communicating with the full range of human emotion — not just what appears to be pretty or perfect.” Shortly after, the unique idea of a temporary communication application became a hit among the youngsters, who did not want their social media activities and history to give them problems, as said by Spiegel in an interview with The Telegraph.

Video Snaps And Chat Were Added To Snapchat In 2012

From about two million Snaps being shared every day in May 2012 to 20 million Snaps being shared every day in Nov. 2012, the social media platform skyrocketed. In Dec. 2012, Snapchat introduced the ability to create 10-second videos. During the same time, the company was evaluated at $70 million. From there, the platform released several updates and features, like Snap Stories and Chat. While Snap Stories allowed users to post Snaps that remained live for 24 hours, Chats allowed users to send and receive text messages on the platform. Seeing the popularity of Snapchat, Facebook launched a similar digital product called Poke, but it failed to turn many heads. Snapchat even received an acquisition offer worth $3 billion from Facebook, but the former rejected it.

The popular Snapchat feature called Geofilters was launched in 2014 when it enabled users to customize the content they share based on their location. In addition, Snapchat also launched Snapcash, which gave users the ability to send and receive money on the platform. Around this time, the application reached the milestone of 50 million daily active users. Snapchat also released two new features in 2015 called Discover and Lenses. The former allowed users to watch content created by other users and enabled paid advertising on the platform. The latter used face detection technology to apply filters on real-time image feed. The number of videos watched on the platform hit a whopping 10 billion in 2016, which marked a pivotal point in the platform’s timeline as Snapchat rebranded itself as Snap Inc.

The Popular Snapstreaks Were Introduced In The Year 2016

Do you send Snapstreaks to your friends regularly? Snapchat released the feature in 2016 when it also reached 150 million daily active users for the first time. During this year, Snapchat released Bitmojis and Memories, a feature that allowed users to save Snaps and use them in the future. Interestingly, Google offered to buy Snapchat for a tremendous $30 billion in May 2016, but Snap turned down the offer. However, the launch of Stories on Instagram affected the growth of Snapchat to a significant extent. In 2017, Snap (Snapchat’s parent company) was evaluated to be worth $23 billion when it decided to go public. The company also launched its first product called Spectacles smartglasses which came with cameras that recorded 10-second videos and allowed users to share them with their friends.

Features such as Snap Map and World Lenses with AR were added to Snapchat in the year 2017 when the company also released an update, due to which it faced backlash. The update separated media content from the content shared by friends and displayed Snapchat Stories with individual Snaps and messages. Users did not receive the update well, and over a million people signed a petition on Change.org to reverse the changes. In Feb. 2018, Snap saw a hard time when the popular American model and businesswoman Kylie Jenner said she was not using Snapchat anymore, wiping out over $1 billion from Snap’s worth. Powering through all the hard times, Snapchat became the fifth most downloaded application of the decade in 2019.

In 2020, Snapchat released the Spotlight feature that gave users the ability to discover and share short videos. Additionally, Snapchat’s Lens Studio was also launched around the same time, and it allowed users to create custom AR lenses. Recently, Snap also introduced Minis, which are small applications within Snapchat that allow users to play games on the application. Over the past two years, Snap’s shares have grown by over 450 percent. Currently, Snapchat is speculated to have over 300 million daily active users who love to experiment with the myriad of filters, maintain their Snapscore and play with the Mini applications present on the platform to stay connected with their near and dear ones.

Source: HubSpot