Why Snapchat Is Moving Further Away From Disappearing Messages

So disappearing messages appear to have been a cute hook to get younger users interested.

But if you want to really scale, it seems that you have to offer some level of preservation, especially if you want to attract advertising - and the revenue that generates. JL

Kurt Wagner reports in Re/code:

Snapchat has moved well beyond its initial appeal to users, which was that you could send photo and video messages to friends that disappeared after they were viewed. It’s what you can do on basically every other social network, like Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. As Snapchat has gotten bigger, it has more readily adopted the idea of preserving user content

Snapchat’s ephemerality is, well, disappearing.

The company announced a new product called Memories that lets users store photos and videos on Snapchat’s servers for later viewing. That means you can keep a list of all your snaps and revisit them or re-share them from inside the app at a later date. Recode’s sister site, The Verge, has a more detailed story on how the new product actually works.

But the bigger takeaway here is that Snapchat has moved well beyond its initial appeal to users, which was that you could send photo and video messages to friends that disappeared after they were viewed. You can still do that on Snapchat, but there are now numerous ways to share and save content for an extended period of time, like 24-hour Stories or saving snaps to your phone’s camera roll.

Sound familiar? It’s what you can do on basically every other social network, like Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. As Snapchat has gotten bigger, it has more readily adopted the idea of preserving user content. It seems to be working, but it’s worth watching to see if the appeal of Snapchat — that snaps were once raw, in-the-moment messages — is diminished at all now that you can curate your stories in much the same way you curate your Instagram or Facebook persona.

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