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Snapchat Introduces Memories: a Searchable, Shareable Archive of Your Snaps (theverge.com)
Casey Newton, reporting for The Verge: At a time when its social networking rivals are racing to promote more real-time sharing, Snapchat is turning its attention to the past. The company today introduced Memories, a way of saving and sharing old snaps in a private archive inside the main app. It's a living, social camera roll in which photos and videos can be organized, edited, and shared long after they are taken. The introduction of Memories represents a significant shift for the famously ephemeral Snapchat -- and reflects the app's growing status as the default camera for millions of users.Reporter Alex Kantrowitz says this update "will make Snapchat feel a little less raw and in-the-moment, and a little more polished and, err, stale. That's a big deal." In a post on BuzzFeed News, he says this update will make Snapchat more addictive. He explains why: Posts from Snapchat are regularly repurposed. On any given day, you're likely to encounter saved snaps on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. People post snaps to other networks because they don't want to constrain themselves to one network. But they also post them elsewhere because saving a snap to a camera roll can feel like tossing it into the abyss. Posting a snap to Instagram, however, can give it a sense of permanence and organization. By creating Memories, Snapchat is building its own home for these old snaps. Whether it's the company's intention or not, Memories will create an avenue within Snapchat for people to do what they're doing with snaps outside, namely: save, organize, edit, republish. The likely result: more time inside Snapchat, less in other apps.
so the app whose main claim to fame was that your pictures (and video?) would disappear from the screen of the recipient has pivoted to the functionality of storing those pictures (like your good old camera app does already) so that they can be sent out again later?
OK, the innovation is staggering. I am sure this adds a few billions to the valuation...
You can't handle the truth.
Instagram and FB are mostly an archive of old stuff.
Exactly! Instagram and FB should develop an algorithm that shows you new things. New things you'd be interested in. They could arrange them in a stream, so you'd get a stream of new things that you're interested in. Now that would be a game changer.
I thought the *entire* point of SNAPCHAT was that nothing was supposed to be saved! That was the entire point of their business model, their venture capital and their IPO (if it exists).
So, after it was revealed that they actually do save shit, now they are going to embrace that, and allow you to revisit your old nude selfies that are already all over the internet.
It's like Facebook suddenly switching gears and announcing that they are going to model themselves after Yahoo, and become a search engine.
Screw it, I'm going to start a business with an impossible plan, then, after I've gotten millions in capital, I'll announce that the company is something else, get my sock puppet and sell dog food over the internet.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Then they could take all the new things you are interested in, and not show them to you. Instead, they could show you old things that you already saw or don't care about, interspersed with what they think you should care about based on the data they have mined about you, your physical location, what your Aunt Gertie liked 13 weeks ago, etc.