Fast To Produce, Fast To Consume
Someone was asking me the other day why I use Snapchat on a daily basis. After all, while I may be in the target demographic by name, I’m not really a part of that world. So what draws me in?
It’s pretty simple, really. I view Snapchat as basically a visual, social journal.¹ I use it to record what I’m doing throughout a day and send it off, via Stories,² to anyone who cares enough to follow. And this is also how I follow several peoples’ lives.
It’s weird. While some of my very good friends — and my wife, at times — also use Snapchat this way. The majority of people I follow are more what I would call acquaintances or colleagues. And yet, because I follow them on Snapchat, I feel more in the know of their daily lives than I do with many of those people I’m far more close with.
Anyway. In this regard, I can see why Snapchat could and is replacing Facebook for many young people. They may still be using that network, but they may use it for different reasons, like Messenger or Instagram, etc. None of this insight is anything nothing new, of course.
More interesting to me is why myself and others prefer to share our lives multiple times a day on Snapchat versus Facebook. For some, the network is the thing. But for me, it’s all about the speed.
And it’s not just the speed with which I can consume snaps — just as vital is the speed at which I can share them. There’s no need to type anything. No need to scroll through a long list of places from a database. No need to tag people. Etc. I just take a picture, swipe a few times to filter if I feel like it, then off it goes. Done. Shared.
Snapchat is one of the few networks I can think of where the speed at which you can share content is roughly equal to the speed at which you can consume content.
It seems so obvious, and yet it’s incredibly hard to pull off. If it weren’t, everyone would clearly be doing it. Because this seems like the way to build a perfect, truly social, network.
¹ To this end, my number one feature request is a way to automatically download your Snapchat Stories each day at the same time. Yes, I know you can manually do this, but I often forget — and that’s mildly tedious. And yes, I know this sort of goes against the entire ethos of ephemerality of Snapchat. But damnit, I’m an old, I want my daily visual journal saved!
² As noted above, the key for me is Snapchat Stories. I basically never use the original p2p version feature of Snapchat.
