Mark Zuckerberg isn’t afraid to throw around a couple of Billion Dollars here and there. Â After buying Instagram and WhatsApp it came as no surprise when Zuckerberg offered $3BN for the self-destructing communication app Snapchat.
What is Snapchat?
Snapchat is an app for smart phones which is primarily used by teenagers. The app allows you to take a picture or a video and send it to your Snapchat contacts. It lasts for up to 10 seconds, after which it self-destructs. As well as that it includes other features such as choice of picture filters, a draw function so you can doodle on your pictures, and you can insert a small amount of text to your picture so you can send your friends short messages. If this wasn’t enough to tease people into downloading the app, Snapchat recently added a text-messaging function so users can have conversations over Snapchat which again get deleted after a short period of time.
Why is Snapchat so popular?
Teenagers are starting to get bored of Facebook, there’s not a great deal of privacy on there anymore, and as more and more parents are beginning to join the social media giant it’s starting to turn teenagers away from sharing pictures, comments and videos to the site. There are just some things that teenagers want to hide from their parents but still share with their friends, which is why Snapchat has become so popular amongst the younger generation. It’s rumoured that Snapchat users are sharing as many as 400 million photos per day which is still increasing as the app is becoming more and more popular.
Snapchat rejected Facebook’s $3BN offer, so what’s next?
To everyone’s amazement, the Facebook Snapchat acquisition fell through when Snapchat rejected Facebook’s $3BN deal. A Chinese company gave Snapchat an estimated value of around $4BN so they felt that they were worth a lot more than Facebook were offering. Of course Zuckerberg isn’t one to just give up, so he’s come up with a new app which will rival his much desired Snapchat.
The rise of Slingshot
Slingshot is a new toy that Zuckerberg has come up with to rival the Snapchat app that he was unsuccessful in purchasing last year. This new app will be similar to Snapchat and Vine. It will allow users to send private video-messages to their contacts. The app is rumoured to be available for download next month and if it works well it could potentially harm Snapchat’s active user base. However it’s hard to tell how popular this new Slingshot app will become, only time will tell if it has the potential to become more successful than Snapchat.
There is a massive instant messaging war between WhatsApp (now owned by Facebook), Facebook messenger, Snapchat and Vine, but who do you think will come out on top?
WhatsApp are still currently getting through more messages per day than any other platform but who do you think will take second place? I am interested to know, tell me in the comments.
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