Snapchat is one of the most unusual social networks to make it big online. You wouldn’t have thought that such a simple concept, handled arguably quite poorly to begin with, would become the huge behemoth it has today. And yet it has – and right now it’s flying higher than ever thanks to its 2.0 update.
Snapchat’s story is surprising enough on face value but when you learn some of the more surprising twists and turns, the plot only thickens. Read on and let’s take a closer look at some of the things you probably didn’t know about Snapchat…
The Original Snapchat App Was Badly Coded
If ever you think you can’t make it big online, let Snapchat be an inspiring story to suggest otherwise. Snapchat is by no means some miracle feat of coding. Rather, this was actually a relatively poorly put together piece of code and would sap huge amounts of battery and CPU power when running in the background even! That’s not to say it’s a bad app – only that it’s all the more impressive it was able to do as well as it did.
Facebook Tried to Buy Snapchat
When it was enjoying its first major surge in popularity, Snapchat was offered a purchase bid from Facebook worth $3 billion. That’s a huge vote of confidence from the biggest social network on the planet… and Snapchat turned it down!
Snapchat Can Do Whatever it Likes With Your Content
Before you think that Snapchat is a great underdog story we can all get behind, bear in mind that it is actually just as guilty of underhand tactics as all the bigger players, sadly.
Specifically, Snapchat retains the right to do whatever it wants with your content – including publishing it on their website or selling it! The terms of service read:
“You grant Snapchat a worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license to host, store, use, display, reproduce, modify, adapt, edit, publish, create derivative works from, publicly perform, broadcast, distribute, syndicate, promote, exhibit, and publicly display that content in any form and in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).”
That’s pretty despicable but note that Instagram has a very similar policy. The only difference? Instagram never claimed to be a private messaging service. (Facebook also has similar terms but only for publicly displayed content… so that’s something.)
There Are Ways to Get Around Snapchat’s Core Functionality
With that in mind, perhaps you’ll feel less guilty about using Snapchat in ways that were never intended by the company. If you want to save a photo you’ve taken – or that someone else has taken – then you can simply take a screenshot on Android devices.
Likewise, there is a hack that lets you record video for longer than 10 seconds on iPhone. Simply start recording your video, double tap on the home button to enable multitasking and then the video will carry on recording without any time restriction in place. Way to stick it to the man!