I don't mean to be a grumpy old man, but this seems even more pointless than usual. If it's not being used for sexual photos, then it's surely a fad that's going to die in a few months.
All that other crap can be done via normal messaging; there's precious little reason to use Snapchat except that it's (briefly, for now) the popular new thing.
This doesn't necessarily mean that sexting is the only legitimate use case, or even the predominant use case. Rather, I see as the use case pretty much anything that people want to share via SMS, or even on Facebook -- but don't want to remain up for long, or be seen accidentally by undesired audiences (parents, co-workers, friends who are outside the specific loop, etc.).
Snapchat is sort of like social networking as pointcasting, rather than social networking as broadcasting.
This is where Snapchat does extremely well. It makes the act of sending a picture or video as frictionless as possible. I've never sent a video through MMS, but I've probably sent over 200 Snapchat videos.
It's not like sending an MMS with video or pictures is hard, it just isn't as dead simple as using Snapchat.
Another thing people like to harp on is the fact that people can take screenshots, thus "defeating the purpose." Fair point, but I think people who say this haven't really used Snapchat and don't really get why it is so sticky.
Sure, one of my friends may screenshot a silly face pic I send, but that's happened maybe 10 times out of the 4k+ snaps I've sent. The fact is I know I am not leaving a huge digital trail compared to using SMS/MMS, FB, GroupMe, etc.
Even if the system isn't perfect, it is good enough for me to trust. And the whole interaction model encourages me to send more pics and videos than I would send to my friends before I used Snapchat. It's almost replaced text messaging for me. Why send a text to my friend that I'm hungover, when I can send an image or video with my tired looking face and overlay text and drawings. It's so much more expressive and interesting than a text.
Another reason I like Snapchat is that I don't keep in touch via SMS with a lot of my friends. I may text them only once a week or every couple of weeks, but with Snapchat, I may send them a pic of something funny a couple times a week. Snapchat has made sending pictures and videos as frictionless as possible, and has changed how I communicate with people (I'm serious here).
To disagree with mmakunas, I don't think people care about the privacy angle so much- I think it's about creating something entirely disposable, and the freedom that gives you. It's like an anti-Instagram- no filters and perfectly positioned shots, just point, shoot, send.
I'm not sure what the exactly psychology of it is or whether it even matters that the photos disappear but a lot of teens use Snapchat. Just take a look at the demographics of a Twitter search:
https://twitter.com/search?q=snapchat%20me&src=typd
Even if Snapchat doesn't do anything that normal messaging can't, they've clearly packaged it in such a way that it's tremendously popular. After all, if it was possible with normal messaging, why wasn't anyone doing it until Snapchat came about?
I think it's about creating something entirely disposable, and the freedom that
Part of that freedom comes from the level of privacy I think. But from looking at those tweets maybe I'm over estimating how people are explicitly thinking about privacy.
It just goes to show that is not always about creating something where the individual bits of functionality are new. Sometime the most compelling thing is putting a novel spin on what we already do and building a network of users around that.
There's a lot of stuff -- really dirty/nasty jokes, really ugly faces, and I'm sure you can use your imagination -- that you would bring up in personal conversation but not really want to have an SMS or email recording of. Hell, I worked in an office where a particularly nasty-minded (in the most entertaining way) coworker of mine would send/forward me e-mails of all sorts, then come over and make sure I would delete them afterward.
Sexting is just a very small portion of all the kinds of messages people don't really want saved.
Similarly, Snapchat encourages a certain kind of conversation, due to the disappearing photos, and ability to draw on them.
Maybe it doesn't make a lot of sense to use Snapchat just for sending goofy pictures, but that doesn't mean it can't become popular for just that.