When was snapchat made

By Alicia Stein. Corey Goldman. By Martin Baccardax. By TheStreet Staff. By Scott Rutt. By Eric Reed. See More. By December, Snapchat users were sending 50 million snaps per day, and the app rolled out an update that introduced the ability to record and send second videos. The best part?

Instead of having to toggle between two different photo and video recording modes, as with camera phones, users could simply hold down the photo capture button to record a video. In October , Snapchat launched Stories -- an ephemeral narrative of snaps that users could post for their friends to view for 24 hours. Brands and users started using Stories to share a fuller picture of what they were up to while still maintaining the hallmark disappearing factor.

In , Snapchat ramped up innovation and launched a slew of new features and updates. First, it introduced Chat in May, the messenger that still featured disappearing messages via text, in addition to the ability to see when your friend was "here" in the chat window so users could start a live video chat. Next, Our Story was rolled out in June, offering Snapchat users around the world to contribute photos and videos to a public feed of snaps from popular events.

Snapchat rolled out Geofilters in July that let users customize their snaps with filters and embellishments according to what city they were snapping from. October marked the beginning of Snapchat advertising , and ads started appearing in users "Recent Updates" section alongside all of their friends' stories. Users had the option to skip viewing the ads if desired, and like other Stories, they disappeared after 24 hours.

Here's what their first ad, for the movie "Ouija," looked like:. Source: Adweek. In November, Snapchat worked with Square to create Snapcash , which allowed users to easily send and receive money directly from Snapchat into their bank accounts.

Snapchat took another step into the world of monetization with Community Geofilters in December Users could create their own Geofilters or purchase branded filters for their business or sponsored event.

In January , Snapchat started offering many new ways for advertisers to earn money from its huge audience -- then roughly 75 million users. Snapchat introduced Discover , a new page easily accessible from the Snapchat home screen that featured short-form ad content from a variety of different publishers and channels like Vox, BuzzFeed, CNN, and Food Network.

Here's what it looks like in action:. Next, Tap to View was introduced. Where before, users had to hold their fingers on their phone screen to view snaps, now they only had to tap once to start watching. In June, Snapchat rolled out sponsored Geofilters to advertisers who wanted to pay for brand exposure in any given location. Here's what McDonald's first sponsored filter looked like:. Source: Los Angeles Times. In September, Snapchat launched the next big thing for avid selfie-takers: Lenses.

When users turned their cameras to be self-facing, by holding a finger down on their face, users could choose from a wide variety of Lenses to change their look. From puppy ears to barfing rainbows, selfies got a lot more creative. Check it out below:. Source: Snapchat. Stanford Campus. The final project, presenting this prototype and business plan, was a third of the grade for the course. While most of the other students worked in groups of three to five, Evan worked on his idea alone.

At the end of the class, everyone presented their prototypes to a panel of venture capitalists. There are dozens of entrepreneurship classes like this at Stanford, and while there is the allure of a team making it big, the vast majority of the students are just playing startup. Like a school science fair, everyone put together a visual presentation to display on tables in the back.

Each group sent a presenter to sell the judges on their project and receive feedback. Evan sat in the back of the classroom and watched his peers pitch their ideas. They ran the usual gamut from overpolished presentations by excited students seeking approval to underprepared undergrads just running out the clock until their turn was over. For the first time, Evan worried what other people would think about his app. They had to, right? He approached the front of the room like the entrance to a party, strutting confidently to show the crowd what he, Reggie, and Bobby had been working on tirelessly for the past six weeks.

Confident and comfortable, Evan enthusiastically explained to the other thirty students, two professors, and half a dozen venture capitalists that not every photograph is meant to last forever.

He passionately argued that people would have fun messaging via pictures. Why would anyone use this app? One of the venture capitalists suggested that Evan make the photos permanent and work with Best Buy for photos of inventory. Phil Knight in a appearance on Charlie Rose. That paper was the driving idea behind a company Knight founded called Nike. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Facebook developed the conditions that allowed Snapchat to flourish. In spite of this third failure to successfully pitch people on the idea, Evan remained undaunted.

And as he hoped to keep Reggie and Bobby engaged and driving on the project, he told them that everyone really liked their idea. But Evan and Bobby were used to ignoring the norms to chase their startup ideas. It hasn't all been smooth sailing, though, for the "Camera Company," which was the puzzling way Snapchat branded itself when it filed for its IPO in Early scandals, owing, in part, to the company's founding by a literal frat boy, will always be part of its history. Employees have continued to feel the aftershocks of those early tremors, and the consequences of operating in a white- and male-dominated tech industry , for years.

As inventive as Snap has been, it recently showed that it's not excused from answering the same question as every other social media startup: How can one company stay relevant when every other company is vying for users' attention?.

At its best and most pure, Snapchat is about playfulness, and communicating with friends without the stress of constructing a digital identity. But can it bring those founding ideals into the future while learning from its problematic moments in the past? From innovations to scandals, wins to losses, here are some defining highs and lows from a decade of Snapchat. Snapchat's first value proposition is still one of its strongest: Give people a way to send photos to their friends and, later, messages and videos , that disappear.

The lore goes that ousted co-founder Reggie Brown more on him in a second thought of an app that would let users send self-deleting photos during a conversation about sexting. The earliest version of the app was designed to minimize the ability of users to take screen grabs.

It also added the whimsical or, juvenile? Today, Snapchat's corporate mission statement says the app "empowers people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together," and that's all well and good. By contrast, in May of , the earliest date with a Wayback Machine snapshot for Snapchat. And then there's the story of Reggie Brown. Brown was one of Spiegel's Kappa Sigma brothers at Stanford. After the purported sexting convo, Brown says he took the idea of a deleting photos app to Spiegel.

The pair then brought in Bobby Murphy for his coding prowess. In , Brown sued the Snap bros for not giving him credit for his intellectual property. Snap settled the suit in and acknowledged Brown's role as the originator of the "deleting photos app" idea. Just as Snap was gaining momentum as a grown up company profiled by the likes of the New York Times , Gawker published a bunch of Spiegel's emails about parties and goings on at the fraternity, involving — most infamously — a stripper pole.