Snapchat says it is ready to monetize its tremendous engagement:

While Facebook’s acquired photos app sees people share the occasional photo publicly and browse its feed, Snapchat hosts incredible time-in-app as users privately send photo after photo while carrying on multiple conversations with friends. These photos (and videos) delete themselves less than 10-seconds after being viewed, encouraging users to create and send more “Snaps”. The push notifications these ephemeral messages generate lead to frequent return visits. Curiosity about what funny face, current surroundings, or racy imagery their friends have just sent them creates goads people to check Snapchat as soon as their pinged, keeping conversations moving along briskly.

They're going to build a massive salesforce to sell in-app mobile ads.

Did you know that more images are now shared on Snapchat than on Instagram and Flickr combined?

Wow.

Snapchat means "Be With Me Now":

Spiegel and co-founder Murphy have carefully selected their media outreach, from exclusives in The New York Times to appearing on The Colbert Report, to reach beyond the classroom types. They want their app to become a household name.

While many wrote off Snapchat as just a novelty, it’s becoming more and more clear that it’s actually an important new medium for communication. Posting to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter can seem like stale pandering for Likes and favorites, or a vain declaration of accomplishment. “I was there then.” But Snapchat feels like a shared moment in time, an urgent window from one person’s life into another. Snapchat means “Be With Me Now.”

Users now send 150 million images a day.

That makes it second only to Facebook in terms of image sharing, with a fraction of the user base.

Mother of God.

snapchat = sextchat.  plain and simple

oh, and uhh...SEX SELLS

Why do they have no competition? Facebook tried to build a similar app but no one wanted to use it.

the ephemeral nature + push notifications really turns activity on fire, non?  makes me think of Candy Crush i.e. games with a pay-to-continue model

Yeah, it's the "look at this in the next 10 seconds or you'll never see it" that has people addicted.

Screen shots, my good man.  Screen shots.

Yes but you have to launch the app within 10 seconds or you don't get the screen shot!

I predict a sharp drop in productivity.  :)

You got that right.

The thing that is probably most troubling about SnapChat (from my old man perspective) is that it is expressly not "of the web" — and in fact, kind of flies in the face of the "once it's on the internet, it can never be removed" maxim. I would imagine that many teenagers really detest that aspect of the web — and SnapChat provides a ready-made answer solution with security through fleeting obscurity — resulting in less stress, less paranoia, and more freedom of expression.

I wouldn't say that's troubling but I would say that it is Snapchat's advantage over web/mobile hybrids like Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, and Google+.

Being purely mobile means embracing the ephemeral. Twitter was a step in this direction but Snapchat takes it all the way.

And yeah as a result it feels safer to use.

In fact, I could see Snapchat (or something like it!) being a killerApp for Google Glass.

It's troubling insomuch as it forces me to rethink digital media as being ephemeral and not lasting. It means you don't need organization anymore because nothing is retained. It means you don't need search. It means you don't need your own storage. 

I mean, Flickr comes out and says that they're going to give you 1TB of data storage; SnapChat comes out and says it'll delete your photo [roughly] within 10 seconds of a recipient viewing it. It just inverts the whole promise of "Big Data" by returning us to an era of fleeting data, unreliable zip drives, and floppy disk sized photos.

Also, change is hard, m'kay?

Heh. M'kay.

I think there can be room for both.

Apple is about to announce Flickr's terabyte as the default storage for iPhone.

Which means that consumers will have options for disappearing (Snapchat) and permanent (Flickr).

A world with both options means consumers can decide what's for now, and what's forever.

That's a good thing, I believe.

http://www.thebolditalic.com/blog_posts/2818-5-ways-snapchat-improves-sextingsubsequently, on a related note - Chaturbate.

You got me all hopeful but this video has *zero* sexting:

SnapChat ended up raising $80 million. It is now worth $800 million:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/22/source-snapchat-snaps-up-80m-from-ivp-at-a-800m-valuation/

Says it WON'T use the $$ to build its mobile salesforce.

The rumor mill rarely gets all of its details right.

Still, it's amazing that SnapChat is worth so much. It's practically Instagram. 

i can see Snapchat as an auxiliary or gateway into camming as a revenue source.  Are there any studies on this, since camming has long been an ephemeral "right now" medium.