Oxford Dictionary has finally caught up to 2013 and has picked “Selfies” as 2013 word of the year. “Selfies” are pictures where the photographer just takes photo of themselves alone and usually doing nothing.  This was increased by the install of a front camera on smart phones. Multiple sites use these photos to their advantage. There’s Instagram, where you post pictures for the world to see and then there’s Snapchat.

     Snapchat is a disappearing photo-sharing service where you take photos, or videos, of anything and send it to your friends. They self-destruct after a certain amount of time, with a maximum of 10 seconds.  You have to hold you finger down on the screen to see it for the time the sender wants you to see it. I usually send it for seven seconds.

    You can also screen shot it, where they take the photo and save it in your camera roll. The one up/downside of screenshotting is that is notifies you if someone has screenshotted your picture. Which is a bad thing because you could send a horrible picture and your friends can screenshot it and use it as revenge.

   Snapchat is getting increasingly popular. It has 80 million users in the US alone. According to their CEO, Snapchat is seeing 400 million snaps per day. This surpasses the photo sharing activity on both Facebook and Instagram.  This includes “broadcast snaps” where you can send the picture to multiple people, turing the one snap into many snaps.

      Currently Snapchat added this story thing, which I don’t like. It allows users to send multiple Snapchats all in a row and you can see it for 24 hours. This is to make it easier for you to send it to all of your contacts without clicking on all their names. If you get annoyed with them all you go to do is open them, then they go away unless you go to the person’s name on your contact list and you can see it again.

    Another quality of Snapchat is that they have this little marker on the upper right side. It contains all the colors of the rainbow if you drag your finger along the side of it. The only downside is that they don’t have black, white or brown. Though i did find these colors by getting cheats.

   To get friends you request them, either from your contacts or Facebook. They can also request you and you can either accept them or not. You can also block them if they start to annoy you. This is exactly like Facebook and Instagram.

    Snapchat does has some glitches that are annoying but besides that its a fun app. It’s not surprising that this very-private and self destructing app is more popular against the very public Instagram, where content lives forever and is seen by many.  I use Snapchat alot and so do my friends, more so than texting. I use it so much my parents always make fun of me when i take “selfies” for my friends.

         Being so popular has made them number four on the Apple iTunes store and a top app in the high school community.