Smartphone owners have a new cool app to discuss, to use, to try almost every week. It can be a game, it can be an app that enhances the services a website offers, it can be a messaging app, a camera app, a social media app, a sound board app, and as a popular sitcom jokes: 'an app app' in which Zach Braff tells you what appetizer to order.
Multi-billion valuations, a 50 million user base, getting hacked and losing the contact details of 4.6 million users and a 23-year-old founder dissing a $3 billion offer from Mark Zuckerberg has a way of doing that.
So on to the basics. While Snapchat is a social messaging app, this is a quite different and much simpler animal than Twitter and Facebook. It is a camera app with a friends list and a share button - except you can capture only 'Snaps' of life. Snapchat says there are 400 million Snaps shared every day.
How is Snapchat different from any other chat app?
First, by function it is a photo and video-sharing app more than a chat app. Your timeline is more like a notification line and your conversation is purely in images and videos (nothing exceeding 10 seconds in length). It lets you caption the images (with a 31-character limit) and even doodle on them.
The median age of users of the app is 18. (Facebook's is now apparently at 40.) And just like the vividly visual Pinterest in its early days, Snapchat is said to have 70 percent female users.