Snapchat announces Group Chat, Allows Group Chats With Up to 16 People

Its Christmas Time.. The perfect time to share your experiences with your small group of loved ones! To help you share your "memories", Snapchat today announced a Group feature for you to start chats with up to 16 friends.

"The holidays are a great time to hang out with friends and spend time with family - it's always better together! We couldn't think of a better time to announce Groups, a new way to communicate with up to 16 friends on Snapchat," said a blog post from Snap Inc, the parent company of California-based platform known for its disappearing messages

Chats sent to a group are deleted by default after 24 hours, and can be opened and replayed just once by each recipient. If unopened, the chat is deleted after 24 hours, just like other messages.

You can see who's present in a group chat at the bottom of the screen, and are given the option to start a private chat by selecting individual friends’ names.

In addition to the update today, there are also new tools for you to customise your own stickers by either cutting them out from a photo with the Scissors function, or using a Paintbrush to draw cat ears and whiskers on your selfies.

You know, Nothing says Happy Holidays like a group snap to your friends with hand-drawn Santa hats.

Source: Snap Inc.

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Snapchat Partners with Foursquare to Enable Location-Specific Geofilter Advertising

Snapchat and Foursquare have entered into a partnership to power location-based geofilters and enable more targeted advertising. With this collaboration, Snapchat has gained access to Foursquare's 87 million locations database to target more ads based on its popular mask feature.

As you may know Foursquare is a mobile app that allows users to search and discover nearby places to visit, usually centred around food, entertainment, and nightlife. Foursquare structures its data through communication signals like GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. Its location data currently powers Twitter, Uber, Pinterest, and even Apple, and now Snapchat has become a part. 

Foursquare's Vice President of business development Mike Harkey believes that this partnership will offer advertisers to target specific customers in specific markets. He wrote in a post, "Now that Snap (Snapchat's parent company) has purchased our Places, they’ll be able to give Snapchatters better, more relevant Geofilters, and allow their advertisers more flexibility and creativity when they purchase Geofilters."

"Consider a surf brand. Now that we're powering Snapchat geofilters, the company could offer branded geofilters at a chain of surf shops or at every beach in the US. Or a soda company may now purchase geofilters across all fast food and convenience store locations," he adds.

This means your geofilters will change based on the location you are at, and advertisers can opt to only power geofilters in specific areas that suit their interest. For those unaware, geofilters are the popular overlays Snapchat provides to its users while taking photos and videos on the social platform.

This isn't the first time Foursquare has partnered with Snapchat for advertising. It was one of the first companies to place a 10-second advertisement on Snapchat's Discover channel for its Swarm check-in app.

If you're leaving under the seas and don't know, Snapchat is reportedly gearing up to go public and is planning on filing an IPO very soon. The company could go public as soon as March and be valued at $20 billion to $25 billion (roughly Rs. 1,35,316 crores to Rs. 1,69,146 crores), making it the largest IPO since Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd's went public two years ago valued at $170.9 billion. It would be the largest US technology IPO since Facebook Inc's debut in 2012 with a value of $81.2 billion.

Source: Medium

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Snapchat update adds ambient augmented reality overlays

The latest Snapchat update adds new features for augmented reality overlays in any scenario, not just selfies. The feature is called World Lenses, and works best with the main camera, and not the selfie shooter. There is a sparkling environment where clouds vomit rainbows, yellow butterflies, snow effect and a fountain of exploding hearts.

Some of the Lenses require users to look all around to find some objects. The clouds that vomit rainbows can only be seen if you turn your camera upward. Once the cloud starts vomiting a rainbow and its eyes cycle through colors users can follow the rainbow downwards to find it ending in a white splash. If you look around in the snow environment, you will find a walrus hovering with the word Chillin'. For users in the United States, there is a Vote World Lens that shoots out red, white and blue stars from an air horn. The butterflies and hearts move in the vertical orientation no matter how the phone is held, so these Lenses do not work well in the landscape mode.

Snapchat has borrowed a direct messaging feature that Instagram introduced back in 2013, called Instagram Direct. Long pressing on a snap allows users to reshare the snap with their contacts. The shared snaps appear in chat to initiate a conversation.

The World Lenses can be activated with a long tap anywhere on the screen. A new interface change allows users to navigate to the previous menu with a tap on the left side of the screen. The Lenses for faces can now be applied with a single tap on the face in selfie mode. The update is live and available to users on Android and iOS.

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Snapchat is doing away with the Auto Advance feature; announces Story Playlist

Snapchat had introduced the Auto Advance features earlier this year which drew criticism from users, as rather than tapping on a single friend's story and then bringing you back to the Stories page after viewing the story, the next person's story was automatically played and you'd have to manually back out to the Story menu.

Today, Snapchat announced on its blog that it was going to do away with Snapchat Story Auto Advance.

"We haven't given up entirely on this idea of making it easier to catch up with friends – so we took what we learned from Auto Advance and built Story Playlist," it said in its blog post. Starting with a few select Android users, Snapchat will soon allow you to add individuals to your Snapchat's "Story Playlist" (As they're calling it!), so that you can auto view all your favorite people's Stories on full screen and in the selected order.

To do so, you just need to tap on the story thumbnail on the left side of your friend's name, add their Story to the playlist. After selecting all stories, all you need to do is hit the play button.

Source: Snap Blog

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Snapchat rebrands itself as Snap Inc; Also launches a new line of sunglass-based camera, Spectacles.

Snapchat has rebranded itself as Snap Inc. The announcement was made to differentiate the company from its products. Snapchat, the photo-messaging app, continues to be called Snapchat. Snap also announced Spectacles, a new line of sunglass-based recording device. These are sunglasses with integrated cameras, with a button that takes Memories.

Spectacles is a "totally new type of camera" because it records videos from "the human perspective." The camera in Spectacles has a 115-degree field of view, which is wider than that of a normal smartphone camera, located on the frames near the left eye.

"Imagine one of your favorite memories. What if you could go back and see that memory the way you experienced it? That's why we built Spectacles," the company said in a blog post.

A button is to be tapped to take a 10 second video, that is instantly transmitted wirelessly to Snapchat, where it appears as a Memory. The specs charge in their charging case, and can be used for a whole day on a single charge. Snap claims the Spectacles use one of the smallest wireless video cameras in the world.

When Snaps are being taken, an LED light ring glows to show that a video is being recorded. The camera has a field of view of a hundred and fifteen degrees. They are available in blue, red and black, with highlights in the iconic Snapchat yellow. The glasses work only with Snapchat, and are expected to land in the market soon. Snap Inc has also indicated that they will be developing more products in the future.

Snapchat had indicated its intentions of getting into hardware when it joined the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, an industry body that maintains the wireless Bluetooth standard. There were speculations that Snapchat would be creating an Augmented Reality Headset.

Spectacles will cost $130, and will be available in limited quantities later in the fall. There will be three options: black, blue and coral.

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