Snapchat Is Trying to Be a Lot Like Twitter

Snap, the makers of Snapchat, is reportedly discussing some major changes to the platform. Reuters reports that the company is discussing plans to introduce snaps that last forever.

The changes will be part of the company’s Stories Everywhere, which was one of the first steps from the firm to open up the content on Snapchat to everyone. The feature allowed users to embed Snaps on websites and share links to Snaps so they can be viewed outside of the app.

But the only problem was that these snaps didn’t last forever, either. Even if you added a snap to Snapchat’s public Our Story, your snaps would eventually disappear. And that completely destroys the point of Stories Everywhere, as news sites don’t embed public Snaps as they are bound to disappear after a while.

The new, permanent snaps, could really help tackle that. The company is reportedly planning to make the snaps last longer, or even permanent. It’s also discussing plans of revealing the identities of Snapchat users that post public snaps.

And that is a really big deal. Privacy and content moderation are going to be huge concerns here, but I think Snap will be able to tackle these if they simply follow what Twitter does (and maybe do it better, of course, because Twitter really isn’t good at that). But once Snapchat is really public, and snaps don’t disappear, it could help the platform reach a lot more users. It will also open up the platform and really make it social. And that sounds a lot like Twitter, except its just going to be stories, snaps of world events, people having fun, random snaps, and teens doing stupid shit.