A common thing we hear about social media today is that near-constant picture taking means not ‘living in the moment’. We should put the phone down and just experience life rather than worry ourselves with its documentation. This sentiment wrongly assumes that documentation and experience are essentially at odds, a conceptual remnant of how we used to think of photography, as an art object, as content, rather than what it is often today, less an object and more a sharing of experience. But not all social media are built the same, and I think we can use a distinction in social platforms: those that are based in social media versus those that are more fundamentally about communication.

A security group first published a report about potential Find Friends abuse in August 2013. Shortly thereafter, we implemented practices like rate limiting aimed at addressing these concerns. We will be releasing an updated version of the Snapchat application that will allow Snapchatters to opt out of appearing in Find Friends after they have verified their phone number. We’re also improving rate limiting and other restrictions to address future attempts to abuse our service. The Snapchat community is a place where friends feel comfortable expressing themselves and we’re dedicated to preventing abuse.

Over the past year we’ve implemented various safeguards to Finding Friends via phone numbers. We recently added additional counter-measures and continue to make improvements to combat spam and abuse.

Two questions we get a lot are “do you keep all of the Snaps?” and “do you look at them?” An earlier blog post detailed how Snaps are stored and when they are deleted, so now with the introduction of Stories, we’d like to share a bit about access.

Every Snap received brings excitement and change. Today is no different. We’re introducing Snapchat Stories. A totally new way to share your day with friends - or everyone. It’s fun and ephemeral, just like Snapchat.

Social media doesn’t need to be what it has come to be. Social media is young, growth comes with pains, and we should keep questioning assumptions and push this new media to new limits.

Technology has a way of making time simultaneously important and baffling. Communication technologies from speaking to writing to recording sound and sight disrupt temporality, mixing the past, present, and future in unpredictable new ways.

Snapchatters are sharing over 200 million snaps every day. And thanks to our incredible and hardworking team, we’ve been able to support the growth of Snapchat with minimal overhead. But in order to continue scaling while developing the Snapchat experience, we needed to build a bigger engineering team and figure out how to pay our server bills.

There’s a new iOS version available in the App Store today. It includes some critical fixes for bugs and crashes, so please download it if you’ve been experiencing issues.

There’s been some speculation lately about how snaps are stored and when and how they are deleted. We’ve always tried to be upfront about how things work and we haven’t made any changes to our practices, so we thought it’d be cool to go over things in a bit more detail.