Snapchat. A social media app that is used globally and developed by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown (former students at Stanford University) back in July of 2011. Even if you're over the age of 50, or under the age of 10, you know what this app is or have heard of it in some sort of fashion. This app is really different that any other kind of social media platform. For me, I would describe Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter kind of all on the same "wave length." You can create an account where you upload pictures of your life, people in it, events that have happened, memories, etc., and people can search you whenever they want, and all your information will pop up. However, snapchat is a little different. You still create an account and have your username and such, however that's it. You then can add people, and send messages or pictures back and forth and after a certain amount of time, they disappear forever. This is a really unique concept and something different that no one has created or thought of before in any other social media branch.
Back in July of 2011 when this app was launched, it took a little while for people in middle school, high school, and even college and beyond to give it a real chance. As you can see from the diagram above, it gives you a visual representation of peoples interest in the app Snapchat from when it was launched in July of 2011, to when it became super popular in July of 2013, and beyond. You can see that for almost a year, this app wasn't really gaining popularity at all. It did not have a big spike in attention, but then around the summer of 2012, people started hearing about it, word got around, and after that it took off, as you can see the difference in popularity from July of 2012 to Jan of 2013. However, the real question is, what made it popular? What gave people the interest in downloading the app and sharing that idea with their friends?
This concept of trying to figure out why new technology becomes popular and to explain how, why and at what rate new ideas and technology spread is called Diffusion of Innovations. This term was developed by Everett Rogers, and Rogers argues that diffusion is the process by which an innovation is communicated over time among the participants in a social system. The origins of the diffusions of innovations theory are varied and span multiple disciplines. Roger then talks about how there are four main elements that are involved with the spread of new technology: the innovation itself, communication channels, time, and social system. For snapchat, I think that time was its friend, and creating different versions of the original innovation helped it become what it is today.
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