The popular social media app Snapchat released a three-feature update this week: Lenses, Trophies, and Paid Replays.
SNAPCHAT UPDATES
Lenses
If you have Snapchat, you have probably seen by now the grotesque images of your friends vomiting rainbows and donning wrinkly-faced, monocled old-man grimaces. The Lenses update appears to be the product of Snapchat acquiring and implementing facial recognition software. The result is very similar to the real-time photo and video distortions we’re familiar with from Apple’s Photo Booth effects page–only stranger.
To activate the feature, first make sure you’ve installed the app’s most recent update. Next, open your front-facing camera in the app as though you’re about to take a selfie. Then, press and hold on your face. Seven Lens options will appear next to the shutter button for you to play around with: a grotesque zombie, a terminator-type screen, heart eyes, weeping tears, a face full of wrinkles, a strange mustachioed vampire-looking option, and of course, the rainbow vomit.
The Lenses appear to be one more in a string of features Snapchat has unveiled that make it more fun for us to play with pictures of our own faces. Between Lenses, geotags, text enhancement options, and the classic drawing tools from the original version, sending pictures on Snapchat is really more like creating and sharing little works of goofy art.
Trophies
The new Trophies feature will award stickers to users for unlocking certain achievements, like sending ten snaps with the front-facing flash on. It appears to be a continuation of the recent emojis update that labeled your best friends (and your peon devotees of unrequited admiration), which included a feature that kept tabs on your snap streaks with other users. These are features that drive engagement and encourage you to set usage goals on the app. They keep you coming back, which means more users, more user dependence, and more potential revenue from in-app advertisements. Snapchat is a business, too.
Paid Replays
And that brings us to the paid Replays. For $0.99, you can now replay three different snaps of your choosing, one time each. It’s the first in-app purchase for Snapchat, and it essentially allows you to undo the fundamental impermanence of digital image sharing that the medium is built on. We all got into Snapchat because it offered freedom from the high stakes of Internet permanence. Of course, this required work in order to convince ourselves that all those snaps really aren’t archived anywhere accessible (which I think we all knew wasn’t the case).
Touché, Snapchat. Maybe now we’ll think twice before sending anything extra-questionable. But I stand by the replay value of the five-chin selfies. Accidentally sending one of those to my crush instead of to my sister was about as liberating as it gets for a millennial.
