That's a hard question to answer precisely, but one I think about often. I use snapchat and text and gchat extensively, and I often wonder what it is about snapchat that makes it more convenient. As best I can tell it's two things:
1. The ephemerality makes me feel less self-conscious about the quality of the picture. It's going away momentarily, never to be seen again, so all I care about is conveying what is happening in the moment, not getting the perfect shot.
2. It's fast. Snapchat sacrifices image quality for speed to some extent, and the interface is faster and more fluid, particularly for broadcasting a snap to multiple people.
These things combine to make sending snaps feel very conversational. When I think of sending an image by text it feels like a hassle, and i'll only do it if it's a picture I want someone to have for more than 10 seconds.
I'm not sure if this explanation totally conveys my meaning, but in using it, it is quite clear to me that there is indeed something categorically different between snapchat and MMS texting, though it is admittedly somewhat hard to pin down what that is.
I get it, they are disposable pics. I'm in the camp that anything I take time to snap a picture of, isn't just some disposable moment that I want a super compressed version of. Far too much junk, overly compressed, and overly filtered pics as it is.
Ya, but to me, that is exactly the perspective taken by snapchat. It allows you to capture moments you want to convey to people in a throwaway sense, but frees you from keeping them around mucking up your digital environment for eternity.
It allows you to express yourself via images in a fundamentally different way. To simply photograph/record the thing happening in front of you because it was funny or amusing for a second, but not have to ask yourself the question "is this worth preserving forever?". It turns a snap into the equivalent of throwaway, idle verbal conversation.
Texts/instagram are the written letters of the digital age. Careful, considered (and if not, people think you're an idiot and look down on you). Snaps are in-person chatter. They don't have to be super meaningful or well composed, just the digital equivalent of "how about this weather we're having".
1. The ephemerality makes me feel less self-conscious about the quality of the picture. It's going away momentarily, never to be seen again, so all I care about is conveying what is happening in the moment, not getting the perfect shot.
2. It's fast. Snapchat sacrifices image quality for speed to some extent, and the interface is faster and more fluid, particularly for broadcasting a snap to multiple people.
These things combine to make sending snaps feel very conversational. When I think of sending an image by text it feels like a hassle, and i'll only do it if it's a picture I want someone to have for more than 10 seconds.
I'm not sure if this explanation totally conveys my meaning, but in using it, it is quite clear to me that there is indeed something categorically different between snapchat and MMS texting, though it is admittedly somewhat hard to pin down what that is.