For reasons (inability to care about streaks) I've been wondering what Snap's game plan is since there's no social glue building/spreading features being added to Snapchat like there is present in other social networks. It makes snap seem like a personal network, and that's fine, but it means Snap doesn't try to get more mature.
Even snapscore feels too nebulous because it's global and is only visible to friends. When you meet someone with 100+ streaks (which you can't really see) or 250k or higher snapscore it barely means anything. And you don't necessarily want to share the details of friendships and interactions with other people. If Snaps had reactions like Facebook and Snap used that data to give your account an overall 'feel' like if you have mostly funny snaps, or lewd snaps, or important snaps.. would that help new people to find you? Like why can't you 'like' things and why are streaks something that's community driven but virtually ignored in the app itself. Would adding notifications for streaks ruin things?
Basically I learned how to use Snapchat from one person. It's a struggle to use it without her because of all it's apparent deficiencies.
There's also that Snapchat is supposed to be the best photo sharing app but it's probably the most ass photo editing app. No crop? No zoom? Typically have to use 2 or 3 external apps to edit photos that weren't captured with Snapchat's garbage camera. And don't even mention how nearly all modern phones can take extremely high resolution photos and video but they are totally wasted on Snaps except that's my whole point. Why aren't Snaps just previews that are linked to HiRes versions stored on the cloud service of your choice (Google Photos and iCloud for example). That simple change would alter Snapchat significantly because it would give incentive to those cloud services to treat snap users as big business (especially premiums). Where it would be totally reasonable to pay Snap too.
I have this same problem with Instagram tbh because Facebook does host larger resolution versions of photos posted to IG (did you know that?). It's not the same for videos which is a shame. You just can't access the larger pictures easily and typically you don't care because everyone is used to the asinine locked portrait mode of IG. Yes Snapchat also has that same view but at least snaps are full screen.
Almost all of the sharing that happens on Snapchat is based on Snaps (which lose quality and meaning as they are shared because you can't see who touched that snap and what was added to it) instead of being supported as data driven views in the app. Example when you open a saved snap you can edit it. Why can't you share saved snaps and other people can also edit them? Like remove or change filters? Facebook almost does that when they talked about remixing photos. And like snap could pick up on the games people play and make them features (which is also why it's hard to figure out Snapchat's real appeal unless you use it). Why doesn't Snapchat have a set of stickers or tools that are just typical geometric shapes? Why can't you add text after drawing? Why can't you easily select objects on the screen by having better handles and layers? I might just not be a snap guru but it seems really half-assed.
Imagine Snapchat where you could see the contributions to a snap even if the privacy of the Snapchaters that made contributions was maintained (only see things that aren't private). That means every change would be applied over their snap without ruining its quality (which needs to be improved) each time it is shared. What if you could go back in time and step through each modification and see each version of a snap in it's native quality. Right now snaps are more like Polaroids that age very poorly as they as passed around and edited than photoshopped masterpieces. There's no need for that quality loss or for edits to get baked into each snap.
Sure Snap being this way makes friendships apparent by the amount of work you put into the frequency of communication and streaks etc but it comes off as half-assed. But the quality loss when sharing and ass quality of the apps photographs and videos it's pretty depressing if you're actually in it for the photography.
So Snap is testing @ mentions. How are they going to half-ass a feature that people might not even want and that would lose meaning as Snaps are shared on with even more @ mentions anyway? Well first off.. what name will show up? username or screen name? The article I read says limited testing is based on usernames. Not good.
Typically you don't use someone's real Snapchat name as that would void the app's inherent privacy when sharing things. Plus as mentioned above it would be good for things like that to be data driven overlays so you see someone name as what you know them as not what someone else knows them as. What happens when someone shares something with you that has the screenname of someone you don't know? That screen name might still be personal or private. The data driven overlay idea means adding an extra bit of privacy because it shouldn't show anything at all and block content from people that blocked you. That's why Instagram stories work so well by having links and doesn't have the sharing features Snap does which degrade quality the more people touch a photo. Facebook would have incredible incentive to rip off that feature from Snap if they did use the data driven overlays and history features described above and could easily handle them. Having to change that fundamental aspect of Snapchat would be too jarring. So after you put your @ you'd have your best friends, your groups, and eventually your friends but that only matters to you and shouldn't be anyone else's business. I don't think at any point would anyone want to mention someone by their username anyway or have it show up when sharing something that's going to keep being shared. Just think of how annoying Facebook gets when only 2 or 3 people reshare something and mention you each time. Imagine an entire school or social network's worth of mentions/notifications.
Also along with a snaps history.. wouldn't you want a section from snap to track your friendships? I remember the neighborhood view in Sims 3 and how mind-blowing it was to see each Sim have arrows going to all it's friends. How you could see that same view with how strong a friendship is and how it grew to be that way.
And here's an even more interesting question related to privacy. Some people treat their snapscore like people used to treat their reputation. What happens when you get blocked by someone that's still on your personal network (friend of a friend) does the app Black out the username or the entire snap? What if you're reported to snap often enough.. shouldn't your account have a reputation for something like that that IS public? (Obviously if someone is going to add you and you have a very high rate of sharing lewd content and they don't like that they might think again). If you just share stuff that's inapropriate you might think twice if you knew you were putting your snapscore at risk as well as being able to add new people.
Even Facebook doesn't yet have a feature that gives you an at a glance view of your friendships or someones reputation. Snap could have a swarm view that gives you an idea of how you use the app to communicate. Something like the timeline feature from Facebook but isn't just a scrolling log. Something like the degree of separation our chart created by Alice from L word but that shows everything you do not just where you are in a larger social network (arguably your snaps are more important than your reputation anyway).
For Snapchat it could be monumental if you could review your own chart/timeline based each snap you touch and every text message you send.