Snapchat’s trying to change into much more essential to teen social life, by buying calendar-based social app Saturn, which permits customers to share their schedules, and organize meet-ups within the app.
As you’ll be able to see in these instance screens, Saturn is primarily centered on making it simpler for college students to remain on monitor with their faculty commitments, however that additionally expands to sharing your calendar with pals, and even chatting and becoming a member of occasions in-app.
Which clearly aligns with Snap utilization.
Snapchat’s consumer base is primarily teenagers, so the alignment right here is sensible, whereas Snap has additionally instructed Engadget that round 80% of U.S. excessive schoolers attend faculties that help Saturn schedules. Saturn is at the moment accessible in round 17k American excessive faculties, whereas it’s additionally now increasing into faculty campuses as effectively.
Given the broader capability to attach Snap’s major viewers in all new methods, the partnership is sensible, and it’ll be fascinating to see how Snapchat appears to be like to combine extra calendar-style components into the app.
At this stage, Saturn will proceed to function as regular, whereas Snap works by means of the total implications and planning based mostly on the merger.
However once more, I believe, at some stage, Saturn might be no extra, and Saturn’s customers might be referred to Snap as a substitute, the place they’ll get entry to all new calendar-based social options that may assist to facilitate connection amongst teenagers.
Snapchat additionally has its Snap Map, on which customers can show the place they’re at any given time, together with its ephemeral (sort of) DM components. Including calendar monitoring to this may present one other technique to facilitate in-person meet-ups, although it may additionally open up new vectors for stalking, and teenagers unwittingly sharing a bit of an excessive amount of information within the app.
However Snap does have privateness settings in place for this, and once more, you’ll be able to already just about do that on the Snap Map. Certain, flagging the place you’ll be forward of time will add one other aspect to this, and you may already think about how jilted teen exes will use this to unwell impact.
However privateness issues apart, it’s one other logical addition for Snapchat, which aligns with teen utilization.
