Snapchat’s trying to grow to be much more vital 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 may see in these instance screens, Saturn is primarily centered on making it simpler for college students to remain on observe with their faculty commitments, however that additionally expands to sharing your calendar with mates, 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 informed Engadget that round 80% of U.S. excessive schoolers attend faculties that help Saturn schedules. Saturn is presently out there in round 17k American excessive faculties, whereas it’s additionally now increasing into school campuses as effectively.
Given the broader capability to attach Snap’s main viewers in all new methods, the partnership is sensible, and it’ll be attention-grabbing to see how Snapchat appears to combine extra calendar-style components into the app.
At this stage, Saturn will proceed to function as regular, whereas Snap works by the total implications and planning based mostly on the merger.
However once more, I think, at some stage, Saturn will likely be no extra, and Saturn’s customers will likely be referred to Snap as an alternative, 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 (type of) DM components. Including calendar monitoring to it will present one other solution to facilitate in-person meet-ups, although it might additionally open up new vectors for stalking, and youths unwittingly sharing a bit an excessive amount of information within the app.
However Snap does have privateness settings in place for this, and once more, you may already just about do that on the Snap Map. Certain, flagging the place you’ll be forward of time will add one other factor to this, and you’ll already think about how jilted teen exes will use this to in poor health impact.
However privateness issues apart, it’s one other logical addition for Snapchat, which aligns with teen utilization.
