Snapchat’s trying to grow to be much more essential to teen social life, by buying calendar-based social app Saturn, which allows 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 monitor with their faculty commitments, however that additionally expands to sharing your calendar with associates, and even chatting and becoming a member of occasions in-app.
Which clearly aligns with Snap utilization.
Snapchat’s person base is primarily teenagers, so the alignment right here is smart, whereas Snap has additionally instructed Engadget that round 80% of U.S. excessive schoolers attend colleges that help Saturn schedules. Saturn is at the moment obtainable in round 17k American excessive colleges, whereas it’s additionally now increasing into school campuses as nicely.
Given the broader capability to attach Snap’s main viewers in all new methods, the partnership is smart, and it’ll be fascinating to see how Snapchat seems to combine extra calendar-style parts into the app.
At this stage, Saturn will proceed to function as regular, whereas Snap works by means of the complete implications and planning based mostly on the merger.
However once more, I believe, at some stage, Saturn can be no extra, and Saturn’s customers can 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 parts. Including calendar monitoring to it will present one other method to facilitate in-person meet-ups, although it may additionally open up new vectors for stalking, and teenagers unwittingly sharing just a little 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. Positive, flagging the place you’ll be forward of time will add one other factor to this, and you may already think about how jilted teen exes will use this to in poor health impact.
However privateness considerations apart, it’s one other logical addition for Snapchat, which aligns with teen utilization.
