Snapchat’s seeking to change into much more vital 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’ll be able to see in these instance screens, Saturn is primarily centered on making it simpler for college kids to remain on observe with their faculty commitments, however that additionally expands to sharing your calendar with buddies, 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 informed Engadget that round 80% of U.S. excessive schoolers attend faculties that help Saturn schedules. Saturn is at the moment out there in round 17k American excessive faculties, whereas it’s additionally now increasing into school campuses as properly.
Given the broader capability to attach Snap’s major viewers in all new methods, the partnership is smart, and it’ll be fascinating to see how Snapchat seems to combine extra calendar-style components into the app.
At this stage, Saturn will proceed to function as regular, whereas Snap works via the complete implications and planning based mostly on the merger.
However once more, I think, 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 can 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 (form of) DM components. Including calendar monitoring to this can present one other technique to facilitate in-person meet-ups, although it might additionally open up new vectors for stalking, and youths unwittingly sharing slightly 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 component to this, and you may already think about how jilted teen exes will use this to ailing impact.
However privateness issues apart, it’s one other logical addition for Snapchat, which aligns with teen utilization.
