I am a huge fan of the app Snapchat, so when I heard there was a new update, I had to blog about it.
If you read my previous blog post, I describe what Snapchat is and how it lost an important feature that had everyone talking on social media. The app developers decided to get rid of “Best Friends” to protect the privacy of certain people. Once this was discovered, there was viral backlash and Snapchat announced it would bring back the feature in it’s next update.
That time has finally come.
Instead of publicly listing everyone’s top “Best Friends,” Snapchat replaced this social hierarchy with emojis (because who doesn’t love emojis). Now, your top best friend will have a heart emoji next to his or her name and the rest goes on. Below is a clever infographic that shows this hierarchy in terms of Beyonce’s inner circle.
Another interesting thing to note about the update is how Snapchat is slowly integrating gamification. Gamification is the idea of applying gaming concepts to real life environments in order to motivate a behavior. Before the update, “Best Friends” lists were set in stone, whether one snapped regularly or not. After the update, one must snap regularly to keep the emoji list and see who is engaging with each other in your contact list. This subtly encourages users to keep sending snaps in order to keep their lists going, which leads to Snapchat gamifying social interactions. While gamification is projected to be a $2.8 billion industry in 2016, I’m not surprised Snapchat finally jumped on the bandwagon.
