There has been a lot of coverage of Snapchat since it apparently turned down a $3 billion offer from Facebook. And a $4 billion offer from Google.

Since then, the company has unveiled Snapchat Stories, which are available to view repeatedly for 24 hours, rather than the single viewing of a single image or video clip.

I have no idea whether turning down investment from more established online companies will prove to be a good or bad decision. But it’s clear that there’s a growing role for ephemeral media in our online lives, particularly for younger internet users. Around 350 million Snaps are being sent every day through this one service, and there are obvious reasons why.

It makes me feel old, but the internet wasn’t part of my life as a teenager. Whatever I got up to generally stayed amongst my friends and whoever else was there, unless it became notorious enough to spread through the verbal grapevine. Beyond a few still photos and a particularly dull VHS video journal shot by a friend of mine when he was given a video camera, there are no records of anything that I didn’t want to purposefully save.

And from the time I increasingly lived online, I was in my late teens and already conscious that what I was sharing online could be seen by anyone – particularly as my early days were spent either creating public websites or on some semi-public forums which can still be found it you know which username to look for.  There’s nothing particularly embarrassing about them, but it’s still a little strange to see offhand forum posts I made 13-15 years ago surfaced via Google!

 

The growing demand for ephemeral media:

The existing big social networks all have a very good reason for encouraging you to share as much data as possible, and making it as public as possible – it’s how they make money from advertising. And it’s also an explicit identification tool for Google, using Authorship and identity for both Google+ and now Youtube comments.

At the same time, any teenager now should be aware that anything accessible online could be viewed by schools, universities and future employers as part of any application and interview process.

But that doesn’t remove the need to interact with friends, impress teenagers of the opposite sex, experiment with photos and generally act as teenagers have since the term first came into use in the 20th Century.

Beyond some bad hair and fashion choices, most of my adolescent mistakes and misjudgements are lost to the mists of time – certainly my friends have yet to share any proof.

And I’m also lucky enough to run my own business, and have built up relationships with a range of clients and companies despite, or because, I made a conscious decision to be pretty open and honest in what I share online. So I don’t have to worry that a potential employer might get dissuaded by a picture of me as a teenager, because I’d probably rather not work with them in the first place!

But I can’t imagine how much time and effort I’d have spent un-tagging, deleting and asking people to remove potentially damaging photos and videos if the always online culture had existed when I was in my teens.

And as much as my son is being taught about online (and offline) safety and best practices from an early age, I’m certain he’ll want a place where he can be himself and experiment without worrying as much about it affecting his employment prospects 10 or 20 years into the future.

And for those of us who have less reason to worry about the reputation and employment implications of permanent sharing, I wonder how much more open and honest we would be if we also removed the social implications, and were able to just interact with our close friends and family without worrying?