Snapchat is well-known for its ephemeral style of messaging, where users' posts expire after a given amount of time. But apparently the company's co-founders, Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, are taking this concept to rival platforms.
On Tuesday, after posting a YouTube video explaining the app's success with millennials, the pair—in typical Snapchat fashion—deleted all of their tweets.
Spiegel, the young company's CEO, highlighted how the mobile phone has "empowered" the idea of instant expression. When social media was once an accumulation of various important moments that make up your personality, instant expression shifts that concept. "Instant expression says that 'my identity is who I am right now,' it says 'I'm the result of everything I've ever done but I'm not really an accumulation of all that stuff.'"
Both the video and the deleted tweets quickly got people buzzing about what it all might mean. In a written statement to CNBC regarding the deleted tweets, a Snapchat spokeswoman said, "Evan has a penchant for living in the present :)."
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Some users saw this as a potential signal that Snapchat may be interested in messaging with a deeper focus on disappearing text over vanishing visuals.
"I think it would be a smart move for Snapchat to break out into a separate app if the new app still has some uniqueness," said Matthew Knell, vice president of social for About.com.
"I think one of the growth issues Snapchat has is that 'people don't get it,' or don't think their lives are interesting enough," Knell explained. "[Snapchat's] growth is limited to people who have a desire to broadcast their lives on the regular, and opening up a more traditional chat app could grow their install base to include people who are more conditioned to using text/emoji chat more as a utility, and increase their [monthly active users] noticeably among people who don't want to bother learning the existing Snapchat ecosystem."
Still, this stunt could just be Spiegel and Murphy showing their clear enthusiasm for ephemeral messaging.
Last year, Facebook reportedly attempted to acquire Snapchat for $3 billion, but Spiegel turned down the offer. In February, the mobile messaging app was said to be seeking funding at a $19 billion valuation, according to a Bloomberg report.