Elephant In The Room: Snapchat has more ambition than any of us

We at Our Bad would like to take a moment on this awful Monday to pay homage to the most ambitious people in the entire world: whoever runs Snapchat. Here are our thoughts on why these people and their app are this week's Elephant In The Room.

No one notices, cares, or talks about this. No one talks about the fact that when Snapchat first was invented, it was laughed at for the simple fact that it seemed there was only one obvious reason it was even invented. I mean, you're talking about an app that allows young people to send a picture to someone that disappears in 10 seconds and you can leave a little message or drawing with it? That's a layup even Stipes wouldn't miss in rec basketball. Nothing ever opened a door for something more than Snapchat opened the door for letting singles expand their..we'll call it "antics" because my mom reads this blog. Other than that, Snapchat was put to use by high school kids like me (I keep reading that as 'high schoolkids' and we weren't, but apparently 'highschool' isn't a word) that wanted to send silly drawn-on pictures back and forth during Mr. Varley's death sentence of a history class and giggle about it.

Fast forward 6 or so years, and think about what you see. The same thing dubbed a "sexting app" now lets you video chat, pay people real money, read articles from CNN, Daily Mail, etc, and even turn your face into a dancing bunny because we've been waiting for something that allows us to do all of that at once. They've added a music recognition feature, group chats, and even allow you to create your own geo-tags for Becky's 21st Bday Bash because its gonna be totally fetch and everyone has to know where you are. To top it off, Snapchat hid the feature that let other people see who your "best friends" on the app are, keeping their creep/schemer demographic happy and loyal as ever despite the major changes throughout the years.

All jokes aside though it's insane where the people who run Snapchat (I still haven't looked up who but S/O) have taken it since its inception. A few years in they had a feature on the app that let you take glimpses into snaps from other cities around the world, half of which I didn't even know used it because I also couldn't pronounce them or locate them on a globe. After that they moved to focusing more on live events, and let users post first-hand stories of their friends but also look at first-hand snaps from strangers attending major live events such as the Super Bowl, or the Oscars to get a feel for it. Not to mention the people at these major events, the celebrities themselves, all have their own Snapchat accounts. People can follow Kylie Jenner to see 15 thousand seconds worth of behind the scenes happenings in the lipstick and dating-rapper industry, watch DJ Khaled huff and puff on an elliptical, or Rontez Miles do his weird finger dances on the way to the Jets' locker room (where he and the rest of the secondary will get roasted for 400 yards but that's a story for another day).

Anyway sprinkle in the live chatting, the special effects, the paying people, and the Discover page full of news, and you have an app that now does it all even though it doesn't need to. And after a lot of hard thinking and not being even slightly productive at work it still literally makes no sense to me, but I guess the fact that it is so simple is really its strength. It's something so dumb we can all get in on it to pass time, and it has no pressure to change so it's free to do whatever it wants. Other juggernaut apps like Instagram and Facebook have added similar features like the "story" or "my day" but to put it simply everybody knows those just aren't as cool.

So we'd like to applaud those people who run Snapchat, particularly CEO and Stanford grad Evan Spiegel (looked it up) on their ambition in taking the silly app that has a ghost for a logo for unknown reasons, and taking over everyone's lives with it. Also this guy is a millennial quadrillionaire, so I'm now very mad I looked it up while at work, and while writing for my blog and making no money for it at all. Smh...I'm done here I guess. Shoutout Snapchat.