Snapchat 2.0 banks on face to face communication

Attempting to take your snap stories to a whole new level, the fleeting photo-sharing application is massively revamping itself by enhancing its chat function with various multimedia features.

Snapchat perks up its chat box after introducing the feature in May 2014, by adding over 200 stickers featuring everything from sloths to aliens and much more. The cherry on the cake is that each chat will highlight the most-used stickers for the particular conversation, making it personalized.

The social app has nested all these updates under the umbrella of Snapchat 2.0 to emulate the best parts of face-to-face conversation. Chat 1.0 was all about the joys of being here — when most apps told you when your friend was typing, Chat let you know that your friend was listening.

"Two years later, we’ve learned a ton about how people talk, but our goal remains unchanged. We want Chat to be the best way to communicate — second only to hanging out face-to-face," read Snapchat's official blog.

In addition to amusing stickers, the application also enables easier video calls, permitting the user to dial a friend who is offline. To spice things up, users can now swing back and forth between the audio and video features during a conversation further allowing them to send offline audio and video clips for the friend to view later.

The chat feature of Snapchat has been thoroughly dolled up to engage its user base as the feature now allows users to access camera roll from the messaging screen. Tapping the photo icon below one can choose to share photos and videos via chat. If that doesn’t sound exciting enough, users can now access them during video chats, sending photos within the chat while talking. This video feature gives a major challenge to other video chatting services like FaceTime, Facebook Messenger, Skype, and Google Hangout.

The video feature on Snapchat is not new, initially, it worked only when the users on both ends were online, available to chat. In fact, the video call would end as soon as the finger was removed from the screen.

Boasting of over 100 million users daily, the escalation of the app might gain greater popularity thus enlarging their user base as this feature is more accessible and provides all the features under one roof, unlike Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp or IMessage.

With this update, it will be a treat to watch how brands leverage it and creatively put across themselves using the video feature which still has a limit of 10 seconds. Snapchat with this update in 2016 is carving itself straight up in the global social media scene giving a tight competition to social media giants and building itself to be the sweetheart of the smartphones.