Snapchat 6.1

According to the release notes: What's New in Version 6.1.0 Introducing Additional Services Smart Filters - Add data overlays to your Snaps! Visual Filters Replay Special Text Front-Facing Flash Up to 7 Best Friends To enable additional services go to Settings > Additional Services > Manage

All of these updates are to encourage and enable more frequent and interesting use of Stories. Data filters (esp time and weather) make perfect sense for adding context to a multi-snap story. Replay actually discourages use of private messaging - not only is publishing to stories already quicker (1 button post) but the privacy advantage of messaging is now undermined. As far as implementation, these features are for story creators aka power users - learned functionality that's quick to use makes great sense. Overall, this signals a move towards a visual twitter / broadcast end game. Oh yeah, doubling your ad impressions with replay doesn't hurt.

Replay? Am I opting in to letting my snaps get replayed or am I enabling the ability for me to replay snaps. I always felt like this was an easy monetization win for Snapchat. I bet they'd make a mint if users had to pay a dime to replay a snap.

@Besvinick You're allowing others to replay your snaps. But they're only able to replay it once a day, not continuously.

I don't think these new features were implemented very well though. A friend just messaged me and said "How do you use any of these new features?" Snapchat is supposed to be a dead simple app. They should have been enabled by default and had a brief walkthrough.

I just spent 5 minutes trying to find how to use the new features to find that they must be enabled in the settings menu first. Clearly this is non-intuitive and most people wouldn't think to look there. But Snapchat isn't stupid. They probably did this intentionally to increase word-of-mouth for the same reason as their easter eggs (http://ryanhoover.me/post/615894...).

Data overlays? Confused in concept, but maybe not in practice.