Snap's "Big" Announcement
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👻Got Any Minis?
Last Thursday, Snap unveiled plans for a suite of new features, to advertisers, influencers, and press at the (virtual) Snap Partner Summit 2020. Amongst the announcements of new lenses, new games, and original content, the highlight of the event was the introduction of Minis, lightweight third-party applications that will live inside Snapchat Chat. These apps will be created by a variety a different advertisers and corporate partners, letting users complete a handful of tasks, such as ordering movie tickets, setting festival schedules, or going through guided meditations, encouraging new forms of socialization without ever leaving the app.
So far Snap has confirmed seven Minis that will be available on the Snapchat app next month: Headspace (meditate and send uplifting messages to friends), Coachella (coordinate and plan festival lineups with friends), Atom (browse showtimes, buy movie tickets together and pay at the theater, stream and share trailers with friends), Let’s Do It (a Snap Inc. app designed to help friend groups make decisions quicker), Saturn (help students organize and share class schedules), Prediction Master (a way for users to make predictions on upcoming events like the stock market, sneaker drops, album drops, etc), and Tempo (create, study, and share flashcards together).
The idea of creating apps within an app is nothing new. WeChat, the go-to messaging app in China has perfected this model, letting users do everything from making payments, applying for loans, hailing a taxi, or booking a hotel all without leaving the app. Still an unproven model stateside, this is something that Snap is looking to tap into and a route that Facebook has already tried to go down with their integration of payments and AI chatbots to their now separate Messenger app.
One of the hardest parts of creating an app is actually getting people to use it without blowing up your marketing budget. With Minis, Snap has already done a lot of the heavy lifting, making it a very attractive opportunity for developers. Here are a few examples:
No app installation required as it is built upon current Snapchat infrastructure
Immediately works on both Android and iOS
Chat and voice while using
Instant sharing on Snap camera to help growth
With that being said, one of the hardest things to do is make a consumer form new habits, a lesson that companies like Facebook and Apple have already learned when integrating new features into their respective messenger apps. Add in the looming privacy concerns regarding third-party data and Snap’s got their work cut out for them. Let’s see what they can do.
🌐 More Loom, Less Zoom
With work from home in effect until further notice, I frequently find myself drowning in a sea of Zoom meetings, leaving little time to actually do all of the work we spend this valuable time discussing. In an effort to cut down on unnecessary meetings, I started to think of alternative ways to help myself and my team communicate more efficiently and effectively.
Enter Loom.
Loom is a video recording tool that lets you record your camera, microphone, and desktop simultaneously with a click of a button. Once you are finished recording, your video is instantly available to edit and share with friends, family, and co-workers. Not only is it easy to use, but it also delivers a beautiful end product. I first started using Loom during college as a presentation tool, but now see the many benefits it can provide at the corporate level:
It can serve as a replacement for meetings that require the explanation of complex ideas or processes. Questions can be asked over email and all attendees will forever have the video to refer to.
It can serve as a way to capture and document processes and How-Tos for future new hires.
Companies can use it to help walk customers through the use of their product and for future tutorials.
These are only a few of the many use cases for Loom, which can be accessed via Chrome extension or desktop app. With a fresh $30 million of funding raised last Fall, Loom has been working diligently to roll out its Business and Enterprise models specifically designed for teams. Think you might want to try it out? Give it a look here.
💻Let’s Get Technical: Round Two
In the first newsletter, I broke down some basic concepts of web development: Front-end, back-end, UX, UI, and API. I received a lot of great feedback asking for more, so without further ado here is a list of five languages that are used to bring your favorite webpages and desktop apps to life:
HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) - This language is used to write the front-end of web pages, letting the user create headers, links, buttons, images and other elements. These elements are written as <header>, <button>, <img>, and are often referred to as tags. Technically, it is not considered a programming language, as it doesn’t contain any real programming logic. If you’re ever in the mood to ruffle a programmer’s feathers, just call HMTL a programming language. Trust me, I learned this the hard way.
Fun fact: Snapchat Minis are built using HTML5.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) - CSS works hand-in-hand with HTML, as it is used to make your website aesthetically appealing. CSS lets you change the font and font color, background color, layout, spacing and more. Let’s say we are building a house. HTML is the structure of the house itself (the foundation, wood, beams etc). The CSS is the interior and exterior decoration. This is also not considered a programming language.
Javascript - Javascript is what makes the webpage interactive. It powers animations and determines what happens when users click, hover on, or type in certain elements. Javascript can be found on all of your favorite apps, Netflix, Spotify, Facebook, etc and is even now being used to build the back-end too.
Python - Python is often recommended as the introductory language to learn, as it is fairly easy to pick up can be used in a bunch of different settings. It is primarily used for data science, machine learning, and writing web servers.
Ruby - A popular language used for building the back-end of web apps. It is often paired with Ruby on Rails which is a web development framework that runs using the Ruby language.