Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Disappearing Messages Are Everywhere
“One of the reasons these services are popular is they’re hearkening back to a time when the context was all that mattered,” says Lee Rainie, director of Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. “You’re just having a little shared thing that goes away after it’s been shared.”
Jeremy Liew, a partner at Snapchat investor Lightspeed Venture Partners, explains its rapid ascent as a result of people’s growing discomfort with sharing their lives on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Snapchat isn’t the only startup benefitting from this apparent change in attitude.Wickr, a startup cofounded and led by security expert and Defcon organizer Nico Sell, is also gaining users for its own disappearing-message app.
Disappearing messages could prove popular beyond social sharing, and could also be profitable, if businesses can be persuaded to pay for the services. Another company, Gryphn, which released a free Android app in February (an iPhone version is coming out shortly), is seeing a lot of interest from paying enterprise users—including hospitals, a police department, and a financial institution.
On Android, Gryphn’s app replaces the stock SMS texting app and encrypts outgoing messages and decrypts incoming messages. The app doesn’t allow users to take screen shots, and encryption can prevent a message recipient from saving or forwarding a message or set a picture message to disappear shortly after being viewed.
If ephemeral messaging startups gain in popularity among both consumers and business users, it’s more likely that this kind of capability will bleed into other apps and services, too. “I do believe ephemeral data’s the future. Every single messaging, social, communications app in the future will have ephemeral capabilities,” Sell says. “Now that we’ve done it, it’s really obvious.”
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