Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Lesson of the day: Snapchat metrics

Last night after being added by a friend on Snapchat, I scrolled through my contacts list and came across an interesting feature.

Upon clicking on any one of your contacts' names, you see a "score" as well as each contact's three best friends. WHOA - A LOT OF INFORMATION THERE. Not even surprised that this type of information is public, and being a nerd in general, I did some research as to how these metrics are determined. Are they even valid?

Apparently, I'm not the only one thrown off by this, as a BuzzFeed reporter who was one of the first to call out the feature in the media says, "It's confusing as to why Snapchat would even have a Web presence for user profiles at all-it's a service that's made for phone-to-phone private communication." Well said.

So....getting to the "research":

What is your 'score'?
The total number of points is the total number of Snapchats you have sent and received. If you send a photo to more than one recipient, it's still only worth one point. There are rumors across the internet that each Snapchat is worth 12 points and consecutive photos are worth 20, but this doesn't appear to be true. 

How are your 'best friends' determined?
"Best friends" are supposedly the people you snap the most, but we have to keep in mind that this includes sent and received messages. It seems to be refreshed pretty often, but I could not find a standard measure. In September, Snapchat released a code for users to enter to gain five best friends (instead of three) in their contact lists, which was a big deal in the Snapchat world to tech dorks (or just people who love selfies). 

Has this always been here?
Yes. In fact, I recall seeing it with friends on the old interface, but rather than appearing in-app the score and best friends would pop up in a separate URL. This is still accessible on a mobile device, when you type in snapchat.me/yourusernamehere.

Now to the primary research...is it accurate?
Looks pretty accurate to me. Andrew, Sherman and Shaina have been my best friends since freshman year of college, so I have no shame in them being represented on my Snapchat "best friends" list. We're all in different cities and Andrew & Sherman send Snapchats from their jobs in TV multiple times a week, so I'm not too surprised.

In terms of benchmarking my score, 1,546 seems like a reasonable number since it's a two-way street. Analyzing others' scores, most seemed to have points in the 300-12,000 points range. Many of my personal contacts list appeared to also have scores between 1,000 and 2,000.


So, is your Snapchat score accurate? Are your best friends your ACTUAL best friends, or is there secret flirting going on with someone that your friends didn't know about? What's next, being able to click on someone in your Contacts app, having the capability to identify the top three people someone exchanges text messages with, and a score of how talkative they are based on the quantity of messages? I sure hope not. In the meantime, let's acknowledge the information out there and apply accordingly. 

5 comments:

  1. That's pretty creepy actually. What if you have a lover that you Snapchat constantly? That's a bit vulgar, but honestly, that doesn't mean they are your best friends. You just happen to message them constantly. And why should the public be able to see this? Eeks.

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  2. True. It's creepy. I wonder why Snapchat did not come up with an option of hiding one's best friends in its latest update. Instead, it allowed increasing the number of best friends from 3 to 5 or 7.

    I wrote a tutorial on how to manipulate the results of Snapchat best friends and achieve an edited list of best friends. Hope this helps.

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