Junior Makda Amdetsyon sat in her room and laughed to herself as she sent yet another embarrassing picture of herself to her friends through Snapchat.  She is not laughing, however, when said Snapchat gets screenshotted and saved on her friends’ phones for an eternity.

Snapchat is an app created for the iPhone for people to share pictures in a different kind of way.  Users have the option to send a picture that can only be seen by the other person for 1 to 10 seconds.  If the other person is quick, they can screenshot to save the picture that they received by pressing the middle and lock button at the same time.

“I personally think Snapchat is a one of the best apps ever invented,” junior Makda Amdetsyon said.  “It’s just fun and it makes me laugh.”

According to creators Evan Speigal and Bobby Murphy’s blog, Snapchat “isn’t about capturing the traditional Kodak moment, it’s about communicating with a full range of human emotion, not just what appears to be pretty or perfect.”

“I love Snapchat because I like to take selfies [pictures of myself] and send them to girls,” senior David Knaide said.  “I think it’s become such a popular trend, because people are too illiterate to text, so they just take pictures of their face.”

This past summer, Snapchat reached over 100 million pictures sent.  Only 46 percent of students use Snapchat, however Snapchat is only an app for the iPhone, so if a person does not have an iPhone, they cannot access Snapchat.

Of the people who have smartphones 25 percent use Snapchat multiple times a day.

According to Amdetsyon, people “just use it to embarrass themselves.  If one of your pictures gets screenshotted, your life is pretty much over, but it’s all for fun.”

Junior Kristen Kyburz said, “I think Snapchat got so popular because a lot of people have iPhones and they just like taking pictures of themselves.”

Caitlin Wolfarth is a News Editor for The Patriot and jcpatriot.com.