Snapchat’s looking to become even more important to teen social life, by acquiring calendar-based social app Saturn, which enables users to share their schedules, and arrange meet-ups in the app.
As you can see in these example screens, Saturn is primarily focused on making it easier for students to stay on track with their school commitments, but that also expands to sharing your calendar with friends, and even chatting and joining events in-app.
Which obviously aligns with Snap usage.
Snapchat’s user base is primarily teens, so the alignment here makes sense, while Snap has also told Engadget that around 80% of U.S. high schoolers attend schools that support Saturn schedules. Saturn is currently available in around 17k American high schools, while it’s also now expanding into college campuses as well.
Given the broader capacity to connect Snap’s primary audience in all new ways, the partnership makes sense, and it’ll be interesting to see how Snapchat looks to integrate more calendar-style elements into the app.
At this stage, Saturn will continue to operate as normal, while Snap works through the full implications and planning based on the merger.
But again, I suspect, at some stage, Saturn will be no more, and Saturn’s users will be referred to Snap instead, where they’ll get access to all new calendar-based social features that will help to facilitate connection among teens.
Snapchat also has its Snap Map, on which users can display where they are at any given time, along with its ephemeral (kind of) DM elements. Adding calendar tracking to this will provide another way to facilitate in-person meet-ups, though it could also open up new vectors for stalking, and teens unwittingly sharing a little too much info in the app.
But Snap does have privacy settings in place for this, and again, you can already pretty much do this on the Snap Map. Sure, flagging where you’ll be ahead of time will add another element to this, and you can already imagine how jilted teen exes will use this to ill effect.
But privacy concerns aside, it’s another logical addition for Snapchat, which aligns with teen usage.
