More than 130 million people around the world use Snapchat daily. For young people especially, the social media app which sends photos that disappear within moments has become an indispensable lifestyle accessory. But the smartphone app remains a mystery to many adults.
At a recent internet conference in Germany, 14-year-old Joshua Arntzen hosted an event entitled "Snapchat for Adults" which attracted 500 bemused attendees. "You can do the craziest things with your snaps and videos," he explained, showing features that can distort or replace faces.
Eventually everything is supposed to be deleted - at least in theory. The possibility that the data might be saved somehow, somewhere doesn't bother the teenager: "I live in the 21st century."
"Many people view Snapchat as a 'sexting app,'" according to Joseph Bayer who led a 2015 study carried out at the University of Michigan. "But instead, we found that Snapchat is typically being used to communicate spontaneously with close friends in a new and often more enjoyable way."
The spontaneity and transience of the communication is part of its appeal - users don't have to spend as much time worrying about how they appear in a photograph. Accordingly, the interactions produce more positive emotions and more enjoyment than other social media, the study found.
It also found that the app has become the place for sharing small moments, whereas Facebook is the forum for big events such as babies, graduations and birthdays.
"We no longer need to record the 'real world' and reproduce it online. We live and communicate at the same time," according to Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel. The 25-year-old created Snapchat in Los Angeles in 2011 along with Robert Murphy.
According to the tech blog Recode, 65 per cent of those aged 18 to 24 in the United States use the app. Originally its unique feature was the short lifespan of the photos it sent.
The receiver can always take a screenshot of the picture before it disappears but the sender will be informed - and anyway it's been a kind of unwritten rule not to do so. Teenagers initially used Snapchat to send nude photos of themselves, which meant it got that reputation as a sexting tool.
Facebook saw the app's potential early and in 2013 offered 3 billion dollars to take it over. However, the start-up declined the offer and has since become an increasingly formidable opponent for the social media giant, particularly in the video segment.
Businesses, the media and politicians have now got in on the act. Zalando, Starbucks, CNN and football team Bayern Munich are just some of the organisations now promoting themselves on Snapchat. Hillary Clinton's election team recently scored with a Snapchat story about Donald Trump.
There are also analytic tools such as Snaplytics to help companies optimise their marketing activities.
So what's next for Snapchat? In September the app will be 5 years old and a flotation on the stock market is planned.
There are already numerous features besides the original quick deletions. For example, there's the beloved-of-celebrities Stories area where content remains visible for 24 hours. And since March, users have been able to make phone calls to each other inside the app.
In the future perhaps more adults will be found on Snapchat. Whether the current hype will still be as strong then remains to be seen. As Joshua Arntzen predicts, "in the next one to two years there'll be the next app and people will begin to switch."
If in five years time it's wondered where all the young people have gone, it'll be because "all the grandmas and grandpas are on Snapchat."
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