Yes but the receiver of your email doesn't necessarily have to delete your email, which is the key distinction of what makes the service useful.

I have to disagree.

What makes Snapchat popular is their use of pictures. Turning the thesis of your point into a totally public, 160 character or less, textual format is effort. A lot of effort.

Pictures are what they are. They're also extremely difficult to parse (no practical reason to retain your message, deletion is a cost effective decision), and they're the easiest thing in the world to make. Who wants to carefully word your tweets when your camera will do?

Because the camera limits you to visual content. You cannot do https://twitter.com/MicroSFF or https://twitter.com/sadserver with images.

That's another thing I don't understand--how is "automatically deleting" a feature? Why would I care if the recipient eventually deletes something I send them? I've literally never given any thought to what people do with E-mails I sent them, since it doesn't affect me at all. They can print it and hang it on their wall or take a screenshot of it and use it as their desktop background for all I care.

Flip it and look at it from the other side. Your inbox filling up with emails and attachments creates cognitive load; you have to decide what to do with all of them eventually. When you're consuming stories/snaps you see it, and it's gone. No overhead.

Additionally, if you needed something that did need persisted you would hopefully have the wit to send it on another service (e.g. email) so automatic filtering for all recipients.

It also makes you check Snapchat more because you know that the stuff will be deleted - which results in using it more often and being addicted to it.

Social media novelty machine 2.0.

>but obviously they're wildly popular for some reason

I am not actually sure that is actually true. My wife and I run a moderately successful travel blog and know quite a number of other travel bloggers, some of whom do it for a living.

They are all technically on Twitter for example however the overwhelming majority have hooked up a service that automatically logs in as them then publishes tweets on their behalf freeing them up to never ever actually log in themselves.

If you look at active user numbers, tweets published etc it presumably all looks great but how many real actual humans are there? I suspect the answer is not nearly as many humans as Twitter would like to publicly admin as so many have been replaced by bots.

It feels like they could radically improve the experience by locking out the bots but doing that would make it obvious how few actual humans are present.

Insightful observation. The quality of the network is eroded by non-human automation.

At least the e-mail software I know has very different UX:

* it is terrible with comfortably looking at a stream of images,

* for one-to-many you have to keep mailing lists around,

* filtering such streams out (to separate notifications) needs to be set up,

* ...

You could do all that with e-mail, and some people probably are more comfortable with using e-mail for such purposes, but you don't get the same streamlined UX with e-mail. Somebody could write an app that offered most of it, but sadly nobody has as far as I know.