[gaurav_v]

I did some accidental market research on Snap with my girlfriend's 9 year-old cousin this weekend.

She had tons of snaps, but informed me that they were almost all blank images. She and her friends send each other these blank images to maintain 'streaks,' which count the number of continuous days that two people have messaged each other.

So attached to these streaks were the cousin and her friends that if the 24 hour mark was approaching and the cousin hadn't sent a blank message to her longest streak, the counterparty would log-in to the cousin's snapchat and send _herself_ a message, to make sure the streak continued.

My cousin said that the blowup in (blank) picture messages had slowed the app to a crawl, leading her not to use it anymore, aside of course for streaks.

Not the kind of of daily-active-users that advertisers crave. I'm 28; never heard of streaks before this.

[kevindong]

One of my friends does this with his long-term girlfriend. I think they're at something like a 3 year streak at this point. They've exchanged username/password credentials to keep the streak alive in the event one of them forgets or my friend messes up his phone so badly he can't get it to boot. He's very enthusiastic about custom ROMs on Android so bricking his phone is not out of the ordinary.

edit: he says they've done that at least twice

[majewsky]

"A metric that becomes a target ceases to be a good metric." ;)