Hey, I Just Got a Snapchat from Jew!

@evanspiegel

CEO and co-founder of the wildly famous app, Snapchat — which could very well be the best “sexting” app ever invented —  is Jewish. Evan Spiegel, the 20-something who created the app in his father’s L.A. home back in 2011, is now swimming in a sea of gelt thanks to the app’s millions of users.

Spiegel and his friend and co-founder, Bobby Murphy, are graduates of Standford University. They developed the app for one of Spiegel’s classes at Stanford where he majored in product design.

Snapchat is an app that allows users to send “snaps” to friends that last anywhere from 1 to 10 seconds. The catch — the snaps disappear forever once the time is up.

Spiegel explained to Forbes:

Snapchat is intended to counteract the trend of users being compelled to manage an idealized online identity of themselves, which he says has “taken all of the fun out of communicating.”

A little over a year ago, some 10 million snaps were sent each day. A recent study from the UK reports that as of June 2013, half of all 18 to 30-year-old respondents (47 percent) have received nude pictures, while 67 percent had received images of “inappropriate poses or gestures.” Besides that, Spiegel mentioned at the Dive into Mobile conference in April that 80 percent of the users are located in the United States.

Snapchat turned out to be pretty popular, even after Siegel’s class at Standford told him his app was a terrible idea.

Over time the app has developed in ways to adapt to technology and appeal to a broader range of users. Snapchat Kidz launched in April 2013 as a more kid-friendly app, meaning users must enter a birth date first. This month, the feature of “Snapchat Stories” was released allowing users to create links of shared content that can be viewed an unlimited number of times over a 24-hour period. The stories will disappear after 24 hours.

But controversy has arisen in the past several weeks over whether or not snaps actually disappear from the Snapchat servers. According to the LA Times, the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint against Snapchat with the Federal Trade Commission stating that Snapchat deceived its customers by leading them to believe that pictures are destroyed within seconds of viewing.

Whatever the controversy may be, it’s pretty cool that the most crazed app in the country was partly created by a Jewish kid. Mazel Tov to you Evan Spiegel! Maybe one day you’ll land your own flick like Mark Zuckerberg, but do the Jewish girls out there a favor, and keep it in the Tribe.

Snapchat’s mascot, “Ghostface Chillah” is named after Ghostface Killah, the rapper from the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Klan.