So basically, you spammed 42k users, and tricked them into sending what they thought were ephemeral pictures but were instead permanently saved and displayed publicly on your website. And now you're bragging about it.

I don't understand how any of these items could be okay with snapchat:

1. You are keeping chats that are meant to be ephemeral 2. You are acting as a snapchat client to create an API where there should not be one. 3. You are basically spamming users on snapchat to get them to add you.

Snapchat was really asking for this to happen, with exposing usernames publicly at snapchat.com/<username> and showing subsequent top friends. What was the rationale of doing that vs keeping it all inside the app?

So this is that obnoxious friend request I got...

It is Hackathon Culture after all; Do something because you can, or just to see what is possible. Unfortunately, you guys are getting lots of negative pushback here. Sometimes, it's not what the Tech does, but how you leverage the Tech, and how you Package your Product. Is this a "just for fun" project, or do you guys plan on going all the way? If the intention here is to build/release a real product, I can see a few potential issues with this approach, some of which are already covered here. Perhaps if you used a different approach, and solved a different problem (Same Tech, Different Product) you might have more positive feedback. In fact, I can think of a great 'Pivot' possibility here using the Tech you've built to provide a different Type of Service that I can see customers happily using, and paying for. If this sounds interesting, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter, @shawnkreilly

Good Job on the Tech!!

You broke "back" functionality with alt+left arrow.

Something about this just strikes me as arrogant. Please enlighten me if I misunderstood ...

"How does it work?

We communicate with Snapchat's servers and pretend to be their mobile app. This gives us access to everything that you can do through the mobile app. For example, we can send messages, view (and save) messages, create new accounts..."

That's a detail that's not relevant at all to their "users" (the people sending in snapchats). It sounds like they're bragging about their circumvention of Snapchat's lack of an API.

I don't want to diminish the technical accomplishment here -- reverse an engineering an API and writing a Snapchat bot is impressive. But, as other posters have pointed out, they're likely violating the Snapchat terms and misleading their "users."

I think this is a neat idea. Looking forward to more! It's creative website scraping, which is what developers did before APIs were mainstream (in case you were living in a cave). The posters here are just butt hurt they didn't think of this idea first. Haters gonna hate.

I don't get it. What is this? Could you explain this a bit better so I know why it is so special?

For API Hack Day in San Francisco (https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/api-hackday-sf-2013/...), we created ranker.io (http://ranker.io).

A bot named 'epicchallenge' programmatically sends a snapchat video about a "smile" contest to a huge (42k) list of users. Then we programmatically get their responses and have people vote on them.

Yeah, I received spam from you twice. It was really annoying.

How did you go about sending/receiving all those snapchats programmatically?

Really interesting solution to creating an API that doesn't exist yet. Cool project!

The modern version of misfits are already crafting the brothels of tomorrow - check how this porn site disguises itself amidst today's ignorance of psychology.

Aren't snap chats supposed to self destruct? This is really cool.If you think it would be useful, I'd be happy to offer all your users a free custom credit card skin from CreditCovers.com with their photo on it if you'd like. ($10 retail value each) - I assume they all wouldn't redeem it but we could budget ~$100k of product for you for this or another promotion. Anthony @ CreditCovers.com if you want to talk.