(Screencap: Snapchat)

Snapchat is one of those rare tech products, like Pinterest, that seems to have taken hold in suburbia and then migrated to New York, at least judging by the coastal buzz suddenly circling the year-and-a-half-year-old app. The service, which was founded by two Stanford computer science students who met at a frat, lets you send photos to friends and strangers for 10 seconds or less before they (in theory!) disappear. You can type a message or use a crude coloring stick to mark up the image. It currently holds down the no. 3 spot for free apps in iTunes and recently claimed 30 million "interactions" a day.

After downloading it earlier this week, however, we were disappointed to find a dearth of norms acquaintances willing to snapchat us. A real pity considering that's pretty much all we want to do with our waking hours in 2012, the Year of Our Lord P.S. (post-Snapchat).

Evidence about Snapchat's newfound popularity with urban adults is purely anecdotal. It may just be that "that teen sexting app" doesn't appeal to the grown up(ish!) people in our contacts list. But sexting is only one use case, and an ill-advised one at that.

Seriously, kids, don't try this at home.

Snapchat says it doesn't store any of the pics on its server, however flash-fingered pervs can always take a screenshot. Snapchat will alert you if they do, but it's not like the app can stop them. One thoughtful tipster has also published a guide to circumventing the "Screenshot!" alert. Helpful! What's more, Snapchat also obscures an indiscreet feature: PUBLIC web profiles that display the top three people every users has messaged, along with the number of pics they've sent.

But there's another reason Snapchat is far from the "perfect sexting app": 10 seconds or less of viewing time is hardly worth your while. It's the App Store version of "just the tip." That might be why its founders keep insisting that the majority of users don't appear to be using it for sexting at all. Jessica's 20-year-old sister, at college in central Pennsylvania, uses Snapchat daily to send funny updates to her friends. "Studying!" she snapchatted us, alongside a photo of her looking glum next to her laptop. Apparently, we're also not the only ones receiving pantsless shots from the loo #nofilter.

And that's the beauty of the app: its ephemerality makes it less the new Chatroulette than the anti-Instagram. You didn't need a cringe-inducing Nickelback parody video to tell you that Kevin Systrom has pulled the ultimate coup: conscripting you into a curator of your own personal brand. Snapchat, on the other hand, tickles the same innate human impulse for sharing selfies, but stripped of the vanity. The photo quality within the app is iffy and there's no moody filter to present a prettified version of the highlights of your life.

It lends itself neatly to silliness, a comforting dissipation of self-awareness. But just because the vanity is gone, doesn't mean the desire to document your life is, making it the perfect app for our ADD-addled society.

So please, for the love of god, Snapchat us. Before this thing becomes the next Draw Something.

(Photo: Quickmeme)

Confession: lately, Betabeat has been on something of a Quora binge. In a fit of heat stroke yesterday afternoon, we found ourselves wishing we could just type "Quora" along with any question and have the answers magically appear. Quora: How many degrees will my apartment be when I get home? Quora: What's a good age to freeze my eggs? But in our estimation, the service's appeal isn't the answers as much as the questions. It's basically a window into the secret preoccupations of the human mind.

Take, for example, one anonymous user's probing query into the development of Airtime, the video chat startup cofounded by Napster alums Sean Parker and Sean Fanning. "What does it feel like," the user asked, "to be the engineer at Airtime who created the wiener detection technology?" 

Dick-tecting jokes are all well and good, but he doesn't answer Quora's favorite question: what does it feeeeel like?

(twitter.com/cliffdailey)

Airtime, the Sean & Shawn bred startup that launched earlier this week, has slowly grown on us. Our initial reaction was in line with the majority of the Internet's: "Okay, it's Chatroulette without penises." But the more we've used the service, the more its benefits for networking, flirting and stymying boredom have revealed themselves.

But the thing is, since the site hasn't really hit critical mass yet, you tend to run into the same types of people over and over again. They're almost always very nice, but in our experience, they also almost always fall into one of the below five categories.

1. Journalists

Okay, this reporter is part of the problem, but few seem to be as in love with Airtime as the navel-gazing, network-savvy media elite. While the new app has been extensively reported on, few of our Facebook friends who aren't explicitly involved in media or tech seem to have caught on to the trend. We tend to wait to grant an app "phenomenon" status until it has been adopted by our Kardashian-obsessed, text-messages-in-her-sleep 20-year-old sister.

2. Startup Evangelizers

No where has the "everybody's a CEO" meme been more obvious than within the hallowed video chat grounds of Airtime. The vast majority of folks we've bumped into on the service are founder or executive-level startup employees. And, inevitably, when they ask us what we do, we are subjected to an impromptu pitch session on why their company is the Next Big Thing.

3. People You are Purposefully Not Facebook Friends With

Remember that dude you had a short but torrid Thing with back in college, and now sometimes you see each other in line for coffee and you make that unspoken "I'll pretend not to see you if you pretend not to see me" pact? Yeah, you're not Facebook friends with him for a reason, and you sure as hell don't want to run into him on Airtime.

4. The Lost, Lonely Men of the Internet

If this Businessweek piece is to be believed, a whole lot of dudes are looking at Airtime like it's a video chat version of OkCupid. We definitely had the experience of running into some flirty young men--one, in fact, who could barely bridle his joy as he blurted out: "You're a girl!"

5. Famous business leaders/investors/B-list celebrities

We all know Zuck uses it. So do Jessica Alba and Justin Bieber's manager, Scooter Braun, as well as Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley and Zynga cofounder Mark Pincus, who users apparently confuse for each other. Assumedly Olivia Munn, Jim Carrey, Martha Stewart, Snoop Dogg and Joel McHale use it too, since they were present for its launch. Personally, we're still waiting for Ryan Gosling to catch on.