TemPic and Picit are apps that, in the style of Snapchat, allows you to send pictures to friends that, after a specified time period, vanish from the recipient's phone. The underlying concept of these temporary social media apps is to be able to share photos with a sense of privacy (i.e. photos can not be kept). The idea is to encourage people to send photos that they might otherwise choose not to share.

However, it hould be noted that it is trivially easy to find a way around the restrictions. For example, an experienced user would know how to capture a screenshot during the handful of second that the photo is available for. And, as you might expect, it's also only possible to send photos to other people who have the app installed, which limits the utility of both apps.

TemPic tries to alleviate this friends / users limitation by allowing you to add random friends and by making it easy to let real-life friends know (via email and SMS) that you are using the app and what your user ID is. Even so the process of manually adding friends is somewhat cumbersome, especially compared to other social apps that integrate with a bigger service provider (e.g. Facebook, Google) or use a combination of your address book and phone number as a unique identifier (e.g. WhatsApp).

Both TemPic and Picit have a straight forward user interfaces that are easy to use, but TemPic is a little more flexible and feature rich. For example, it allows you to select a photo from the phone or capture a new one, allows you to add effects to your photos before sending (via Aviary photo editor), and specify an interval (amount of time for which the photo will be visible to recipients).

TemPic and Picit work as advertised, but they are always going to be limited by the number of your friends that have the respective app installed. For these kinds of social and sharing apps the network effect is always going to have a big impact (i.e. value depends on the number of people using the app) and it's hard to see how apps of this type, that are only available on Windows Phone, can achieve sufficient scale to take off in the mass market. That said, these apps may prove useful if you have group of friends within which there is a high instance of Windows Phone ownership, but being realistic we would expect that to be the exception, rather than the rule.

Apps of this type are also a good example of how a similar or equivalent app, a metric sometimes used when comparing app availability between platforms, can be misleading. Yes, TemPic and Picit can be seen as an equiavlents to Snapchat, but the reality is they don't have anything like the same value.

TemPic Windows Phone Store description:

TemPic is a fun way to share temporary pictures with your friends! Simply take a picture, add a caption if you'd like, pick the friends you want to send it to, select how long they are able to view it, and send! You friends will get your TemPic and see it for the length of time you specified then it disappears! After that its gone, deleted, never to be seen again by anybody!

Picit Windows Phone Store description:

Picit is a social networking app for Windows Phone, which allows users to share in real-time their special picture moments with optional custom effects applied (picits). Also, users are only able to view a picit for as long as the sender specifies; after the specified time interval (currently between 1 and 15 secs) it vanishes from the recipient's phone!

Both TemPic (Windows Phone 7.5 and Windows Phone 8) and Picit (Windows Phone 8 only) are free downloads from the Windows Phone Store.