Snapchat’s Success: Connectivity, Easy Media Creation, And Ephemerality

http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/25/how-snapchat-thinks-about-snapchat/?ncid=twittersocialshare

by coloneltcb • 12 years ago

32 29 12 years ago

diek• 12 years ago

Wasn't the whole point of Snapchat undermined by the fact that they weren't really deleting the snaps [1] ? Just renaming the snaps with a '.nomedia' extension? That sort of contradicts the 'ephemerality' they're going for.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/partner-zone-infose...

shalalala• 12 years ago

Someone needs to coin a term for businesses like Snapchat. They offer nil in the way of progress, yet act like they are all about progress. They offer no lasting value, yet you know they store all these snaps and will sell your info later through meta tags. They offer a free service, so you know you're the product. They target teenagers whose minds have not fully developed and sell their info to adults so they can advertise to them more effectively.

They should shut down their service, take the money they have, and make something that improves the world.

We don't really need another leech, or a shell vehicle for the rich to hedge in.

vezzy-fnord• 12 years ago

Pretty sure Snapchat falls under the definition of the archetypal cash cow.

They target teenagers whose minds have not fully developed and sell their info to adults so they can advertise to them more effectively.

Frankly I have no sympathy for such people, but I agree that ultimately Snapchat is a useless trend. It will be replaced soon enough.

toomuchtodo• 12 years ago

Someone needs to coin a term for businesses like Snapchat.

Psychopathic Hockeystick.

Please note I'm referring only to the company, and not its owners/founders when I coined this.

AndrewKemendo• 12 years ago

They should shut down their service, take the money they have, and make something that improves the world

The problem is, if they did that they wouldn't have any money as it's all VC wrapped

calinet65• 12 years ago

"They offer nil in the way of progress, yet act like they are all about progress."

There's some lesson here in the value of distilling an experience to its bare emotional essence.

They did actually capture something of value, and created (perhaps by accident, perhaps intentionally) something that brings an unmistakeable humanity to what used to be cold and technological.

This is some sort of progress, I think. We could use more humanity in our technology. In fact I'd say it could be the next big set of problems to solve.

nl2• 12 years ago

Sorry, I think I'm dumb today.

They offer nil in the way of progress, yet act like they are all about progress.

What does this mean?

and will sell your info later through meta tags

What does through meta tags mean?

They should shut down their service, take the money they have, and make something that improves the world.

Communication doesn't improve the world? Why not?

We don't really need another leech, or a shell vehicle for the rich to hedge in.

What's the hedge here?

This post sort of nearly makes sense, but doesn't quite. Is it generated by a Markov chain?

girvo• 12 years ago

That was an issue in the past, yeah. But it also sort of misses the point. While you and I care about whether those snaps truly are properly removed from memory, your average 14-25yo using SnapChat doesn't. They don't care that if they jailbroke their iPhone they could get the snaps possibly (though iirc that's been fixed). All they care about is the fact that by default they know that the snaps will no longer be accessible after a time to the people they send them to, through the default interface, with screenshotting (which sends a notification back to the sender).

andrewfong• 12 years ago

I think it's even simpler than that. Your average 14-25yo just cares about whether their parents and employers can view their snaps. Any barrier that requires more than 10 minutes of effort to circumvent is good enough in that respect.

nostromo• 12 years ago

It doesn't need to be bulletproof. It needs to be more ephemeral than Facebook.

calinet65• 12 years ago

It doesn't even have to actually work. It just has to offer the experience of ephemerality.

lucasnb• 12 years ago

I wonder if the newer ephemeral apps like Whisper etc... will ever catch on as much as Snapchat did. They're basically trying to be more like Facebook in terms of functionality but they've added optional ephemerality on everything you post.

Kiro• 12 years ago

No, it makes no difference at all. I would have thought the same before but you really need to use Snapchat to understand what it's all about.

siliconc0w• 12 years ago

Whoever is calling the shots over at instragram needs to be fired for not spending the hour or so of engineering time required to make instragram photos 'ephemeral' when the app first came out. It's basically an anti-feature. I knew I should have patented not saving data back in the day.

lajy• 12 years ago

You clearly didn't read the article or the speech. If every word you ever said aloud was recorded, you'd probably speak differently than have you entire life. The whole point is that by making it ephemeral, in an age where nearly everything can be stored indefinitely and shared immediately, it becomes a mode of communication rather than a preserved expression.

lelandbatey• 12 years ago

It's interesting that you say "imagine growing up in a world where everything you say is recorded" because a key part of growing up for me was being taught that for a large part of my life, that could be the reality.

It's very interesting to try to live your life as if you were always being recorded. It forces you to be more truthful in the things you casually say, while simultaneously tempering your views so you can stay truthful when expressing your opinion. However, I've found it to be a largely worthwhile goal, since it forces a high degree of consistency between ones internal and external state, a feeling that is quite satisfying.

calinet65• 12 years ago

You're entirely missing the point about the psychology of communication.

Whether or not Snapchat landed on what they did by sheer accident or by intentionally making the interaction more human, they did land on something.

fatjokes• 12 years ago

I thought it was the sexting?

Snapchat’s Success: Connectivity, Easy Media Creation, And Ephemerality

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