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To Stop Copycats, Snapchat Shares Itself (techcrunch.com)
"Snapchat pioneered Stories, the popular feature where users create and share ephemeral posts that disappear within 24 hours," reports Business Insider. "And now, it's taking them everywhere." Users are now able to share their Stories on third-party partner apps like Tinder -- and Snap is also sharing its Bitmoji's with Venmo and Fitbit.
TechCrunch reports: For 2.5 years, Snapchat foolishly tried to take the high road versus Facebook, with Evan Spiegel claiming "Our values are hard to copy". That inaction allowed Zuckerberg to accrue over 1 billion daily Stories users across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook compared to Snapchat's 186 million total daily users. Meanwhile, the whole tech industry scrambled to build knock-offs of Snap's vision of an ephemeral, visual future.
But Snapchat's new strategy is a rallying call for the rest of the social web that's scared of being squashed beneath Facebook's boot. It rearranges the adage of "if you can't beat them, join them" into "to beat them, join us". As a unified front, Snap's partners get the infrastructure they need to focus on what differentiates them, while Snapchat gains the reach and entrenchment necessary to weather the war. Snapchat's plan is to let other apps embed the best parts of it rather than building their own half-rate copies. Why reinvent the wheel of Stories, Bitmoji, and ads when you can reuse the original?
A high-ranking Snap executive told me on background that this is indeed the strategy. If it's going to invent these products, and others want something similar, it's smarter to enable and partly control the Snapchatification than to try to ignore it. Otherwise, Facebook might be the one to platform-tize what Snap inspired everyone to want.
The article concludes that Snap "needs all the help it can get if the underdog is going to carve out a substantial and sustainable piece of social networking."
TechCrunch reports: For 2.5 years, Snapchat foolishly tried to take the high road versus Facebook, with Evan Spiegel claiming "Our values are hard to copy". That inaction allowed Zuckerberg to accrue over 1 billion daily Stories users across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook compared to Snapchat's 186 million total daily users. Meanwhile, the whole tech industry scrambled to build knock-offs of Snap's vision of an ephemeral, visual future.
But Snapchat's new strategy is a rallying call for the rest of the social web that's scared of being squashed beneath Facebook's boot. It rearranges the adage of "if you can't beat them, join them" into "to beat them, join us". As a unified front, Snap's partners get the infrastructure they need to focus on what differentiates them, while Snapchat gains the reach and entrenchment necessary to weather the war. Snapchat's plan is to let other apps embed the best parts of it rather than building their own half-rate copies. Why reinvent the wheel of Stories, Bitmoji, and ads when you can reuse the original?
A high-ranking Snap executive told me on background that this is indeed the strategy. If it's going to invent these products, and others want something similar, it's smarter to enable and partly control the Snapchatification than to try to ignore it. Otherwise, Facebook might be the one to platform-tize what Snap inspired everyone to want.
The article concludes that Snap "needs all the help it can get if the underdog is going to carve out a substantial and sustainable piece of social networking."
But on the other hand, Snapchat's userbase is growing older and reaching adulthood.
It slowly will become less relevant on the fight for the social platform: it will slowly go the way of Instagram and WhatsApp (average platform that everybody uses, but starts to be a bit saturated in its attention-economy), which then in turn go the way of Facebook (kind of still here, but has become crap due to over commercialization on the attention market) which in turn will end up in the same spot as MySpace (a.k.a. "who the hell still uses that ?" social networks) whose own days are counted until it reaches the GeoCities level (Deleted from the web).
The next thing that Zuckerberg will actually focus on buying (or if buying fails, try to clone the shit out of it) is whatever the current kids are starting to use (random attempt at guessing: Tiktok ?). To keep swiming un uncle-scoorge-style pools-of-(Advertiser's)-money, Zuckerberg needs to attracks users. The network effect usually doesn't help for younger generation (They want to use what their *peers* are using, *not* being on the *same social platform as their parents*), and that's why Zuckerberg is usually shopping for new networks (Instagram, Whatsapp) or clonning them if that fails (Snapchat).
This whole "Snapchat's new strategy is a rallying call for the rest of the social web" and "to beat them, join us" narrative makes a nice "David vs Goliath" story of the lesser networks going up against the big Facebook. But in practice, it's yet another attempt at the same.
It's basically the Snapchat crew wanting *to be the ones* who'll snatch the "next big platform" that kids will be using in the future, instead of Facebook.
Just wrapped in a different narrative, because they try to present a different image to the public.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
For 2.5 years, Snapchat foolishly tried to take the high road versus Facebook...
Snapchat is the only social media provider I've found to be even LESS careful with private data than Facebook.
They've disclosed their encryption key in source code.
They store user data in cleartext.
They didn't deploy end to end encryption until 2019.
It is hard to stumble over such as low bar as Facebook's "security", but Snapchat has done it.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.