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Comment by doublerebel | Hacker News Reader

I still think Snap is a good long play because so far they are the only social network to "get" Augmented Reality. Google has already had multiple AR missteps (Glass, Tango, Pokemon Go via Niantic), Facebook is playing AR copycat, Microsoft's AR is targeting big industry.

Snap's entertainment experience puts the viewer in the center of the action, similar to VR 360° experiences and Spectacles is a direct expression of that understanding. Snap's AR advertising (sponsored filters) has been an overwhelming success. I don't think a real competitor has emerged for Snap yet, as long as they stay the course.

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First, that's a feature, not a product.

Second, there's no barrier to entry there. Facebook's ~10000 engineers can recreate features with amazing swiftness, do it better than the first movers, then spread the feature quickly through its 1 billion+ user social network. If Facebook wants to beat snapchat at the AR game, they will do it when they feel like it.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/13/instagram-stories-bigger-t...

You mean like how Google+ replaced FB?

Thats a product, not a feature.

Pokemon Go probably shouldn't be considered a misstep given it surpassed $1.2b in revenue and over 750 million downloads earlier this summer. Also as another poster notes below, AR is pretty wide open with both Instagram (FB) finding success with the exact same AR features/lenses as Snap, as well as apple integrating AI in to their most recent iOS release.

SNAP has already lost $40 mn on Spectacles, because they don't sell. This does not seem to be a strategy that is actually going to work. Meanwhile, Instagram Stories now has more users than Snap, and Snap's user growth has stalled, coming in below expectations for the second quarter in a row. So far they have also failed to improve their Android experience, which is not helping. At this point, SNAP seems more like TWTR than FB, except they don't have the kind of relevance, and therefore staying power, that the former has. Unless they can come up with a strategy for a turnaround, they may be dead in five years.

Apple just commoditized AR by adding it as a set of iOS APIs that anyone can use, so that's an awfully shallow moat for Snap to rely on.

Adding filters to a camera is a very different market compared to sustaining a social network on it. Look at Hipstamatic vs Instagram.

It's not just creating a feature, it's understanding why someone would want to use it. That's the difference between a product and a business.

Most of HN is too old and otherwise not the Snap demographic. How many of you actually use Snapchat with your friends and watch the videos with your headphones in? The experience is key -- the business facets being analyzed are a symptom of the experience.

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