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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

”Adults, not teens. Messaging, not Stories. Developing markets, not the U.S.”

So... Snap basically wants to be Facebook?

Adults, messaging, developing world — Facebook is already enormously entrenched in the overlap of those markets thanks to Messenger and WhatsApp. FB has also shown the ability to clone Snap’s product innovations.

I have a feeling 2019 is the year when Snap is acquired. The market cap is already below $10 billion.

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The USP of Snapchat was that parents could not go through past messages as these would get deleted once read. So, if you had planned a night out on the town doing silly things you could still pretend to the parents that you would being having a sleep over at a best friend's house. Even if they went through the phone with a fine toothcomb the parents would not find evidence of plans for wrong-doing.

Facebook is not about regularly messaging your best friends, it is about messaging/stalking people you knew from school onwards up to now, including workmates, parents and other people you don't message important things to, such as plans for tonight.

Snap are pretending here that their 'besties' market isn't already consumed by WhatsApp!, which it is, so Facebook have already eaten their lunch there. They don't actually acknowledge their 'secret sauce' in this memo, which was the instantly deleting messages that appeal to teens.

I also viewed Snap as an platform built on a single missing SMS feature, temporal messages. They have added a bunch of other stuff, but that single feature was always the adoption driver, and eventually users figured out screenshots trump deletion. I also thought that the other features were in direct conflict with that adoption driver, as in actively providing negative user incentives for continued use.

> "Developing markets, not the U.S.”

I thought he hated developing markets?

“This app is only for rich people,” Spiegel said, according to Pompliano. “I don’t want to expand into poor countries like India and Spain.”

Delicious irony.

https://variety.com/2017/biz/news/snapchat-evan-spiegel-only...

He does. And poor people. And old people. He still wants the money of advertisers targeting these groups though.

Who would be the buyer, though? Microsoft? Alibaba? I can't see many acquirers wanting to get into the competitions that snapchat has gotten themselves into.

maybe Google finally gets their social network

Maybe Apple. They’ll just pull most of the ads and make it “privacy focused”. If they gave people an alternative to Facebook it would be a big move.

Apple's not going to buy an app with a significant Android user base unless it's such a compelling app that it causes people to abandon Android and buy an iPhone. Snapchat ain't that app.

How do you square that with their purchase of Shazam?

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