Snapchat weighs what was once unthinkable: permanent snaps
reuters.com
reuters.com
There's probably a network effect — a couple of strong links in the friend group in that city keeps it going. I also wonder if usage in coastal cities is a leading indicator.
Wait, is this the same Snap that convinced people to share intimate pictures by making them inaccessible after a short while, but retains the right to store those pictures indefinitely and to use them for other purposes?
(Mostly-but-not-entirely rhetorical question, since I never used it and haven't looked closely into their privacy policies - so I might actually be wrong.)
Instagram is only going to get worse with Mark Zuckerberg pushing it. Snap could still be an alternative if it focuses on what users want and keep what users may not want as optional or as a new app altogether.
We are curious about what others do. That's why reality shows and gossip magazines were so successful.
But the point is that by introducing Stories, Instagram provided this opportunity to spy on the lives of others. But also the opportunity to build a profile. This is important for anyone who has the ability to entertain others for longer, the influencers. And make others believe they could be that too.
Just saving a snap would not be enough. Snap would have to provide a landing page for each user that could be attractive enough for others to start following it. And some small clips is not so attractive, because you have to wait without doing nothing. In Instagram, in a few second rolling someone feed you would like it or not.
In addition, Instagram's search system improved greatly during this time of competition. While on snapchat is non-existent.
Otherwise, I (xennial) tried it twice and found the UI rather confusing.
It is depressing to me how low the bar is for our ability to learn an application. If the UI has more than a single list or button, it becomes "impossible to navigate". There was a time when users would expect some time getting to know their application and even, dare I say, read a guide or manual! Sometimes extremely powerful, creative, and useful tools will have a learning curve. Snap could offer some amazing capabilities, but because of this "simple is everything" mindset, they will face outrage if they expose anything beyond message passing.
It is completely nonsensical how Snapchat works. You have to swipe every which way and there's no clues when to swipe where. You just have to memorize the magical incantation to do what you want through trial and error.
We as a society have built up a fantastic 'language' of UI. We know what buttons and menus, etc do. Snapchat throws away all the ways you want to intuitively navigate and give you no clues about what to do instead.
However, I think your description also fits CLI's which has always led me to wonder if maybe Snapchat's UI is really a way forward as a "native mobile" CLI of a sort.
We're already seeing things like pinch-to-zoom, swipe to move next, etc. being taken and recombined for all sorts of apps.
This is probably one of my favorite things about the CLI versus GUI. There is nothing worse than working with cli apps that have weird incantations.
I've been using command-line interfaces for a pretty long time now, and I'm incredibly thankful that these days I can look something up on the internet and generally find a list of some examples on how to use things. Man pages are generally incredibly verbose in all the wrong ways (far too much information, far too little that you actually want) and the -h switch at best gives you some flags and descriptions that are fundamentally too short to teach you anything useful. There is no real global standard for what kind of flags or inputs do what things (for example, far from every program with a CLI interface will actually accept "-" as an input file even though that's one of those things a lot of people use and should therefore be pretty obvious), further obfuscating the core workings of anything you might be using.
The applications you are thinking of served preexisting needs, so it required more upfront complexity.
Something like Snapchat's UI does not have the burden of fulfilling a previously existing need. That is, until they redesigned it. Then suddenly, the new UI had to provide for a pre-existing need and as an obvious consequence, has been more difficult for both new and existing users.
.... I don't know that thats really a generation.
A generation typically involves a period of time at least as long as the organism takes to reach sexual reproductive age.
> Compared with Twitter or Facebook, Snapchat can seem almost aggressively user-unfriendly. If you’re new to the app and looking for posts by your kid, your boyfriend, or DJ Khaled, good luck. It’s hard to find somebody without knowing his or her screen name. This is by design. “We’ve made it very hard for parents to embarrass their children,” Spiegel said at a conference in January. “It’s much more for sharing personal moments than it is about this public display.”
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-snapchat-built-a...
Snapchat ‘16 was “confusing” because it didn’t hand hold you and a lot of features weee behind invisible swipes. The features were there, it was just hard to realize that they existed.
Snapchat ‘18 isn’t confusing. It’s bad because they de-emphasized everything about why people used the app and instead heavily pushed their own content. It’s practically a different app with a different purpose - it’s a tabloid rag rather than a social network.
Snapchat felt more personal than FB/IG, and I guess Spiegal saw all the celebs using the app and killed the goose trying to monetize that.
Yah, not successful at all.
In the context of valuation and business decisions, it turns out having a lot of users isn't enough. If it was, Snapchat wouldn't be in trouble and we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
As a further point, note that you're citing 2014 and 2016 figures, and I did say, "especially in 2019." Yahoo never recouped its acquisition price from Tumblr.
It's likely that they making all apps alike to match most grossing.
Is screenshotting a message proof of intent to reproduce?
If I don’t use an ephemeral messaging service am I giving implied consent to reproduce?
Specifically when using the Sky Go app for streaming TV, screenshots come out black.
Being unique or solving a purpose that's genuinely useful to its audience, doesn't seem to be a primary aim of businesses like Snapchat.
- Snapchat solves a unique communication problem (the desire to express yourself without it living forever). It still solves this problem today, however so do a lot of competitors.
Why not? You’re a highly evolved biological entity and you were from the very moment you were conceived! Evolution refers to your ancestors, not to any individual.
A unicorn is not supposed to fill a niche, it’s supposed to fight till death.
And not saying that this is wrong. After all this is how the society works.
Due to a lack of overall direction and a common goal, teams are isolated in their own silos (which they're good at), but there's no cohesion. At the moment the company is reactive to competitors, not innovative and a leader in the space like what you could argue they were a few years ago
I don't look at anyone's stories anymore. The people I care about, I make time to hang out with them in person or call them when I miss them. You know, like people used to before 2010.
There I said it. I know I'm not alone.
I don't know about anyone else, but posting a story is the only guaranteed way to ensure I don't even check it.
That applies equally to Snapchat, instagram and facebook.
As a means of communication, it just doesn't work for me.
I love my work, my hobbies, solitude, family, analog lifestyle as much as possible.
The company is also weighing an option to reveal the identities of Snapchat users who make public posts
Of course, the irony is not lost on Reuters because just a few lines after that:
Snap is carefully weighing the privacy, technical and legal considerations of revealing user identities on public posts
So the way I read this is that Snap are giving up their transient nature and planning to become yet another platform for industrial grade stalking.
At most saving the last 24 hours is just fine. I don't really see a need to keep everything forever and ever
There is no reason not to skip to the next photo sharing platform because nothing is saved. It's a platform without a platform effect.
(The fact that temporary photos can be quite easily screenshotted, photographed etc. is an unfortunate limitation, and something which many users may not realize)
There are places where it's legal to record your conversations when you go out with friends, and even whether it's legal or not it's incredibly easy to do. But good luck having much of a social life or even getting served in the local bar if people know you're always wearing a wire.
Sorry, I'm not sure I understand. What, exactly, shifts norms?