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Comment by grumdan | Hacker News Reader

Whether it's because of their business model is an important question though, because it may tell us if we this has a good chance of being genuine and whether we can expect this to last. If it's in their financial interest to protect users' privacy, then I'm much more inclined to believe that they are actually trying to do that.

If they right now appear to care about privacy, but it's for some other reason, I'd expect financial motives to eventually overrule that.

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Am I the only person we thinks Apple might be setting itself up to take a shot at a private, secure, ad-free, paid for social media play?

I mean there are a growing number of people leaving Facebook (ok mostly for Instagram and WhatsApp) who would be willing to pay a few dollars a month to have an advert free experience in a private social media network.

I don’t see it being foretold by their actions, but you have a point. I hope they keep out of social media though. It would bring them within distance of becoming yet another bad privacy actor. I also prefer the separation of my apple account and such things.

Yes, and they should call it Pong.

Jokes aside, isn't that, functionally speaking, iMessage?

They have failed at every attempt at social media.

Because there was never a demand for a new social network. Apple is now big enough that anything they build becomes trendy and something people will jump into.

Apple is not that big when it comes to market share - yes they have the most affluent users - but you can’t make a social network from that.

Smartphone market share wouldn't be the defining factor in whether you could jumpstart a social network, given there are billions of active smartphones.

The actual size - not relative size - of your base would define that. The only way relative would matter is if they needed to be larger than eg Android to do it, for some reason (they don't).

They have ~1.4 billion active devices world-wide (900+ million active iPhones). You're acting like they have more like 50 million. They'll soon have a billion people using their various services.

The whole idea of a social network is being able to connect with anyone not just 20% of the market.

The whole idea of a social network is to connect with your friends. Young people, the most valuable demographic, overwhelmingly use iPhone in both the UK/US. Snapchat/Instagram is a successful social network just controlling this market.

No. Failed because they refused to open up user info. Remember Ping and iAds. Ask the bitter people running those project what they think. To get any user's info you have to go through chains of managers and then a sign off from a board member.

You act as if that’s a bad thing....

Its in their financial interest because it casts a halo on the brand and incentivizes people to buy iphones.

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