Ask HN: Why did Poke fail while Snapchat succeeded? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why did Poke fail while Snapchat succeeded?

6 pointsguptaneil5 comments

I looked at the App Store top charts today and noticed that Facebook Poke was no longer listed, while Snapchat is currently at #4. On top of that, even searching for Facebook Poke puts the actual Poke app as the #4 result. For a moment, I even thought the app had been entirely pulled.

Does anybody have any theories for why Facebook's app failed so quickly? Did users realize that Snapchat was the original and decide to support it (seems unlikely), or is there another reason? I can't seem to find any information about this.

View on HN

Why on earth do you think it's failed less than a week after it came out? Also, App Store search is known to be terrible.

Snapchat succeeds because (not despite) it is not Facebook. Snapchat lets young people communicate without parental oversight. Text messages, phone logs, facebook accounts can all be seen by parents. But Snapchat's "self destruct" messages don't give parents the chance to oversee what their kids are up to.

My guess is that everyone who would use either app was using Snapchat and saw no reason to switch. The idea isn't compelling enough to draw in new users, so Poke failed.

you cant trust Facebook when you are posting personal/ private pics in Poke...more so after the instagram issue...

This article explains it:

http://www.businessinsider.com/everyone-is-talking-about-how...

Basically, you can't just clone something an expect to succeed automatically. In fact, historically the vast majority of clones have failed to beat the "original". You'd think Facebook would've learned this by now. They tried to build a clone in 10 days, just like they tried to build a "Circles" thing like Google+ had when it came out, and thought that's all they needed to stop people from joining Google+. But it had no effect on Google+, and Poke had no effect on Snapchat either. If anything, all these articles mentioning Snapchat together with Poke may have helped it rise in ranks. I think it was #6 before, and now it's #3.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com