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Comment by smtddr | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to have to eat my words at this rate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6824666 ...

I really don't understand this. What is so special about snapchat? What future does this thing have? Can Evan Spiegel see the future?

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For more perspective on this question, I'd recommend this recent video (~6 min) by Casey Neistat - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKSr6h5-fCU

Wow. This shows how out of touch I am with youth culture.

WHOOOAAA.... I didn't know about the story feature. I thought it was still just a glorified MMS with an alleged unrecoverable-delete-in-10-secs feature.

As someone of the "Facebook generation", I have to say my mind was blown by this video. Thanks for sharing.

I feel there is clearly a trend line one could draw here in the evolution of social networking and social media. Since the initial era of social networking, friction was reduced (e.g. Instagram / Twitter) and now it's moving to be both frictionless and ephemeral (Snapchat).

It's interesting because the trend almost leads you something like life broadcasting (e.g. Justin.tv) - but we've already been there. I wonder what the next phase will be.

As someone who really respects and likes Snapchat, I had no idea the impact it was having on modern culture. I could not have come up with this experience.

It seems like their planned future is to share sponsored snaps with their users. I'm not a fan of this. While I like the idea of snapchat, I have enough problems with their app already... Much more annoyance and I'll just ditch it.

I think Snapchat is a cool company, and they showed their technical wisdom by building their original messaging service with Java atop App Engine, so they could scale effortlessly and just focus on the product. While this might not sound like wisdom per se it certainly shows more competence than all the tech companies building on top of garbage like node.js or whatever flavor of the month tech mouth-breathers happen to be hyping at the time, and then months later releasing a blog post about how they had to switch their entire architecture to an actually capable system, as if doing stupid things that cause you headaches later and wasting time fixing your broken garbage when you could be working on the actual product instead of doing things right the first time is some kind of engineering feat.

They have 100 million + users(not as small as it seems in these days of throwing around huge numbers), see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_virtual_communities_wit...

The offers and valuation they got I assume are based on(aside from their huge funding rounds) the usual vastly overblown targeted userbase analytics advertising blah blah. I say vastly overblown because the revenue potential based on the targeted ads hooplah really isn't what its made out to be. To put this in perspective, Facebook has 10x Snapchat's users and made around $8 billion in revenue last year, so a little over twice of its bid for Snapchat. So unless they planned on putting extra special magic fairy dust ads on Snapchat(a platform of which its dubious what kind of ads will be successful/viable on, if any) after acquiring it, there are better companies out there that they could have acquired if they wanted to increase their earnings.

I think specifically Facebook's offer wasn't based on Snapchat's earning potential, more on the fact that Zuck seems to get antsy when the Facebook empire loses face(pun not intended) to any other platform in the least. He paid $1bil for Instagram when it had 30 million users, way more than it was valuated at at the time. The press made it seem like he alone spearheaded both offers, and that Facebook's board/other execs were barely involved in the decisions.

Google allegedly attempted to outbid Facebook for Snapchat, offering $4bil, which struck me as odd, seeing as their better known recent acquires included a machine learning firm and a company that makes smart home products. I thought Google had learned it's lesson in the social space after the colossal failure that was Google+.

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