New York Times: Snapchat Revolutionized Social Networks

Posted December 01, 2016

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Snapchat, or how the company has rebranded themselve, Snap, has truly changed the way we interact with content on our mobile devices.  What started as a simple app the let you send photos that would disappear after a short time, has quickly transformed into one of the most important content platforms on the market. All while still being misunderstood, and underestimated by older people.

Let's look in terms of business: Snap is preparing to go public with a huge valuation, they have just released Specticals, sunglasses with a camera installed in them, and Snapchat has surpassed Twitter in daily users.  That is a pretty impressive past few weeks.  Additionally, Snapchat is particularly popular with the ever sought after 30 and under demographic, and has greatly influenced the way that age group views content: expendable, entertaining, and digital. 

Snapchat is a great marketing tool and in 2016 companies, as well as Presidential campaigns, ventured onto Snapchat to reach the younger audiences.  If you want to know what the future of video could look like, just look at Snapchat.  Additionally, Snapchat recently started to venture into content.  Snap has posted jobs for original content producers, and clearly wants to be a big player in the upcoming media landscape. 

You may remember a few years ago Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook wanted to buy Snapchat for something like a billion dollers.  Snapchat said no.  Turns out, that may have been the right decision.

Technology columnist Farhad Manjoo of The New York Times reports:

Snap Inc., the parent company of the popular photo-messaging and storytelling app Snapchat, is having a productive autumn.

A couple of weeks ago, Snap filed confidential documents for a coming stock offering that could value the firm at $30 billion, which would make it one of the largest initial public offerings in recent years. Around the same time, it began selling Spectacles, sunglasses that can record video clips, which have become one of the most sought-after gadgets of the season.

And yet, even when it’s grabbing headlines, it often seems as if Snap gets little respect.

Though Snapchat has overtaken Twitter in terms of daily users to become one of the most popular social networks in the world, it has not attracted the media attention that the 140-character platform earns, perhaps because journalists and presidential candidates don’t use it very much. Snapchat’s news division has become a popular and innovative source of information for young people, but it is rarely mentioned in the hand-wringing over how social media affected the presidential election.

And because Snapchat is used primarily by teenagers and 20-somethings, and it seems deliberately designed to frustrate anyone over 25, it is often dismissed as a frivolity by older people (especially readers of a certain newspaper based in New York who have my email address).

This is all wrong. If you secretly harbor the idea that Snapchat is frivolous or somehow a fad, it’s time to re-examine your certainties. In fact, in various large and small ways, Snap has quietly become one of the world’s most innovative and influential consumer technology companies.

Snap, which is based far outside the Silicon Valley bubble, in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles, is pushing radically new ideas about how humans should interact with computers. It is pioneering a model of social networking that feels more intimate and authentic than the Facebook-led ideas that now dominate the online world. Snap’s software and hardware designs, as well as its marketing strategies, are more daring than much of what we’ve seen from tech giants, including Apple.

Snap’s business model, which depends on TV-style advertising that (so far) offers marketers fewer of the data-targeted options pioneered by web giants like Google, feels refreshingly novel. And perhaps most important, its model for entertainment and journalism values human editing and curation over stories selected by personalization algorithms — and thus represents a departure from the filtered, viral feeds that dominate much of the rest of the online news environment.

Read the full article.