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I find Snapchat's charter fascinating. I say this as the author of a competing, and much less successful, product called Privy (https://play.google.com/store/ap
by ryandvm 13y ago
I find Snapchat's charter fascinating. I say this as the author of a competing, and much less successful, product called Privy (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appidio.privy https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appidio.pr...).
I wrote Privy with a very simple use case in mind. It was for sending messages that you never want to resurface. Privacy, of course, was paramount.
After reading a few interviews with the Snapchat guys, I was amused that they always pitched it to be about temporal communications. They would downplay Snapchat as a secretive transport and talk about how it's more about sharing special moments. These new "un-private" features very clearly show that Snapchat is sincere about this use case.
It simply never occurred to me that people might want to send temporal messages and that privacy around sending those messages not be absolutely critical. I don't know if I'm out of touch or what. Or maybe this is more of a natural selection thing for successful mobile messaging products. Obviously the network effect of a privacy-oriented app is by definition nonexistent. Trust me.
- ionwake 13y agoI do not know much about privy, but as a competitor - why do you feel snapchat was more successful?
- Ziomislaw 13y agoread the 2nd last sentence
- ryandvm 13y agoI think they were more successful because of marketing. Initially, Privy and Snapchat were fairly close to feature parity. I had never actually heard of them while I was developing Privy. And then about a month or so before I was ready to release Privy, SnapChat hit the TechCrunch lottery. After that they quickly became a media sensation. Being a side project, Privy wasn't able to compete. Especially after they started picking up funding. Once the Snapchat buzz hit full fever pitch I threw in the towel on development. I used to think that useful apps could sell themselves. I know a lot of developers have this mentality. Nothing could be further from the truth. I now have much greater respect for the value of good marketing.
- lotso 13y agoThis is an incorrect history of Snapchat. Snapchat was a couple of college kids' summer project. It had a couple of thousand of users in the Fall of 2011, but didn't take off until it went viral in a couple of LA high schools. They raised money in the Spring of 2012, and were still relatively under the radar of most tech publications. It wasn't until the Fall of 2012 that they started getting major buzz. I'm not disagreeing that marketing can't sway products into success, but that was not the case with Snapchat.
- chanux 13y ago`unlike snap chat there is no account setup required` So do you authenticate with IMEI or phone number?
- ryandvm 13y agoThere is no authentication. Message is uploaded to server and then the sender's phone sends an SMS message with a query string authenticated URL to the recipient. That way the system never knows the sender's identity or to whom the message was sent.
- saurik 13y agoYou can't build a system that only lets a user view something in the way you claim on untrusted hardware, such as a cell phone: it is an hour of work and a few lines of code to entirely defeat your security. Snapchat really could not claim they can provide that, as they can't. While Snapchat somewhat relies on some confusion regarding this, their description is at least honest that this is an impossible problem, and their wording is largely based on the idea that they can't even keep the user from performing a very simple screenshot.