On Snapchat : Pre Chat.2.0

Mark imma let you finish but Evan has the greatest social network of all time

“Dude that guy is stupid man. If someone offered me $3bn even $30m for snapchat. i’ll take it and invest it in a real company. The guy went to Stanford, snapchat can’t be the best idea that he will have!” BOY WAS I SOOO DAMN WRONG.

Snapchat is proving to be a company that will be worth ~10x that amount. But what is more exciting is how they are doing it.

Facebook is a great company (about to be exponentially greater with this bot platform announcement at this year’s f8 conference), but Facebook is wrong in thinking that competing with snapchat means buying lenses and facial recognition technology. Snapchat is the David in this story because of design and product decisions.

A True Mobile First Network

On the web, for the longest time, your identity was mapped to your email. More recently, web identity has been linked to Facebook and twitter and other popular social networks in addition to email. However, on your phone, your identity is linked to your phone number. All the great mobile first networks (Snapchat, Whatsapp, Messenger) realise this and make this the primary source of identity on their platforms. Sure, they can add your other social identities and email for consolidation of your social graph but primarily you sign up with your phone number.

Even in today’s hyper open world, phone numbers are still pretty personal. You can message me, you can tweet me but only people I actually know have my phone number. This means that the people you connect with are not just work colleagues or sales reps (i’m tired of telling Linkedin that i don’t know Andy for intercom.io :| ) from your email, but friends who you know well enough to have their numbers. This creates what I call a Tight-Social-Network. One of the great things about tight-social-networks is they feel safe. In the sense that, I know everyone who sends me a message and the chances of me getting threatened for expressing an opinion or just being a living thing is significantly less, compared with more open/ looser social networks like twitter for example where almost anyone can say anything to you. I think this seemingly safe environment allows Snapchat to thrive even through all the chatter about it just being a sexting app and warnings of exploitations.

DEFAULT DELETE

In a world with content overload. Snapchat’s decision to be default delete is the one contrarian view that makes it super successful. Paradoxically this leads to users creating more as they are less concerned about getting the perfect selfie on the site. In stark contrast is Instagram, where profile pages are about creating a carefully curated vibe and focus is on putting our best photos forward. We even describe some certain photo’s as Instagramable, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but usually includes less than 1% of the photos we take.

The second reason why ephemerality works for snapchat is because it draws users back everyday. The 24hrs lifecycle of Snapchat stories makes me come back to the app at least once a day. I use Facebook more to find out major milestones in my looser social networks life. Facebook is where I find out my ex-girlfriend is getting married, snapchat is where I see how great the wedding was. FML

Bundled Feed

Another way Snapchat tackles content overload is through what I call a bundled feed. Twitter is trying to do this with the introduction of moments but on Snapchat, as a default all stories by the same person are in one bundle. The result is a more organized feed with a limited batch of information to consume. This is neither an algorithmic or reverse chronological feed but a collection of snippets from my closest freinds last 24hrs. Compare that with twitter where each tweet has a life of its own making it almost impossible to easily identify a stream of thoughts. Power users hack this by replying to themselves in a tweetstorm which is downright weird and un-intuitive for new users.

Snapchat has also chosen not to glorify the friend/follower count and focuses on the content being shared. As a result most users don’t have the pressure to increase number of friends they have on snapchat like they do/did on other social networks, this means their feed remains restricted to close friends and few celebrities they care about. This goes a long way in solving the signal vs noise issue most products like this have, again resulting in more engagement.

The combination of these things: tight social network and default delete, leads to more users sharing and immediately finding utility from the product, keeps snapchat growing exponentially. With the company now making a serious attempt to monetize (customizable Geo-filters are going to be huge) i’m super excited to see what the next 3–5 years of Snapchat will be.