Why Facebook Is Terrified of Snapchat in 3 Letters: EDC
And how Slingshot might be their bet against it
I’ll admit it. When Snapchat first came on the scene in my high school, I didn’t really “get it”. I thought it was a silly fad that would disappear as quickly as its photos. As time went on, I slowly warmed up to the service, but was still as shocked as anyone when I heard they received — and turned down— a $3B cash offer from Facebook.
It wasn’t until this morning that I fully grasped the vision of the company and, as a result, why Facebook is terrified of it.
If you haven’t already, add EDCLive on Snapchat and click through Snapchat’s first “Our Story”. I’ll wait here for you.
If you didn’t watch it, you should. It is, by far, the most immersed I have been in an event I didn’t attend. You were as there as you could be. 50+ personal, unique perspectives, from beginning to end. I was wow’d.
A few months back, Snapchat introduced Smart Filters. The most significant element wasn’t the colored filters, the bigger text, or ability to add the time to your photo. It was the one that made absolutely zero sense to me at the time: the Weather filter, which allows you to add the current temperature to your snap. Looking back, it also happened to be the filter that encouraged every user to approve Location Services.
Our Story— which shares your snaps into one location-sensitive collection—isn’t a one-off experiment. It is the future of Snapchat and, I believe, will become just as vital to the company as its one-to-one photo sharing services.
In the coming months, Snapchat may continue to focus Our Story around big gatherings; it’s not hard to imagine sporting events and concerts all with their own Story. Eventually, they could move into limited geofenced locations. As Baz asked me, “What if every college campus had its own collective story? Think about it.” It’s hard to imagine students not glued to that 24/7.
The final and probably most difficult move could be towards location networks that move with you — or “elastic networks”. What photos are being shared around me right now? Just because Color failed doesn’t mean its vision was wrong. (I also believe location-based Stories will be essential for monetization, but that’s for another post).
This future of location-centric photo sharing (whether based around events or not) is the one Facebook is, and should be, terrified of. And it’s also the one I think their newest app, Slingshot, is hedging against.
Built around the requirement that users have to send a photo to see a photo, Slingshot simply isn’t built for one-to-one messaging. I’m not exaggerating when I say I can carry more coherent conversations on Yo.
In fact, Slingshot does everything it can to prevent users from sending photos to only one person. Facebook pushes a “Select All” button for you to click when you are choosing who to “sling” your photo to (a feature that has been requested to and denied by Snapchat many times). In addition, Slingshot makes it very obvious to recipients when a photo was “slung” to them and no one else.
These aren’t oversights. Fundamentally, Slingshot isn’t a messaging app. It’s a mass photo-update app. A mass photo-update app that asks every single user to enable Location Services upon download.
I don’t think Slingshot is meant to compete against the 2014, one-to-one (or even one-to-friends) messaging Snapchat. It’s meant to compete against 2015, 16, and 17, one-to-location Snapchat. With Poke and some private emails tweeted to the press, Facebook and Snapchat have already butted heads a few times. Expect to see it a lot more going forward.
If you enjoyed this at all, feel free to click Recommend. You can find me on Twitter, Snapchat, and Yo at @Lee94Josh.
Thanks to @robgo, @unger, @alex, @jjeremycai, and @Baz__ for proofreading!
