Snapchat Thinking
Redefining social currency, photos, and the camera.
As news emerges of Snap’s impending $3 billion NYSE IPO, I thought it might be a good time to publish some thoughts about Snapchat I’ve been mulling over for quite some time. Snapchat continues to be one of the most confounding products I’ve encountered, and I’ve found myself constantly oscillating between being bullish and bearish on the company; the arguments for both side of the coin seem equally compelling. But setting all that aside, Snapchat is the fastest-moving, most innovative social company out there (or camera company), and has augured a unique method of challenging the assumptions that have become embedded in many aspects of the technology landscape.
Much has already been made of the way in which Snapchat’s architecture has enabled users to shed the baggage associated with crafting the perfect online profile. Disappearing images are of course uniquely suited to communicating authentic and undoctored moments in time, and their ephemerality is a refreshing break from other social network photos which last forever by default. Snapchat’s impact in this regard has been profound, because before it came around, consumers didn’t really know any other ways to use photos. Photos by design have always been about capturing and preserving memories, freezing and storing pockets of time - the idea of disappearing photos was notionally absurd.
But when we spout buzzwords like ‘mobile native’ and ‘mobile first’, what we mean is how products like Snapchat and Uber build products that are not just context-specific, but also context-exclusive. That is to say Uber’s application is not just well suited to the specific capabilities of mobile devices, it only works with mobile devices. The utility of Uber as a ride-hailing service is destroyed if you port it to another platform, like an immobile PC.
Snapchat is very much the same. Disappearing photos are still conceptually ridiculous if you think about them running on a service such as Facebook. This is because the product’s architecture — the reverse chronological news-feed, user profiles, text-based messaging — simply doesn’t cater for such a paradigm: Facebook wasn’t built to share real-time moments in the same manner as Snapchat. On Facebook, ephemeral photos would be an annoyance, on Snapchat it’s a feature. Despite Facebook’s success in bringing Facebook to mobile, the product’s fundamental utility is still in many ways a relic of the desktop age of 2004 when it was born.
Snapchat has effectively seized the mobile context to create applications that are uniquely mobile. Snapchat redefines what can be done with an image — transforming it from a means of storing memories, to a mechanism for communicating moments.
Of course transforming this paradigm requires re-thinking the kinds of reward and feedback that drive user engagement and behaviour. As such, Snapchat has reinscribed new forms of social currency in the act of sharing and communicating. The ‘like’, and the ‘comment’ have become mainstays of our digital social interactions as powerful forms of digital reward, however Snapchat removes the like, and replaces it with a simple ‘seen by’. The seen function is consistent with Snapchat’s goal to minimise the baggage of traditional social networking: the goal is no longer to impress your friends so much as it is to simply communicate or broadcast to them. It doesn’t matter if they ‘like’ it or not, the fun part is just knowing that they’ve seen it. It’s an entire layer of cognitive costs removed.
Crucially this minimises the feedback loop between action and reward given that it’s naturally much quicker to illicit a ‘seen’ than a ‘like’. Small wonder Snapchat is so addictive amongst its users. Additionally, features such as user emojis, filters, and snap counters act to gamify the experience which adds to its addictiveness.
Snapchat’s entire business has been predicated on changing the game in almost every possible way. Not only does Snapchat change what a photo can do, and the kinds of rewards that drive digital behaviour, it also forces us to think a lot harder about what a camera on a mobile device can actually do. Snapchat is an image-based communications platform, contending the assumption and habits which have conventionally mandated that communication occurs mostly via text. But if the camera can replace (or augment) the use of text in social communication, in what other applications can the camera be used to replace text as an input method. Google Translate’s image-to-text translation is just one great example, and all of these possibilities are achieved by a new market dynamic: technologists are now comfortable to work with the assumption that most of their addressable market will carry around a very capable camera with them every day.
Through this lens (pun intended), it makes a lot of sense for Snapchat to position itself as a camera company. The industry for social networking is saturated and opportunities are scarce; in imaging, the opportunities are just opening up.
Even so, none of this should be interpreted as a way of validating Snapchat’s future. Facebook has learnt to swallow its pride, and can copy aggressively and copy well. Instagram Stories continues to dent Snapchat’s aspirations. It would be perilous however to doubt the potential of Evan Spiegel and his tenacious team of innovators; time will tell.
