When you put it like that, you have to wonder how they have any chance at all, save some crazy pivot.
From a consumer perspective, it's disappointing that Facebook controls itself and now this arena. It's gonna be hard to find innovation when purchasing and cloning are the way to do business.
In some circles, having an Instagram is as expected as having Facebook, which makes abstaining difficult.
> It's gonna be hard to find innovation when purchasing and cloning are the way to do business.
Welcome to Microsoft circa 1990. People forget how much oxygen Microsoft could suck out of a space simply by mentioning they were going to develop something.
I agree, but what can we do? Snap Inc. isn't exactly some teenager trying to make it out of their parent's garage. Patents obviously don't work, or at least not in their current form – troll litigation should suffice as proof of that – and besides, the big co's can just as well have departments doing nothing but patent all-the-things.
As so many like to say: they idea matters less than the speed and strength of execution. It's clear that the network effects of Facebook makes it very difficult to compete, but is the problem really that they are copying features from other products, or is that just the symptoms of a bigger issue?
Facebook effectively has a monopoly on the digital social network, no matter how many millennials say it's "not cool anymore" – they're still on it.
My personal hypothesis is that this is because we lack a decentralized identity feature on the internet. For better or worse, Facebook and Google solved that problem, and now everything you do is connected to either your Facebook account or gmail. It doesn't matter if you don't have those accounts, becasue everyone else does, more or less, and they're locked in. You can't bring your identity with you. Sure you can close your account and possibly download your data, but if you do that you sever the connections, which is the true valuable bit of the network – the nodes less so.
I really don't like the sheer dominance of Google and Facebook, but I have no idea how to get away from it either. Makes me small just thinking about it.
Snapchat and Instagram definitely offer in somewhat similar spaces. All the semi-famous people I follow on instagram have their snapchat username right there in the profile.
People used to share Myspace and Facebook handle as well for a period of time...
Snap used to have an advantage in terms of age group. I'm curious if this is still the case.
Anecdotally I've heard from my partner that Instagram effectively duplicated a core feature of Snapchat to the point she no longer sees the point of Snapchat. But she always saw Snapchat as a side novelty, largely because she used Instagram well before Snapchat.
But I also see this as an age group thing, Snapchat had the image of being popular with high school kids while Instagram had penetrated the university-30yr old category most effectively. So it's hard to say merely as an outside spectator. As well as being geographically limited in my perspective.
I would argue that's a relic from the past. Most Instagram celebrities also had snapchat to post 'raw unedited' updates. Now that Instagram has stories, there probably isn't a strong reason to double post on snapchat as well.
From a different perspective you could point out that the innovative companies (in this context, Instagram and Snapchat) were indeed capable of significant (relative to the space, at lease) innovation (and getting extremely well paid). I don't see how the risk of "ending up" like Instagram or Snapchat would discourage anyone from making a play in the field.
Unseating Facebook is a very different play from merely innovating.
From a consumer perspective, it's disappointing that Facebook controls itself and now this arena. It's gonna be hard to find innovation when purchasing and cloning are the way to do business.
In some circles, having an Instagram is as expected as having Facebook, which makes abstaining difficult.