Earlier quoted context omitted.
Over 1000 Googlers were cranking on Google Plus, which at the time was a Facebook copy cat. What makes Facebook so threatening to Snapchat is the aggressive cloning in tandem with it's pre-existing, larger network. By the time Google decided to clone Facebook, the Facebook Graph was already more powerful than the GMail graph (which is what Google Plus was built on).
Facebook copycat? It was poor take on Facebook. Bad design, bad decisions, bad UI and bad UX. There was no vision for it, Google Plus would be much better as LinkedIn killer than Facebook killer.
Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results
161–170 of 294 posts
Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know anything about this overall, but I have some interesting anecdotes that show the power of Facebook around the world. I've done some pretty substantial traveling throughout Asia, and just about everyone with a smartphone that I've met also has a Facebook account (excluding China). In Myanmar (aka Burma) the strict military government restricted internet usage until they turned over control of the governme…
Buzzfeed has some surprisingly good long form pieces. A recent one discusses in detail what's going on in Myanmar[1]. I found it interesting, but depressing. The cesspool of fake news, Trump gossip, etc, turning into hot topics amongst Myanmar's budding online culture is sad, like a virus spreading. Another worrisome side effect is the quick adoption of the medium by hate groups inciting violence towards religious mi…
Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How much social media activity/growth is not human? As much as I agree with you, that kind of activity especially by first party or those related is called market manipulation. SEC and investors won't take lightly to it.
And who will blow the whistle? One person could deploy a bot army to juice numbers. On a related note, the market itself is controlled by HFT bots. Don't rock the boat too much and no one is the wiser. Edit: Would love to some actual debate on this rather than downvotes with no context. I have deployed many bots for fun to twitter and reddit. I could easily do the same on Instagram, Snap or Facebook. I could even mak…
Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How much social media activity/growth is not human? As much as I agree with you, that kind of activity especially by first party or those related is called market manipulation. SEC and investors won't take lightly to it.
And who will blow the whistle? One person could deploy a bot army to juice numbers. On a related note, the market itself is controlled by HFT bots. Don't rock the boat too much and no one is the wiser. Edit: Would love to some actual debate on this rather than downvotes with no context. I have deployed many bots for fun to twitter and reddit. I could easily do the same on Instagram, Snap or Facebook. I could even mak…
Your blithe comment has some merit on its surface -- I also "think" it seems trivial to do account fraud at a large scale -- but it pattern matches against the "I can build Stack Overflow in a weekend" mode. I can only guess, but I imagine the difficulty factor going from 500 to 1 million bots is much greater than 200x higher. (As in, if there are 1,000,000 people right now on Earth who could do the former, I suspect there are way fewer than 1mm/500 for the latter.)
There are undoubtedly bot networks that operate (although we have no idea for how long), at a scale that would likely surprise me. However, even that doesn't make the data useless (especially when frequently cited against a previous measurement).
Finally, your non-sequitur about markets being controlled by HFT bots hit a number of negative heuristics in my brain.
Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results
#165But! SNAP is doing AR, Spectacles are a stroke of marketing genius, distributed to cool influencers, instead of boring geeks like Google Glass or HoloLens. \s Guess you can't fool all people all the time.
They fell victim to the 3rd classic blunder, never over-estimate the attention span of teens when your core product offering is on the line
Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How much social media activity/growth is not human? As much as I agree with you, that kind of activity especially by first party or those related is called market manipulation. SEC and investors won't take lightly to it.
And who will blow the whistle? One person could deploy a bot army to juice numbers. On a related note, the market itself is controlled by HFT bots. Don't rock the boat too much and no one is the wiser. Edit: Would love to some actual debate on this rather than downvotes with no context. I have deployed many bots for fun to twitter and reddit. I could easily do the same on Instagram, Snap or Facebook. I could even mak…
Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
> According to the report, Instagram Stories has more than 200 million users per day, with that number being measured by people updating their story or watching a friend's. I wonder what the number would be if those who only watched stories were excluded. Its also worth considering that Instagram delivers some of their announcements as stories and whether or not people viewing those also count towards the active user…
This is very important. I watch Instagram and Snapchat stories every day. Instagram is 2 or 3 celebrity stories, then I scroll down to look at a few new pics. Snapchat is a constant stream of glimpses into the lives of my close friends. edit: I'm curious if this is true only for my friend groups/demographic/principal component, poll here: http://www.strawpoll.me/12939274
Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results
#168Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results
#169Snapchat will quickly learn than obfuscating growing losses with "Not Meaningful" is swiftly punished by investors... I know it's not the main reason for the -23% in premarket, but it show a certain culture and disdain for shareholders, in my opinion.
Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results
#170This is one of the ugliest financial statements I've ever seen. The multi-billion dollar loss is due mostly to stock compensation, but still their COGS or cost of revenues sold was greater than their revenues. That's probably the first time that's been seen for a sizable software company in the history of the industry. They said their revenue per DAU is $.90 and their server costs per DAU were $.60...so that means se…
You have to admire facebook. They've been focused on low-resource Android for a long time, even requesting employees to use slower connections from time to time to make them viscerally feel the effect of low-bandwidth Internet. fb really gets that they need an Asia growth story and they've done pretty well. I simply don't see how Snap will do anything comparable given that their entire service is predicated on high-bandwidth video shot from high-end smartphones even half the US probably can't afford.