11–20 of 129 posts
You've been able to see this online now for... a long time. Just go to http://www.snapchat.com/ ; and you can see it.
on a related note. it would be amusing to trace all these relationships by scraping the site for common usernames and then following jumping down through their friends list.
Perhaps the fact that there are top-users lists highlights the tension between what Snapchat says that people use it for (sharing brief moments with friends) vs what people actually use it for.
In fact, I actually use Snapchat for sharing photos with friends, and I still would prefer that this network information disappear. The existence of a top list suggests that there is quite a bit of metadata retained long after the photos are (ostensibly) destroyed.
It implies that the company is building a database that could be used to reconstruct an enormous network diagram.
This has been circulating in my mind for some time now. It seems to me that Silicon Valley is so obsessed with "home run" start ups that we've lost track of caring if they make our lives better. I'm not necessarily making a moral judgement on Snapchat but I do think it is something to consider. You can see the same mentality around Chatroulette. I realize the value of something is not concrete at first; Twitter comes…
I use SnapChat daily and its starting to cannibalize a lot of my other methods of communication: its fast, more personal, more affective, and a lot more fun to use. I only have ~forty SnapChat friends compared to the ~1200 on Facebook or ~300 phone numbers I have, and it makes it a lot more intimate: you're not gonna send a goofy face of yourself to that study partner from freshman Biology who you never talk to.
(Honestly, it reminds me of what Path could be if Path wasn't so pretentious.)
Oh, and email helps people commit extramarital affairs, too.
"Facebook makes it extremely clear that they never give away this information" Not a quick learner, I'm afraid.
This has been circulating in my mind for some time now. It seems to me that Silicon Valley is so obsessed with "home run" start ups that we've lost track of caring if they make our lives better. I'm not necessarily making a moral judgement on Snapchat but I do think it is something to consider. You can see the same mentality around Chatroulette. I realize the value of something is not concrete at first; Twitter comes…
I think that line of reasoning is projecting far too much onto a photo sharing service. I use it to share silly photos with friends. Just because someone else uses it to conduct an extramarital affair doesn't make the service per se immoral.
Stop being sketchy and it won't be a big deal.
Most of the comments are focused on the author's trivial mistake (when was this information surfaced: now, or at launch?). His substantive point is more valuable to bring to light. Perhaps the fact that there are top-users lists highlights the tension between what Snapchat says that people use it for (sharing brief moments with friends) vs what people actually use it for. In fact, I actually use Snapchat for sharing…
It's actually fun and trivial to do this yourself with a spider: go to http://www.snapchat.com/username, mark 'best friendships' as followthroughs. A fun thing you notice pretty quickly is that the 'best friend' designation isn't one-to-one, prolific snappers will appear often in peoples' friends lists.
I think a SnapChat API is likely on the way, and once they figure out a way to market this stuff to advertisers (hey, ten seconds of undivided attention towards an ad is probably worth more than thirty seconds of ignoring a commercial) they're going to have a whole new host of problems.
Clearly the solution is just to create a toggle for that feature in Settings. Boom... make your "being shady" user persona happy in a matter of minutes.
This has been circulating in my mind for some time now. It seems to me that Silicon Valley is so obsessed with "home run" start ups that we've lost track of caring if they make our lives better. I'm not necessarily making a moral judgement on Snapchat but I do think it is something to consider. You can see the same mentality around Chatroulette. I realize the value of something is not concrete at first; Twitter comes…
I'm definitely not a Mark Zuckerberg fan, but imagine one of your hobby projects suddenly turning into this phenomenon, when you probably just created it for a certain social circle.
I think we should cut "incidental start-ups" some slack for a while, but Snapchat definitely need to do something about their privacy, especially since it goes against the entire value proposition.