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Snapchat, You've Made a Huge Mistake

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Re: Snapchat, You've Made a Huge Mistake

#111

Post by jerf »

Karunamon wrote: post #103
jerf wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't get away from the issue of payment, it just moves it around. I think it does so in a way with a lot of positives, but there's the whole P2P bootstrapping problem in the way, both in terms of creating the code that even works and then actually bringing the network online, and unfortunately it seems that's a pretty big negative in practice.

It just "moves it around" to the point where the cost is so spread out as to be effectively zero. What's the average cost of a volunteer-run peer to peer file sharing network?

How many computers running P2P software does it take to write the software?

You can only talk about the "all but 0" marginal cost when you can produce a piece of software that really does have an all-but-0 marginal cost. And, therefore, doesn't require the computer running it to be always on, or run on a dedicated VM, etc. Sure, such a thing may be possible, but you have to produce it first.

Unfortunately.

Re: Snapchat, You've Made a Huge Mistake

#112

Post by lnanek2 »

Back when huge companies were being made thanks to viral games on Facebook, the CEO of Arkadium came and gave a talk at the NY Gaming Meetup.

He said, do some potential users get annoyed with all the gifting and invites and requests for help? Sure! But those are not the users that are going to get your viral coefficient over 1 (each user brings in more than one other user) and trigger geometric growth. So even if you miss out on some users because you write a game that is very social, you are still doing the right thing, because the social users are the one who make you a hit.

Same thing here. Are a few privacy minded individuals like the author going to abandon the service? Sure. Are they worth as much to the company as users that will revel in social graphs and drag friends in? No way. Is it a mistake to add social graphing in this case? No it isn't.

Re: Snapchat, You've Made a Huge Mistake

#113

Post by coreyja »

GotAnyMegadeth wrote: post #15
leephillips wrote: post #7

"Facebook makes it extremely clear that they never give away this information" Not a quick learner, I'm afraid.

I remember at one point there was a FB app that told you who spent the most time looking at your profile, then generated a photo and tagged people in it. Hilariously I was the top person on my GF's sister's one, not sure why. Not sure where they got the data for that...

Pretty positive all the apps like this were either just random data or fake. I could be wrong, but I believe that none of these apps ever actually worked

Re: Snapchat, You've Made a Huge Mistake

#114

Post by hnha »

nemof wrote: post #11
mrlase wrote: post #2

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.

seems like http://www.snapchat.com/sexgod696969 is doing really well. 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.

I assume this showed a big friends list earlier? they seem to have limited the display to 3 friends.

Re: Snapchat, You've Made a Huge Mistake

#115

Post by mbreese »

ansible wrote: post #76
jerf wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not. That ends with no service existing at all. Money has to come from somewhere for the service.

Does this really need to be a centralized service though? Isn't this the sort of thing that could be implemented as a peer-to-peer networking service?

No. It couldn't be a peer-to-peer setup because you couldn't guarantee that all peers would delete photos after they expire. This has to be centralized in order to guarantee that.

Re: Snapchat, You've Made a Huge Mistake

#117

Post by acchow »

mbreese wrote: post #115
ansible wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this really need to be a centralized service though? Isn't this the sort of thing that could be implemented as a peer-to-peer networking service?

No. It couldn't be a peer-to-peer setup because you couldn't guarantee that all peers would delete photos after they expire. This has to be centralized in order to guarantee that.

Well, you could have only one user (such as the sender) hold the decryption key and be willing to securely send it only to the recipient within a given expiry... The distributed data could still be floating around but would be unreadable.

There are plenty of distributed designs which could be secure and "read once within a time period".

(btw, a distributed network topology can look isomorphic to a centralized topology at the application layer. You seem to have a highly simplistic map of the territory.)

Re: Snapchat, You've Made a Huge Mistake

#118

Post by btown »

Karunamon wrote: post #103
jerf wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't get away from the issue of payment, it just moves it around. I think it does so in a way with a lot of positives, but there's the whole P2P bootstrapping problem in the way, both in terms of creating the code that even works and then actually bringing the network online, and unfortunately it seems that's a pretty big negative in practice.

It just "moves it around" to the point where the cost is so spread out as to be effectively zero. What's the average cost of a volunteer-run peer to peer file sharing network?

The cost comes in the labor of the organization that needs to bootstrap and maintain the network of volunteers - this includes marketing to them that it's safe and worthwhile to load software onto their computer. For instance, SETI@home has a budget in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_budget.php . Who would donate to Snapchat@home when it's just as easy to get Snapchat+ads on your phone?

Re: Snapchat, You've Made a Huge Mistake

#120

Post by dave5104 »

bennyg wrote: post #63
moheeb wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've been brainwashed. The best option for consumers is for it to be free, with no ads.

Exactly my point. Option 3 is free for everyone with optional purchases for those that want it. The parent of my comment would rather see ads than purchase Pro. But those aren't mutually exclusive. He/She can still not see ads and not purchase pro while Snapchat makes money.

I certainly wouldn't complain about option 3... but I'd be very weary of whether that would be /enough/ for Snapchat.
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