> "Everything in this new generation is trying to come back to what feels real," she says. "So we’re making a bet that live video is as real as it gets."
Oh God, I weep for the world we're making for ourselves.
Last I checked, putting down your phone and actually being present with someone is as real as it gets. But I guess it's hard to monetize, gamify, and micro-transact that.
Sure, it's just so easy to put down your phone and meet your friends a few dozen/hundred/thousand kilometers away. It's just so easy to make a plan with 7 other people, everybody is free all the time to drive/fly to the local pub to have random chit-chat about nothing and then drive/fly back.
Sometimes you have to look beyond your own situation and think that you may not be the target, which means this may solve problems you don't have and be convenient for a scenario you never encounter.
>Can private broadcasting succeed where public live-streaming failed?
No. Nobody cares that much for their friends (especially their hundreds of "friends" on social media), or has that time to spare on real-time streaming. For the times when this is actually needed, there are tons of videoconference apps.
What seems powerful about this idea is its more like a common physical space you gather in with your friends than a phone or video conference. You show up "in the house" (treehouse, cafeteria, club, call it whatever) and some of your friends are there, some aren't. You don't have to call people up and interaction just happens naturally more like it would if you walked into a room of your friends.
I wrote off Snapchat with many of the same kind of flip dismissals and I was pretty wrong about how popular it would eventually be. I'm too old for this app, or even snapchat, but think back to when you were a teen and remember what it was like to just shoot the shit with friends after class. Thats the kind of interaction they seem to be trying to facilitate.
Finding half an hour isn't the problem, it's the two hours of travelling it takes me to get to one of theirs (and another two to get back) or what they do with their dogs, or what they do with their newborn. It requires lining up an entire day or weekend we're all free, rather than just a half hour.
My first thought about this is "yet another proprietary telepresence app"? It's a bit sad that although the IETF and ITU have developed plenty of standard protocols for things like this (SIP, RTP, H.323, etc.), which would've allowed for great interoperability in the same way that the Internet standardised on IP/TCP/TLS/HTTP(S), others have chosen to create their own closed protocols and their own isolated userbases. IM is the other related service that would've been well-served by standard protocols, but instead turns out to be scattered among different providers all with userbases that don't completely overlap. One of the comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12620468 about having half a dozen IM clients is very relevant here.
At least email is still pretty standardised, but in some ways it feels like the Internet is breaking apart. :-/
Six or eight faces (video feed rectangles) on the mobile device simultaneously. Each rectangle needs to be information rich. People will need to stare at the camera and get into just the right position to give that video feed rectangle a high signal to noise ratio.
You have to pay careful attention while you're using it. It's like attending a video conference. How often and for how long do you want to do that?
HN isn't about the latest news, because the comments are always about how the idea is terrible or useless and technically inept.
Even when there's a million users, or crazy growth that doesn't change apparently. There's a saying somewhere now that if HN hates it its a good sign. This is probably a test of it. Snapchat & Twitter in the hall of fame.
Yeah I think they're doing a hell of a job with their Instagram stories. I've been observing how people are sharing less content on Snapchat stories nowadays
Newsgroups. IRC. University E-mail (though it's no longer done on a shared system like it was in the 60s and 70s.) Probably more if I sat down and actually tried remembering.
The important question is "How are they going to monetize?"
All the talk of "candid conversations" sure doesn't give me the warm-and-fuzzies when I consider that the only way to monetize this is abusing user metadata or scraping the video feeds for trending topics.
Hmm, I think that's probably the least important question right now. I want to know:
- is it 1 million returning daily users, or 1 million registered users?
- percentage of their registered users in the past month that come back every day (basically, are users addicted, or not really?).
- How many times users open the app every day and average length of each video session?
I've seen the app there before and tried it out, very nice onboarding flow that seemed like it could be viral, but I don't think it maintained its app store position.
If they are closing in on 1m returning daily actives, that's pretty sweet. If it's 1 million total users who ever signed up, that's actually a bit of a concern given how many downloads they should have gotten when they were topping the app store charts.
I'm far to old to use this app with my friends but it seemed like a much more friendly version of Google Hangouts, which my sister, who is in their target demographic, uses quite often.
They are definitely onto something, just literally follow any kid around, and they all like to video chat with their friends in real-time, and they snapchat doesn't solve that specific problem for them (yet).
Those are hardly the only ways of monetizing. There a range of premium services you could offer in app, for one the crowd who is using it to collaborate on schoolwork has a load of potential.
Their barriers to entry, from a technical perspective, are too low...
The possible scenarios for this product are:
1) Fad Success like the one experimented by YikYak (same target demographic) and then struggling to maintain growth and traction.
2) Getting copied by Snap, Facebook, Twitter (perhaps even Google now that they have Allo) and repeating Meerkat's faith.
3) Reaching an inflection point that allows them to have growth and traction (like the one Snapchat had in its early years) and had decent exit by being acquired by any of the companies in #2.
It's hard to tell which one would be, but as I said the barriers to entry are very low. I would expect Facebook or another big company releasing something similar in the short term.
When it comes to social networks, when has it ever been about technical barriers? Facebook could (and did) copy Snapchat at any point through its rise, but it failed—and not because of technical issues.
Oh God, I weep for the world we're making for ourselves.
Last I checked, putting down your phone and actually being present with someone is as real as it gets. But I guess it's hard to monetize, gamify, and micro-transact that.