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Comment by angryasian | Hacker News Reader

>For most of their users, they have a large portion of their phone's contacts

Just about every app can collect this information.

>Snap's data has real value

My only disagreement is that its all fake usernames. The friend graph is not as accurate as its like Kik, Myspace, Instagram and twitter in that people will add random people from all different sources, and make connections as there are no real threats to "real life" and "online life". with facebook you at least have a more signals into a "real life" graph and with twitter you have an interest graph. With Snap I don't think either of their signals (stories, friends) are as good.

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> My only disagreement is that its all fake usernames

Plenty of people have added their real names in addition to their usernames. But even if they don't, contact lists often have real names.

I'm not sure if that's how you use Snapchat, but personally (and I may be in the minority) I only add people I've either met, or who are in some capacity a celebrity. You can also typically see how close a friend someone is by how many connections they have to other friends in a user's network. Snap users (like Facebook users, I think?) also tend to mostly interact with people they're actually friends with. So at the very least I think the data Snap has is at least as high quality as FB's (and I'm not at all disappointed we're comparing more with Facebook than Twitter, as the latter has had a much more positive market story.)

I know both of our experiences are anecdotal, but the way I see people asking for their snap is pretty lax. Snap or Kik is how I see in many ways the first contact that millenials ask for passive connections whether it be online or irl. For more closer connections its a phone number and fb messenger in the US.

>close a friend someone is by how many connections they have to other friends in a user's network

Again every messaging app that asks for contacts has these connections. FB messenger, Line, Wechat etc has more data points than snap when it comes to this.

>I'm not at all disappointed we're comparing more with Facebook

I would actually compare it closer to twitter. If they are going in the direction of media as they've already announced they are building an interest graph.

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