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Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

> It implies that the company is building a database that could be used to reconstruct an enormous network diagram.

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.

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That's the day I stop using it. If I get a few second ad every 4 or 5 snaps then I won't continue my usage of the app. I understand that good things that require monetary value to continue operating at scale need to have a way to make money, but advertising should be a last-resort option. We haven't even seen for-pay snaps yet (more seconds, more options like random clip-art to add in, etc). Advertising kills the product 9 times out of 10.

I'm on the opposite end there. I would never pay money for extra snap options. I'd much rather see ads if choosing between the two.

Those two aren't all the options though.

1.) Pay for SnapPro 2.) Sit through advertisements 3.) Let people who want to pay for SnapPro pay, while you don't because you don't want to pay for it. Therefore no ads, and Snapchat is making money.

Option 3 is the best for consumers. Option 3 is possible if the price-point dictates that enough people will pay for it to remain alive and well. Not everyone will pay. But when is that not always the case?

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

because it's best for consumers when things they like go away?

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.

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?

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.

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?

See the Diaspora project for how great/easy P2P social networking is. Getting P2P working on bandwidth and port limited smartphone connections sounds like a nightmare.

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.)

Most people just want to see funny pictures of their friends, privacy and advertising concerns aside. Ride yo high horse outta here!!

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