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Comment by jfernandez | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm crazy (and admittedly a little old) but I like the separation of my social and financial software "zones". I know there are tremendous reasons to incorporate this directly into a social product but I just can't shake that feeling.

Am I alone in this or does everyone here on HN embrace this with arms wide open for actual use (vs experimenting or playing around with new products)?

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I don't think people who desire this separation are the target audience of this update. It seems to be a pretty solid business move for both parties. Snapchat has a feature that is (at least in my experience) commonly used between friends just like their app is, and Square continues to build it's user base and trust as a mobile payment system. Win-win.

I've been using square cash for a while and I've been quite pleased with it. Now, assuming I can use square cash to send money to people with Snapcash, it'll be even easier to convince others to adopt this payment method, making it even more useful.

I think their long term objective is to make it in a separate app. Snapchat doesn't have any logs (it's against its principles) and you would want to have some kind of logs if you're sending money. But launch a product through your already successful product and make it something apart when it gets traction.

Plenty of people will feel the same way, but I suspect the proportion is much lower among people under 25. Pretty soon people will probably use software that integrates social and finanicial so often they won't even think of it as anything special.

But what about social financial software?

Don't get me wrong, I don't want my online banking in Snapchat. But sending money to friends is a very different action - it's inherently public, for one.

Public? It is a private transaction between two parties. This is why I don't understand Venmo's interface that tells me about transactions that I'm not involved in. I always set my payments to private, admittedly it does make for an interesting feed to browse for those who transact publicly.

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