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Comment by imjk | Hacker News Reader

Serious question, in what ways is Snapchat similar to MySpace? Poor UI and disregard for user experience? Buggy code? Bloated executive team? Bureaucratic management? The only parallel I see is that it's a trendy technology among a younger cohort that tends to be very fickle.

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The only parallel I see is that it's a trendy technology among a younger cohort that tends to be very fickle.

Which is presumably what the OP was talking about. MySpace was hyped and valued beyond belief, and then came crashing down. The same could well happen to Snapchat.

The last one is the obvious one and I think it's big enough to kill them. Unlike, say, Whatsapp, Snapchat's demographic is extremely teen & early twenties heavy. That's the worst demographic to be in if you're a hip app/product/service looking for longevity (and your only real party trick is messages sent through your service are ephemeral). Users in this demographic are also terrible for monetising (unless you're a game :) ).

Having said all that, I'm judging it from anecdotal evidence available to me. None of my friends use snapchat (all late twenties and early thirties) but they do use twitter, fb, vine (on occasion), whatsapp etc. The only people I know that have snapchat on their phone and use it regularly are all < 23 yrs old. Of course, could simply be my friends and I are totally out of touch!

Edit: interestingly, just realised none of my friends (female or male) use pinterest either (which, from what I've read, has a wider demographic). So maybe we're just a bunch of luddite weirdos...

Snapchat will need some features (apps) that make it sticky to this demographics. They tried SnapCash (sending money with SquareCash), and Discover (popular videos content/news sponsored by content providers). I don't know if these are enough to keep the users.

It would be interesting to know what's the percentage of Snapchat users still use it daily after high schools. That would make or break the whole company.

I'm 26, one year ahead of Spiegel in school (my brother was his year at Stanford), and I don't use Snapchat (I have an account, I download it maybe every other month to see what's changed, but have never been able to get into it). I'm an outlier in my social circles. All my friends use it. Also, a few weeks ago, Bill Simmons (Grantland creator) used it while at Wrestlemania. One year ago, he would have tweeted it from @GrantlandLive. Grantland has been really good at leveraging social technology, and were ahead of the curve on livestreaming, so to me, the fact that basically everyone I know my age and younger uses Snapchat, and that an organization that's done a great job using social tools is starting to try and figure it out tells me that its here to stay for at least the near future.

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