📽 Snap. A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Snap has a big, engaged base of users who are the right age to pioneer a new technology platform. It’s in the sweet spot - it has been around long enough to have a large user base, which is necessary to create enough adoption for a new platform, while its users are young enough (and geographically dense enough) to adopt a new spatial platform.

Before watching the Summit, I thought of Snap as a social media company, a competitor to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and the rest. It’s not though. Snap isn’t just building a camera-first messaging app; it’s building the platform of the future. It’s building mirrorworld.

When Snap launched, there were infinite way to share images, but Snap asked a bunch of weird questions that no-one had really asked before. Why do you have to press the camera button - why doesn’t the app open in the camera? Why are you saving your messages - isn’t that like saving all your phone calls? Fundamentally, Snap asked ‘why, exactly, are ... See more

Snap: A text messaging app that adds expression, emotion, and nuance to each message through a background photo. Adding a photo allowed the same text to have a variety of meanings with a change to the background photo. This is a source material that took a normal boring text to a whole new level. Meanwhile, ephemerality was a constraint that unlock... See more