Jan 27, 2014, 1:21pm PST
The UpTake: What do disappearing messages really mean? Evan Spiegel has a pretty clear vision for where he'd like to take social media.
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Evan Spiegel elaborated on what he thinks makes Snapchat different than its competitors during a recent keynote.
- Alex Dalenberg
- Upstart Business Journal contributor
- Email | Twitter | LinkedIn
Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel got philosophical over the weekend in a keynote address at the AXS Partner Summit.
Peppering his speech with quotes from iconic industrial designer Charles Eames and the poet Robert Burns, he elaborated on his vision behind his disappearing photo messaging app and what makes it different from its social media competitors.
Spiegel posted the full text to Scribd (you can read it here). Sure, it contains some of the usual tech startup puffery, but here's a bit that I like about how Snapchat frees users from one of the staples of social media: the profile.
Traditional social media required that we live experiences in the offline world, record those experiences, and then post them online to recreate the experience and talk about it. For example, I go on vacation, take a bunch of pictures, come back home, pick the good ones, post them online, and talk about them with my friends. This traditional social media view of identity is actually quite radical: you are the sum of your published experience. Otherwise known as: pics or it didn't happen. Or in the case of Instagram: beautiful pics or it didn't happen AND you're not cool.
This notion of a profile made a lot of sense in the binary experience of online and offline. It was designed to recreate who I am online so that people could interact with me even if I wasn't logged on at that particular moment.
To Spiegel, Snapchat puts the focus on the private conversation, in the moment, not how it adds to a crafted online persona. Say what you will about Spiegel's public persona, or what Snapchat is actually worth, that's a vision that we're already seeing bleed into other apps, like Facebook and Twitter adding more emphasis on direct (if not disappearing) messages.
Alex Dalenberg is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer covering NYC startups and technology for the Upstart Business Journal.
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