I've read the article
And I still have no idea what snapchat is other than not a fish nor a door-opener which is a shame as it's lunchtime and fish would do just nicely right now.
Oh Snap! How intelligent people make themselves stupid for Snapchat
Perv-magnet app Snapchat is no more. It has renamed itself Snap! as it wants to be a respectable media tech company. Specifically, it says “a camera company”. Here’s perhaps the only interesting thing about Snapchat. Nobody really understands what the point of it is, and maybe Snapchat doesn’t either. But it’s exploited this …
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Tuesday 27th September 2016 13:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Snap!
Ironic considering I thought the whole point of Snapchat was that it let you send photographs of your bollocks (and similar parts) to other people under the deluded impression it would safely disappear and no-one would *ever* be able to copy and forward that photograph of you doing something obscene with a Coke bottle.
And some alphabetti spaghetti.
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Tuesday 27th September 2016 17:08 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Snap!
Originally yes, but most stuff people post to Snapchat now is permanent. I don't know why the author has so much trouble explaining it. It is basically the same thing as Twitter, except instead of sharing 140 characters at a time, you share a picture with a one line caption, or a video that lasts a few seconds.
Like Twitter, I suspect they are having trouble monetizing it because there isn't a good way to insert ads, which is probably why they are getting desperate with the re-branding to "Snap!" and coming out with Glasshole mark two.
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Tuesday 27th September 2016 19:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Snapholes
With Google Glass, at least the Glassholes had to work a bit to get the video off their glasses and onto the internet. This will be integrated with the Snapchat app on your phone, and will allow uploading something seconds after it happens.
Snapholes will definitely be more obnoxious, but I'm not sure there's much difference in someone walking around with cheap glasses that are lit up recording, and holding up their phone recording. Well except that being only $130, anti-Snaphole bullies won't feel too bad about ripping them off the Snaphole's head and stomping on them.
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Tuesday 27th September 2016 19:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: the creepy part of Google Glass...
Since these would target the 15-22 year olds who are the primary users of Snapchat, so long as they are wearing them around others like them, it won't be too much of a problem. But I can see them being just as poorly accepted outside that group.
Looking forward to reading articles on Snaphole etiquette next year!
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Tuesday 27th September 2016 19:06 GMT Sporkinum
Re: I tried
Interesting explanation, but I don't get it. I don't use twitter for anything but an occasional bitch to a company as it seems to work better than emails or web forms that go directly to /dev/null. He acts like all gods chillin' use twitter since 2009, and that snapchat is the same. Guess I am too old since I started out with BBS s in the '80s.
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Tuesday 27th September 2016 13:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Snap - It's the vertical leaning app that runs on the horizontal level, it self defines a new definition of what an app is without confusing the user and appealing to investors because of it's forward thinking development in a contained user space. A true paradigm shift.
You can also send dick pics on it.
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Tuesday 27th September 2016 17:08 GMT Anonymous Coward
"You can also send dick pics on it."
You were doing so well up to then.
It leverages and supersedes millennial conceptions of patriarchy and alt-feminism by synergistically engaging with the iconography of desire and satiation, permitting instantaneous response to urges towards transgressive behaviour in an environment of transient satisfaction without implying traditional gender roleplaying and so enabling expression of gender fluidity.
(it allows fanny pictures as well.)
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Tuesday 27th September 2016 15:53 GMT c1ue
Re: It's not rocket science
You're close, but have it backwards.
Its photos and videos that are sent SMS-style to all your friends. The quickest, dirtiest, easiest self-extollation or other-condemnation possible for a generation which is too lazy to use spoken words, which confuses quantity for quality in communications, and which believes the photo or the video is more real than the words which are too slow and difficult to compose (and more easily mocked).
It is the logical extrapolation of the abbreviations used in SMS by teenagers.
That's it.
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Wednesday 28th September 2016 00:58 GMT Gartal
Re: It's not rocket science
"which confuses quantity for quality" But quantity has a quality all of it's own.
Besides your comment makes you out to be an old fogey, if a picture is worth a thousand words and you don't want to discuss philosophy, theology, history or anything for which there are no pictures, why not send a picture?
Remember, you are the people your parents warned you against.
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Tuesday 27th September 2016 19:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "will know they're being recorded because of a halo-like light"
Drones!? Too technical, and way too slow. What's needed in the ever-accelerating technological sphere is rapid response times--on the order of seconds, or even less. Fortunately, the halo might be considered the first of a series of concentric circles of different diameter, making it easy to triangulate your response, even in the dark. Call it assistive or enabling, if you like, but it seems like a problem carrying its own solution.
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Wednesday 28th September 2016 13:30 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "will know they're being recorded because of a halo-like light"
"Call it assistive or enabling, if you like, but it seems like a problem carrying its own solution."
Many years ago I wondered why nobody had come up with a warhead containing extremely thick ink which would be fired at close range at a tank, blinding it. Reverse smoke if you like.
It seems to me a repurposed potato gun and gel ink capsule might do the job here. Paint guns are a bit too dangerous.
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Tuesday 27th September 2016 13:55 GMT censored
I admit I don't get it
And I'm pretty sure it's not me. I'm as 'digital native' as they come, despite approaching 40. I'm a user not an IT-bod.
Snapchat doesn't doesn't appear to have utility. It simply doesn't do much. It's very ephemeral nature is it's greatest downfall. It's speed reduces the quality of communication. It's utterly empty and bereft of any kind of meaning.
I have teens who use it. And they're sending a near constant stream of pictures. Each takes no more than 10 or 15 seconds to compose, snap, edit and send. Which means it's taken virtually no thought. When each message it received, it stays only for 10 seconds. Imagine looking for meaning in something new in ten seconds?! It has no meaning.
It's almost telepresence. But that's all. "I am here and friends with you". That's basically it.
If you composed a message or an image with meaning, you'd surely want it to stay around? If you received something of interest or with value, you'd want to keep it. At least for more than 10 seconds.
As for the parent's stuff - we didn't want the kids to have it, but dad allowed it. "It's fine," they said "it tells you if someone takes a screenshot". Bit late by then, isn't it? We have since dealt with a 14 yo sexting and a stream of illegal bullying messages disappearing, leaving no evidence to have it dealt with. Wonderful.
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Tuesday 27th September 2016 14:58 GMT Stevie
Bah!
The really nifty thing about being too old for Millennial Tech is that it doesn't seem to be any sort of real-life hindrance.
I get the occasional issue with people who insist I go to their arsebook page and who can't understand that I won't use the thing, but it usually turns out that all they wanted me to see was some text which they can mail to me or a picture I have no interest in seeing anyway.
And I've avoided being rooted by any of The Zuck's behind-the-scenes, while-you-weren't-looking "enhancements" to the arsebook experience or being friended/unfriended as a bullying tactic by idiots who think I give a rat's bottom for their e-presence in my life.
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Tuesday 27th September 2016 16:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
“You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants.”
Oh really? I was one of the people who built the foundations of what they're using (pretty much like other immigrants, by the way) and trust me, when it comes to the fundamentals there are still very few who have a clue. If I see what passed for an "expert" these days (worse, what calls ITSELF an expert, IMHO one of the more major sins) I can only conclude that whatever is used to teach these people cannot be more complex than an etch-a-sketch, although they wouldn't recognise that either unless it had some fancy name and marketed every 30 seconds on websites and TV.
When I started with IT you needed a talent for logic and engineering. You still do, even though there are now many ways to fake having that talent. That is, until Powerpoint time is over and you actually have to deliver.
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Tuesday 27th September 2016 21:53 GMT Destroy All Monsters
That is, until Powerpoint time is over and you actually have to deliver.
I have found out you no longer need to deliver. Riding the shockwave of endless unfulfilled promises stacked on other unfulfilled promises and lubed with paperware is the way forward. Actually the ONLY way forward as we have come to the point where deluded customers expect the moon for the price of a script.
Let everything burn down.
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Tuesday 27th September 2016 17:11 GMT Oh Homer
For those who still don't get it...
If the SMS with photos (or more precisely the photo equivalent of SMS) analogy doesn't work for you, then just think of it as "internet postcards".
"This is me, this is where I am, this is what I'm doing."
If you think that's vacuous then so are holiday postcards, and yes I suppose they are, but they're not really meant to have some profound meaning, they're just meant to be friendly.
And just like their snail-mail counterpart, most people don't really have any reason to keep them forever. Yes, I've seen the pier at Bognor Regis, thanks.
Unlike their snail-mail counterpart, they tend to actually arrive before the end of your holiday (or night out, funny spewing episode, etc.). They're probably also a better medium for sending material that might otherwise get you arrested, or at least cause your postie a nasty accident.
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Tuesday 27th September 2016 19:07 GMT Brewster's Angle Grinder
Optic nerve taps
Within twenty years, we'll accept we're perpetually recorded. (Well, the crusty reactionaries round here won't; but the rest of the population will tolerate it.) It happens already with CCTV. And now the police are starting to wear bodycams. Okay, the glassholes got beat up. I imagine the spectacle wearers will, too; but not quite so much. And the wearers of the generation of devices after that will get beaten up still less, as slowly our intolerance is worn away.
In theory, you'll have the right to erase a youtube video of youths shouting abuse at you. In practice, it will be too much hassle. People will just accept it as part of life. (And the videos that people think are worth deleting will be mirrored so many times they'll be de facto undeletable, even if the law says otherwise.)
Hopefully, twenty years after that, we'll be able to set up algorithms that pixelate ourselves whenever we appear in public footage and let them loose upon the world. Till then, mine's the burqa.
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Tuesday 27th September 2016 21:53 GMT AdamWill
Re: Optic nerve taps
One of William Gibson's recent novels came up with a t-shirt (IIRC, anyway) designed to screw with video compression algorithms and stop the wearer being trackable via security cameras...neat concept. (I may be misremembering the details a bit, it's a couple of years since I read it, but that was the basic idea).
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Tuesday 27th September 2016 21:55 GMT Phil.T.Tipp
Re: Optic nerve taps
"Till then, mine's the burqa." I think you're on the right track - but medieval sand people masks aren't the answer.
I suspect, as you correctly imagine, that future generational tech-creep and the mass-adoption/mass-acceptance model will put many more of these perma-recording digi devices into the public arena. However, there is, quite demonstrably even now, a market for the opposite - for privacy and decorum - grown-up attributes.
My suspicion is that with the rise of the SnapHoles and whatever always-on spyware that follows, there will be a profitable reactionary leap in counter-technology which can obfuscate, blind, confuse, mis-direct or otherwise negate the mindless soul-stealing of the all-seeing eyes.
Til then, mine's the one with the portable jammer in the pocket.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
