Evan Spiegel on How Snapchat Differs From Facebook

Facebook, its practices, and how it might exist regulated were major topics at last week's Code conference. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel was quick to discuss what makes Snapchat different from Facebook, while others—similar Microsoft President Brad Smith and Stratechery analyst Ben Thompson—considered how regulation might affect Facebook—and Google.

There were a variety of Facebook critics in attendance, simply James Murdoch, the CEO of 21st Century Trick, seemed to strike a chord when he said Facebook "looks less like an ad platform and more like an attack surface."

Snap'south View

Snap co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel tried to distance his company and its practices from those of Facebook. Snapchat has an underlying philosophy that is at odds with traditional social media; it's about building deeper relationships with people whom y'all are close to, while Facebook is all most having people compete with each other online for attention, Spiegel said.

Spiegel discussed the features Snapchat pioneered, including ephemeral messages, Stories, and Lens. Asked if he was concerned about Facebook "stealing" these ideas, he responded that the best feeling in the world is "to design something that is so simple so elegant that the but matter competitors can do is copy it exactly." He added that it's easier to copy features than values, and said that "we would really capeesh it if they would copy our data protection practices also."

From the starting time, Snapchat was built on data minimization, and disposing of personal information rather than storing and hoarding it. Spiegel said he supports GDPR, but noted that some companies are only adding their data practices to their terms of service, rather than complying with the underlying spirit of the regulation.

Spiegel besides addressed Snapchat'due south contempo—and controversial—redesign. It was meant to accost the "constant conflict" between having small-scale groups of friends where people feel free to really express themselves, while at the aforementioned time seeking to share less personal content with a larger group of friends. Most social media sites desire users to have a larger group of friends so they can see more content, but Snap is trying to make sure users can express themselves more than clearly and on their own terms, he said.

Spiegel believes people retrieve differently about advice compared to watching stories, and having the stories in the way of the advice was a fault, then the company changed that. But despite the iteration on the design and short-term disruption, it'southward important to have a long-term conviction for doing the right thing, he said.

Overall, Spiegel repeatedly talked about values, and said that though information technology'south piece of cake in business organisation to reduce bug to numbers, values are things that can't be quantified. "A big red flag for all of us is when we put more weight on things that tin exist counted than things that can't," he said.

Regulation

Microsoft president Brad Smith compared the force per unit area on Facebook today to what Microsoft faced when it was charged under antitrust laws in the 90s, and said the visitor had to modify. Startups need big egos, he said, but the time comes when y'all aren't a startup anymore and "you take to grow upward and learn to compromise."

The single greatest cost of the antitrust fight, he said, was the distraction it caused, which may have been i of the reasons Microsoft missed the search opportunity.

In their conversation, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and CTO Mike Schroepfer discussed regulation, and Sandberg admitted that it appears "the question isn't if there volition exist more regulation, but what kind of regulation."

Sandberg is concerned almost the unintended consequences of regulation, while Schroepfer stressed that Facebook has competition, from apps such as YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, WeChat, and iMessage.

Platforms vs. Aggregators

I was particularly interested in a presentation on the conference'southward last twenty-four hour period by Ben Thompson of Stratechery, on the difference between platforms and aggregators.

Thompson suggested that industry observers are wrong to talk about Google and Facebook in the context of the Microsoft antitrust case, because Windows is a platform, while Google and Facebook are aggregators.

Platforms facilitate other products on top of them, he said, and allow and encourage those products to have a direct connection with the consumer, and thus make money. He quoted Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who said that "a platform is when the economical value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that creates information technology."

On the other hand, Thompson said, aggregators such as Google and Facebook act every bit intermediaries between the consumer and publishers, and are creating much more than value for themselves than for anyone who builds on their respective platforms, including publishers that use those platforms for distribution. "At that place is no reason for Facebook, beyond goodwill, to practise annihilation for publishers," he said.

On prospective regulation, Thompson argued that the best way to regulate platforms is to limit vertical foreclosure, where the platform provider harvests information from products on the platform in order to build competing products. But the best way to regulate aggregators, on the other hand, is to prevent them from gaining more horizontal reach. He said that if regulators consider Google and Facebook from a platform perspective, they will fail to produce effective regulation.

In that sense, Thompson said, "the greatest regulatory failure of the concluding 10 years is Facebook being allowed to purchase Instagram." As a result, Thompson believes, Facebook was "able to aggrandize their admission in a horizontal way to more users and more time within those users themselves."

Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/feature/21448/evan-spiegel-on-how-snapchat-differs-from-facebook

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