I joined Snapchat recently, but I don’t know what I would use it for. I was just curious to see how the service works.
Frankly, Snapchat seems a little crazy to me, and I can’t see much point in it other than making it easier for young people to send provocative selfies to each other. The founder who was offered a few billion for it should have taken the cash and run.
But then a friend said that her daughter routinely sends photos of her new baby via Snapchat — just day to day happenings that don’t seem worth recording for posterity.
From the alway-interesting Farhad Manjoo in today’s WSJ, Do We Want an Erasable Internet?:
Yet, even if it fails, Snapchat will have been one of the most fascinating services to hit the Internet in years. To me, the app’s exploding popularity suggests that society is yearning for a new way to think about data. Snapchat is one of the first mainstream services to show us that our photos and texts don’t need to stick around forever: that erasing all the digital effluvia generated by our phones and computers can be just as popular a concept as saving it.
If the Snapchat model takes off—if other sites and services began to promote the idea of erasability as a competitive feature—the Internet would look very different from the Internet of today. It would be a more private network, one without the constant worry of every ill-considered picture or thought being held up for ridicule by the whole world, forever. But it also might be a less useful Internet, a network on which you couldn’t look up an old photo every time you felt nostalgic, or where computers wouldn’t always feed you suggestions based on your history, since your history wouldn’t be complete.
With its timelines, galleries, and seemingly limitless online storage, Facebook has created a model of the internet as archive. Everything we do will be saved forever.
Tumblr, which is also popular among the young, allows endless sharing/”reblogging” of photos and other posts — the sharing can continue even if the original uploader deletes the post.
But the Snapchat model is closer to phone calls of old (at least before the NSA!). Back then, conversations happened over the wires, and the words were never immortalized.
Manjoo’s piece is well worth a read.