Snapchat Fills the Facebook Gap and Silicon Valley Invests in Privacy

Imagine a world where companies listed on the stock exchange didn’t make any money at all, but investors bought and sold according to the companies’ popularity. A monetary value would be attached to non-tangibles and creativity would be directly rewarded for its own sake. Nothing would have to be bought or sold; it would just have to be created, requiring investment.

It’s not such a wild idea. Snapchat, an app that lets you share photos and videos for a couple of seconds before they self-destruct, attracted the attention of Silicon Valley investors after its popularity started going through the roof. It was created 2 years ago by Evan Spiegel, 22, and Bobby Murphy, 24, from Venice Beach, responding to a need they saw for better privacy, especially in their own age bracket and younger. The app now has 60 million users a month, most of them between the ages of 13 and 25.

Users see it as a way to be more real with friends – which of course includes sexting, but that isn’t its exclusive use. This is really about a younger generation wanting to be able to express itself freely but valuing its privacy above everything else. And it’s about investors rewarding creativity for its own sake, not requiring the artist to sell their product. Not much different from artists getting sponsorship just to produce art. Except that Snapchat’s value isn’t tangible.

A successful entrepreneur and investor, Scott. D. Cook, founder of Intuit, put his weight behind Snapchat, valuing it at $60 - $70 million – without it having made a cent and not even really having a capacity for making money – which resulted in Snapchat raising $13.5 million recently for development.  

Unfortunately, as Dominique Mosbergen points out in huffingtonpost.com, it’s really easy to take a screenshot of images and videos before they disappear, without the original sender being aware, so its privacy isn’t really privacy after all, but it is a notch better than Facebook. When Katie Notopoulos asked the founder Evan Spiegel about this vulnerability, he said, rather cryptically, “The people who most enjoy using Snapchat are those who embrace the spirit and intent of the service. There will always be ways to reverse engineer technology products — but that spoils the fun!” (Buzzfeed)

Snapchat has moved in where Facebook failed, by recognizing the most important thing to users – privacy - and finding a way to capitalize on it without compromising it. So far, anyway. It will take a creative investor to understand where the real value lies and that they also need to join in the creativity and find a way to create profit without destroying the most important component. It’s hard to imagine that investors will be that creative. They seem hard-wired and utterly insensitive to where real value lies. Advertising seems to be all they know as a means of creating revenue. 

But it’s not really working on Facebook, and in any case, advertising is finite; there’s only so much space on a page and people either get inured to it or they get annoyed and stop opening up that page.
Whether what’s happening with Snapchat is really creativity being valued for its own sake is hard to say. All successful companies have an eye on Wall Street, and even though most trading does seem to be controlled by prediction, to think that pure speculation based on popularity but no income stream is enough to trade off is kind of like science fiction. 

Some kind of change is in the wind, though. Snapchat has competitors, including Poke on Facebook, all a response to market demands. Maybe individuals and companies will find it harder and harder to earn megabucks in an advertising-saturated world; maybe eventually they’ll run out of options, particularly as people become better informed and demand what’s important to them. Maybe founders of apps like Snapchat won’t enjoy the idea of world dominance, like Mark Zuckerberg did, and kill their own birthchild.

Frankly, I’ve never understood why anybody would want to have so much financial power. What on earth can a single person do with it? Absolutely nothing. How many cars can you drive, how many houses can you live in at one time? How many places can you fly to in a year? How much stimulation can you take in?

That lust for more and more is a beast. Eventually you run out of ways to feed it. I think the world would be a much more peaceful and better place if these giant corps and super-wealthy individuals were brought down to earth a bit. And imagine a world where you weren’t besieged by advertising at every turn.

Israel & Palestine - No Peace Without Respect

People with strong religious beliefs at war all seem the same, whether Christian, Muslim or Jewish, unless you’re one of them. They all cite some version of God as their guiding light and interpret some element of scripture to justify their position, and all of them are blind to the reality of their double standards. I’m allowed to hurt you but you aren’t allowed to hurt me. It’s a kind of skewed entitlement. 

It’s easy to judge them and the world does. But anybody who is honest with themselves will admit that at some point in their lives they have been blind to their own unhealthy entitlement and unbalanced behavior.  In our civilized society, teachers violate pupils, parents take their anger out on their children and refuse to acknowledge it, businesspeople destroy the lives of anybody who gets in their way, priests and celebrities rape children.

It’s the same principle, I can do what I want but you don’t have the right to object. In many ways our civilization is just a veneer. We’re still savages, unwilling to pay the price of true civilization, which is understanding that all reactive and punishing behavior is about scared and threatened people. Who can’t settle themselves deep within and are unwilling to face their own abysmal fears and do something about them. 

Projecting their inner uncertainty onto the material world and people around them.  Using an interpretation of some higher authority to justify what they’re doing, and clinging to the ephemeral right and wrong that never resolved an argument or a life’s crisis or a war. That never generated love and never ever settled a person down deep within themselves.  

It’s easy to look at Israel and Palestine and take sides on principles, tagging onto right and wrong. It’s easy to judge Netanyahu who believes he is civilized but behaves like a fundamentalist, and who doggedly refuses to let Palestine have its own turf. It’s also easy to rationalize his behavior in the face of missiles being launched at his country, as it is to rationalize Hamas’s actions in the face of Netanyahu refusing to budge. 

Or to judge Hamas for launching missiles indiscriminately. Or to make sweeping generalizations in either case, no matter which side of the right/wrong fence you stand. Harder is to step away and recognize that this is just about people who feel threatened. We have a tendency to forget that no matter what religion or race or nationality people are, they are affected by the same principles of cause and effect in human behavior.

Israel and Palestine need to get to a place where they can recognize each other’s humanity and say to each other “I see your vulnerability and I empathize with it because it matches my own. We’re both afraid. We’re both leading our own people towards destruction. So let us sit down and talk and listen.” Until they do right and wrong will rule and violence will continue to rape Israel and Palestine. Peace treaties will come and go, as one side or the other is bullied or cajoled into submission by other powers. 

But neither side will ever win and it won’t be about peace. It doesn’t matter who started the war. Somebody has to stop it. And you don’t beat bullying with more bullying. You beat it with respect.

Exploiting Relationships For Profit - Facebook's Blunder?

I’ve been watching the Facebook saga with quite a lot of interest.  Somehow the giant prodigy just doesn’t seem like a winner any more.  Perhaps I’ve been influenced by all the hype around its lack of success on the stock market so far, but I think there's more to my sense that fundamentally something's wrong.

It seems to me that its power grew because it was originally about people connecting, with no money involved.  So it was all about the heart.  The foundation was solid.  But now all the advertising and intrusion into privacy, and the extent to which people use it to promote business has changed it into something completely different.  So different in fact that it’s primary purpose isn’t related much to its original one, which created the foundation.  The giant has become weakened.

It's one thing connecting with your friends to say hi and keep in touch, share stuff, and ask a favor.  I think asking is fine.  It’s challenging, but there’s nothing wrong with it.  If you need, you have to ask, and if people get annoyed or judge you for it, then that’s the reality of your relationship, and it might as well be out in the open so you can both move on.

But it's another thing to actively market products to your friends on a consistent basis.  I don’t mean it in a moral sense, that it’s bad, because I don’t think it is.  It’s just it doesn’t work after a while!  It doesn’t work with me!  Good case in point is the Borowitz Report, which I absolute love – it’s intelligent satire - hilarious and insightful.  So I subscribed to it.  Now I get an email every day.  I read probably one a week, maybe not even that much.

But what really brought all this home to me was the blog I started, to promote or at least tie in with an ebook I wrote.  Every day I posted something, and I followed somebody’s advice to automatically feed it to my Facebook page.  I didn’t think it through.  Then I started tweeting, and I connected that to my Facebook as well.  Not so long ago I realized that my Facebook friends are getting inundated with tweets and posts that aren’t related to our relationship at all!

I was actively marketing to my friends, and – which is most important when it comes to marketing – ignoring the fact that none of them are interested in my damn book!!  Gaaahhhh.  So I’ve got some choices: I must seek another market for my book, and I must either have more variety on my blog, or I must disconnect the automatic feeds between my Facebook and my blog and my  twitter account.  If I want to share something I’ll do it manually.

How many times have people said “don’t mix business with friendship”?  It’s not a cliché for nothing.  Facebook encourages you to do the mixing, but I wonder if it isn’t paying the price.  If the majority of people were drawn to it because it was a place where you could get away from advertising, and it was about real connection and not money, how can it sustain itself when the culture has become about exploiting connection for profit?

Hmmm, I think I'll share this page!

To read a sample of or buy my ebook Make The Connection: And What About Me? on how to be real love and be loved and be the boss of your own life, Click here or go to Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble Nook 

 

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