I was talking to a parent friend of mine a while back, and we both agreed (he owns a pair) that Snapchat Spectacles could be an amazing accessory for parents.
Kids are easily distracted, so if you point a phone at them it'll completely throw them off whatever cute activity it was they were just doing - probably because they now want to play with your phone. No such problem with Spectacles - and not only that, it means you can keep two hands free (not a small issue when one arm might already have a child in it).
The problem is that Spectacles are so tied into Snapchat that it makes sharing the output very difficult. Grandma and Grandpa are not going to use Snapchat, and I'm not sure Snapchat wants them to. You can, eventually, import into Snapchat then export single videos back out again, but they lose the cool display method for circular videos and look awful. I think they could shift some of these glasses with a little rebranding and a spin-off app just for importing videos into whatever destination you want. They'll never do that, though. Maybe if they finally declare it dead they'll open up the sync API, but I'm not holding my breath.
(this is a repost of an old comment I wrote a few days ago in case anyone is suffering from deja-vu)
Google just released a product that is aimed directly at this opportunity: Google Clips. You don't wear it on your face, so it's a little different, but it's clearly designed for hands free use by parents, and it should be a little easier to get the videos out and onto whatever service you prefer.
Yes! I'll be interested to see the reaction to it. Having to carry it around and clip it to things feels a little unwieldy, and no audio is an odd restriction, but the idea of smartly detecting clips worth keeping is absolutely fascinating. And the whole thing shows exactly the kind of parent-focused design Snapchat obviously doesn't do.
> Grandma and Grandpa are not going to use Snapchat, and I'm not sure Snapchat wants them to.
There's no maybe about it: Snapchat definitely doesn't want them. Evan Spiegel has been very upfront that he doesn't want the riff-raff. Snapchat has always been deliberately shitty on Android and Spiegel went out of his way to make clear how they definitely weren't going to make a Windows Phone application, back when WP was a potential player. If you're not a cool, hip teen with an iPhone, you can piss off.
He reminds me a lot of that Abercrombie CEO who said that they didn't want fatties and uglies in their stores, which was a winning strategy until it suddenly wasn't.
This is partially why, as much as I hate Facebook, I'm not particularly upset at Snapchat slowly getting steamrolled by them. Businesses that stick up their middle finger at potential customers out of snobbery deserve to fail.
To be fair to Evan Spiegel and Snap, almost no-one was interested in doing versions of their apps for Windows Phone.
Windows Phone turned up late to the party - third or fourth horse (remember Blackberry?) in an already competitive two horse race. A lot of the apps that made it to Windows Phone were paid for by MS.
It's also worth bearing in mind the advice of "its better to make something 100 people love than 1000 people like".
Marketing is a dark art, and signalling is real. Trying to appeal to everyone, especially when you are a scrappy startup, sounds like a great way to appeal to absolutely no-one.
He reminds me a lot of that Abercrombie CEO who said that they didn't want fatties and uglies in their stores, which was a winning strategy until it suddenly wasn't.
To be fair, my impression is that this aspect of their marketing wasn't the problem; the Great Recession was the problem, because suddenly no one had 2 – 4x the money to pay for a piece of clothing that only differed from the competition in that it told other teens you have 2 – 4x the money.
Great Recession + fast fashion seems to be the real culprit.
The market for elitism has never disappeared in that domain. Maybe any domain.
There's a difference between being an upscale brand and actually turning away customers. Apple and BMW are elite brands, but if you're poorer but save up for one because you want it that bad, they'll happily take your money. Snapchat and Abercrombie are looking at people who want to give them money and telling them to go away.
By your own definition, how are kids with iPhones cool? They're the choice of old people everywhere. Every teen I see has some sort of jazzed up Android (phablet).
It's like the Porsche 911. Great car, but definitely not cool. 3/4 of the people driving them are of retirement age. Definitely not cool by any stretch of the imagination.
Because BB messaging was exempt from data caps etc thanks to agreements between Blackberry and carriers.
I have seen similar outcomes when carriers have introduced unlimited calling plans "because teens only text", only for said teens to switch to calling en mass.
I feel like Snapchat is aging out of coolness and there's nothing they can do about it. First adopters are in the workforce and probably starting families by now. Do kids want to be on the same social media platform their uncle or aunt are posting baby pictures on?
I have never seen a baby picture on Snapchat. I'm sure it'll get to that point with that happening a bit. But Snapchat is pretty far away from being like that.
There also isn't any other social network that is close to being big. There's just the current incumbents. For teens i can think of Musically, but that's a focused app. On the other hand I am actually surprised Snapchat didn't try to go and buy Musically.
I guess the main issue is the media will drum up some moral panic about undesirables using devices like this, to record clips of children or whatever.
I've often thought about a device that would catalogue my life, what I did, be intelligent enough to group events together etc, have a searchable index of time, places, people. But the ethical implications of this are just too great, and effects on society would shift in strange ways. There was an episode of Black Mirror a few years ago that explored this, in some ways it is "be careful what you wish for"
Narrative Clip (http://getnarrative.com) is pretty close to what you're talking about. The intelligence of the software isn't/wasn't there. Though you could upload to google photos and get some of that.
In the near term there's no worry about ethics. My friends and family found the Narrative Clip interesting to varying degrees but almost none of them were interested in it for themselves.
> Kids are easily distracted, so if you point a phone at them it'll completely throw them off whatever cute activity it was they were just doing - probably because they now want to play with your phone.
True that! Thanks for the idea, I am tempted to pull my Looxcie out of retirement and see if it is discreet enough to avoid notice.
As a new parent, this is the use case I investigated spectacles for. I enjoy sending pictures and videos to my new born's grandparents but the phone does distract him.
It is unfortunate that spectacles don't work well outside of snapchat.
Kids are easily distracted, so if you point a phone at them it'll completely throw them off whatever cute activity it was they were just doing - probably because they now want to play with your phone. No such problem with Spectacles - and not only that, it means you can keep two hands free (not a small issue when one arm might already have a child in it).
The problem is that Spectacles are so tied into Snapchat that it makes sharing the output very difficult. Grandma and Grandpa are not going to use Snapchat, and I'm not sure Snapchat wants them to. You can, eventually, import into Snapchat then export single videos back out again, but they lose the cool display method for circular videos and look awful. I think they could shift some of these glasses with a little rebranding and a spin-off app just for importing videos into whatever destination you want. They'll never do that, though. Maybe if they finally declare it dead they'll open up the sync API, but I'm not holding my breath.
(this is a repost of an old comment I wrote a few days ago in case anyone is suffering from deja-vu)