Tag Archives: snapchat

For My Next Trick, I Will Make This Message Disappear

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Someone else has a toy, and Facebook really wants to play with it.

Several weeks ago, Facebook quietly shut down Poke, an app that was pretty much a clone of the monsterously successful Snapchat. Poke was released in 2012 and was touted as the next big thing in Facebook’s family of apps. However it was never on the same level as Snapchat, and in 2013, Facebook attempted and failed to purchase Snapchat with an offer to the tune of $3 billion.

It would seem that the Snapchat model is something Facebook desperately wants to get a toehold in, as evidenced by reports of a new app called Slingshot, which sends short video messages by tapping on the screen. The same reports caution that the app, while it has been in production for some months, may never be released.

Maybe it’s for the best. No one has yet managed to out-Snapchat Snapchat.

What Sparks Our Fire: It’s easy to tell what’s important in social media by the way that Facebook reacts to it.

Would you try out a Snapchat clone?

This Is So Last Decade

So apparently Facebook isn’t cool any more. While the numbers for the website remain high, it simply does not engage adolescents as much anymore. More and more, middle and high school age kids are preferring apps like Snapchat and Instagram to the older social network. We at Canopy theorize this is because their parents are on it, which drives them away and negates the cool-factor of Facebook.

Imagine your parents started hanging out at your favorite spot while you were in high school. It would quickly get uncomfortable and you’d leave to find somewhere new to uphold your sense of privacy.

Personally, my parents and even my grandparents have friend-requested me and I won’t accept, but even then I don’t want them to see my public profile, even though there’s nothing inappropriate. I prefer to have my own space, but my personal network is so tied to Facebook I simply can’t make the switch easily. Teens who are just starting out on the internet can make the choice more easily.

Here’s a chart from Mashable that approximates the breakdown of demographics in both 2011 and 2014. Note, it doesn’t take into account users who aged out of being a teenager during those years, so the “millions of teens” may or may not be significantly less than it appears.

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What Sparks Our Fire:  Watching trends, especially on social networks, is incredibly important to the work we do at Canopy.

Do you find Facebook uncool?

Snap Yourself Out of a Problem

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If you’ve been paying attention, you know that recently a great deal of the private information kept by the social media app Snapchat was compromised by hackers and posted on the internet. If you use this app and are worried that your information has been stolen, there is a tool you can use to check if that is the case.

Two developers, Will Smidlein and Robbie Trencheny, built a tool called GS Lookup – Snapchat on Wednesday to “help the public quickly understand if they were affected so that they could take the appropriate actions,” according to Smidlein. “My biggest fear with leaks like this are that malicious [tech-savvy] people have access to the SQL file, but a ‘normal’ consumer doesn’t necessarily understand what that means.”

To use the tool, follow the link and type your screen name into the text box, and you will receive information based on whether or not your information was leaked. It’s a very easy process.

The developers added they were not responsible for the leak, merely using the information that has already been released.

What Sparks Our Fire: Making the process of checking for data leaks.

Were you one of the unlucky ones?