Snapchat Glasses

So, it seems like Snapchat took google glass, made it absurdly terrible looking, and less useful.

How can this not fail? Because it’s so ugly it’s cool?

They’re trying to pivot from sexting to POV porn, apparently.

As a cheap gimmick, I think it’s actually positioned to do better than Google Glass’s sky-high ambitions. I still don’t expect it to set the world on fire, but I could see this carving out a little of the GoPro market.

People freaked out at people wearing google glass. Why won’t they freak out at this? Given it’s even more obvious and obnoxious.

I think people will wear this for specific events/activities. I don’t know how Snap is positioning it (who has time to read the article?!), but it seems like a thing you put on at a party or at a concert, not the kind of thing someone’s going to wear to the grocery store or at the next table in your favorite restaurant.

I think you’re right, a bit like the props and photo booths you get at big events, parties, etc.

Then prepare to have your glasses detained by security.

I should have shorted this shit.

These things were terrible. We had a couple show up in the office and they totally reminded me of some cheapo free tchotchkes given away at trade shows. In fact, that’s what they should’ve done. Instead of making them hard to find and stupidly expensive, they should’ve just sent them out to 500k of their top-end users as a promo freebie and sold the rest online at a loss and chalked them up to marketing.

I’m glad that I still have enough grasp of reality that my certainty of failure on this product was correct.

Seriously, I do not understand how anyone looked at these and said, “yeah. Let’s do that.”

Didn’t @Editer get a pair? What was your impression Denny?

Damn, and I paid a premium to get them for my kid in time for Xmas last year.

They’re pretty lame. They work well with SnapChat, but if you bring the videos into anything else, they’re “round.” Which is possibly even worse than vertical.

Anyway, he never found much occasion to use them. If I had it to do over again, wouldn’t have bought them.

As evidenced by the product marketing, you put them on the type of supermodel that Evan Spiegel associates with (he married Miranda Kerr) and they still look dumb. You put them on a regular human being and they look idiotic.

The idea of a glasses mounted camera is not bad.
These particular sunglasses are bad.

Well, Tencent seems to think there is still hope for Snapchat & just invested $2B

Probably a hedge bet against the coming dystopia of Facebook-wins-all.

Actually the hardware was pretty well-received. It turns out that people just don’t want cameras on their glasses.

Snapchat the company is in steep decline. Its users and more importantly popular users (I have to hold my nose to use the word “influencers”) are moving en masse to Instagram, who blatantly copied all its features except the horrible UI. Instagram is of course owned by Facebook.

One really cool feature Snapchat has that Instagram hasn’t ripped off yet is geographical search. You can open up a map and see what people are snapping about in Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Johannesburg, whereever, and zoom in to the street level. It’s pretty neat, because it gives a snapshot of their daily lives far away. Also very cool during newsworthy events.

I’m just thinking of it from the perspective of “Those sunglasses are huge and ugly”

That was actually a deliberate and very smart design choice. People are creeped out by the idea of being surreptitiously recorded. The snapchat glasses are overt and in your face. Nobody thought they were creepy, unlike google glass.

They solved that problem, but it turns out that isn’t why nobody has cameras in their glasses. Nobody has cameras in their glasses because they don’t want them.

But this doesn’t make sense on its face.
If you don’t notice the glasses, you can’t be creeped out by them.

If you don’t want to be recorded, the fact that someone is obviously recording you doesn’t improve the situation.