In 2012, Snapchat, when was little more than a year old, was struggling to shake a reputation that it was only popular for sending inappropriate photos. Zuckerberg met with Spiegel and expressed interest in buying Snapchat; but when Spiegel declined, Zuckerberg launched a clone of Snapchat, called Poke.
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While it was intended to kill Snapchat for good, it may have saved it.
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Snapchat struggled to be taken seriously. Many people, particularly those over twenty-five, still thought of it as a sexting app or a toy. An internet revolution was going on, but all anyone wanted to talk about was sexting. By having the dominant, respected social network take impermanent photo sharing seriously, Poke helped change the narrative, and Snapchat benefited enormously. The logic changed from “The photos disappear — Snapchat must be for sexting” to “Facebook made a disappearing photos app — disappearing photos must be the next big thing!”
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Evan Spiegel would later call Poke “the greatest Christmas present we ever had.”
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Facebook’s failure not only helped Snap’s ability to recruit and improved the company’s reputation with the media, it also revealed that Facebook was out of touch about why Snapchat was so popular to begin with.
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“It really showed at the time that Facebook didn’t really understand the appeal of Snap and why this demographic was using it, It took a while for Facebook to sort of be humbled, understand Snapchat, and then finally have a successful copy with Instagram Stories.”
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Snap is now worth almost $25 billion, and it’s certainly possible Snapchat and Spiegel would have ended up in the same place whether Zuckerberg tried to kill it or not.
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17th century French poet Jean de La Fontaine once said: “A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.”
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**Source: https://www.vox.com/
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