Review | Snapchat’s rise from obscure app to Facebook rival charted in How To Turn Down A Billion Dollars
Author Billy Gallagher tells how CEO Evan Spiegel invented the social app while at Stanford University, then rejected Facebook’s multibillion-dollar acquisition offer in 2013, and recounts Snapchat’s rocky expansion to an IPO
by Billy Gallagher
St Martin’s Press
3 stars
Snapchat is the great dividing line in the social media ecosystem: the old, with their fuddy-duddy Facebook, don’t understand it and do not use it; the young, with their selfies and sexting, have taken to it with alacrity, their daily usage figures far exceeding that of any other app.
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Yet its entire communication model goes against the grain of what every other social app had employed until then. It is predicated on ephemerality: where Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter curate your online identity, leaving a permanent record of how you present yourself, Snapchat sends pictures (or, more recently, videos or text messages) which disappear after being viewed, allowing interaction to be less portentous, more transitory. Also, Snapchat makes it less easy to find other users – there are no follow suggestions, or reposts of content, making it very much a private network.