FacebookCEO Mark Zuckerberg was not short on his praise for Snapchat, calling it a “super interesting privacy phenomenon."
During an interview with Stanford University President John Hennessy on Tuesday, when the conversation switched to Snapchat, Zuckerberg said that instant messaging offered a way to communicate between groups while acknowledging that, before Facebook, there was nothing in between. "A lot of times you’re not comfortable communicating it publicly, and maybe it’s just not worth communicating it to a small set or that’s not the full potential of what you want to communicate so you just don’t do it. It just gets lost," he said.
Facebook reportedly offered to buy Snapchat for $3 billion last year, but the company rejected. Prior to the deal, Facebook released their own Snapchat clone, Poke, in December 2012 and it was a monstrous failure, falling out of the top 1,000 apps only four months after its release. However, Zuckerberg commended his competitor, while also hinting that more innovations were on the way.
"Snapchat is a super interesting privacy phenomenon because it creates a new kind of space to communicate, which makes it so that things that people previously would not have been able to share, you now feel like you have place to do so," he said. "That’s really important, and that’s a big kind of innovation that we’re going to keep pushing on and keep trying to do more on, and I think a lot of other companies will, too."
He also was spared that embarrassing Snapchat leak of user info, which was... bad, to say the least.
[via TechCrunch]
