Thanks to mobile, we have accelerated disruption

Garry Tan of YCombinator shared a post showing the survey data of little over thousand teenagers.  He asked them to pick social networks that they used more than several hours per week.  On his top 5 chart, there were Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter.  But there were also Instagram and Snapchat.  They showed up 21% and 19% of the answers respectively.

Social network usage among 13-18 and 19-25 yr olds.
Surprise! Say hello to Snapchat.
Source: http://blog.garrytan.com/tenth-grade-tech-trends-my-survey-data-says-s

Product Management: Fear the unknown competitors

After reading Ben Parr's piece Why startups shouldn't be afraid of Facebook cloning them, I thought about the topic a little bit.  I agree with Parr's observation.  Facebook jumping in and cloning the app should not be a death sentence to a startup.  If anything, it should be seen as a validation that the idea is interesting and there is that much more potential for the market.

The reason is multiple fold.  The main one is that a big company like Facebook will not focus on single application idea because it's just too small and unproven to move Facebook's needle.  It means two things.  One, Facebook has other bread-earning business that they cannot let go, and two, although Facebook touts moving fast and breaking things, it is not going to be as fast as the laser-focused startup of a single team.

Facebook Poke is not the death sentence for Snapchat.
Snapchat should focus on its customers and building its roadmap.
Source: http://techcrunch.com