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[The New York Times](
Saturday, August 5, 2017
[For the latest updates, go to nytimes.com/bits »](
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Illustration by The New York Times
A Snap and Google Tie-Up?
Each Saturday, Farhad Manjoo and Mike Isaac, technology reporters at The New York Times, review [the weekâs news]( offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry.
Mike:Â Good morning, Farhad! I hear youâre going on your second vacation inside of a month next week. And good thing, too; two weeks of work in a row is a lot for you.
Farhad:Â Working with you takes a toll, Mike.
Mike: I completely understand. Iâll take a week off when Uber stops cranking out drama every other day. So, perhaps 2020?
Anyway, letâs talk tech. Reddit [raised a fresh round of funding]( this week, adding $200 million to its coffers and valuing the company at a whopping $1.8 billion. Which just goes to show you, even the worst corners of the internet can turn a buck somehow.
To be fair, Reddit is also highly entertaining, despite â and occasionally because of â its murkier parts.
Farhad: Reddit has always been a strange business. Itâs the internetâs most productive viral machine; every other meme or GIF you encounter online probably came from Reddit first. But if it creates lots of stuff for the rest of the internet to gawk at, it hasnât been very good at becoming a mainstream site by itself. For the uninitiated, itâs tricky to navigate Reddit and find yourself a comfortable corner there.
And it sounds like the company understands that. The new money will go to redesigning the site and creating a better mobile version, in the mold of more modern services â it will look like Facebook or Twitter, per Recode, the technology site. This sounds smart, but entrenched communities tend to hate change, so weâll see what Redditâs hordes have to say about this.
Mike: Right, well, you get one [downvote]( for that comment. And I certainly canât imagine the hordes of Redditors being superenthusiastic about a Facebook-esque version of the site.
Moving on, [Facebook bought]( a small team of artificial intelligence experts who were working on Ozlo, a smart virtual assistant that seemed to do rather well with natural language processing. That is, you could text with Ozlo and he (she? it?) would respond with suggestions and serve up answers to your questions.
I canât imagine what Iâd do with a virtual assistant, though perhaps it would help me remember to pay rent on time, which I am constitutionally incapable of doing. In any case, Iâm curious to see how Facebook decides to use the tech. Perhaps theyâll incorporate it into Messenger, the chat app that was playing around with its own virtual assistant ideas.
Farhad:Â Iâm glad to see Facebook is still plugging away at the message bot idea. Sure, itâs so 2015, but hey, as you say, people like you need all the help they can get.
Mike:Â Uh huh. Well, if none of this works out, you can always have your old job back as my assistant. At a lower pay grade, of course.
Also in Facebook news, the company is apparently working on a [video chat hardware device]( something along the lines of what Cisco or Polycom offer, I believe, but also possibly similar to Amazonâs most recent video tablet offering.
I thought it was crazy and something Iâd never use, but a lot of folks on Twitter told me itâs absolutely perfect for older people like their grandparents, who love to use video chat to keep in touch with family. Maybe Iâm wrong? Maybe Iâm just too young and cool to understand? Help me, Farhad.
Farhad: Iâm with your Twitter pals. If Facebook is making something like Amazonâs Echo Show â a hands-free computer with a screen, [which I love]( â itâs on the right track. Facebook made billions by giving us an easy way to see which crazy conspiracy theories our grandparents believe. Soon grandpa will be able to call you about his flat-earth obsession. Ah, family!
Mike: Meanwhile, in content land, [HBO suffered a fairly significant hack this week]( in which the company lost thousands of internal documents, television episode scripts and videos, and delved into the personal information of a studio executive.
Thatâs not good! But I can stomach it as long as they donât start leaking âGame of Thronesâ spoilers all over the place.
Farhad: This weekâs episode [has already leaked]( I just watched it, and let me say, [Hot Pie]( sudden return to defeat Cersei and take over the Seven Kingdoms sure was surprising.
Mike: No spoilers! Unless, that is, you hear anything about [the return of Gendry](.
Oh, a quick reminder: If you have any Bitcoin, the digital currency just [underwent a âhard fork]( and now something called Bitcoin Cash exists, too. Iâm honestly too dumb to understand the larger implications of this, which is why I continue to insist The New York Times pay me in gold coins that I hoard in a pile under my bed.
Do you have any Bitcoin, Farhad? Or perhaps now some Bitcoin Cash?
Farhad:Â Alas, I was once a Bitcoin thousandaire, but Iâve since sold all my holdings. Now I collect the only commodity that matters: Twitter followers.
Mike: O.K. then.
Finally, I wanted to scratch at something in potential acquisition land. According to a report from Business Insider, Google was apparently [sniffing around a potential acquisition of Snap]( the self-styled âcamera companyâ and maker of Snapchat, for a whopping $30 billion.
The caveats: This all happened last year, and Snap said the rumors were false (though there may have been âinformalâ talks, according to B.I.). It may not have been a real serious possibility, and often when rumors like these get floated, it stems from folks who have quite a vested interest in making an acquisition actually happen.
Farhad: Itâs kind of like that rumor about how youâre being sent to The New York Timesâs Siberia bureau. Iâm not sure who keeps starting that rumor.
Mike: That said, I see the logic in this deal. Snap is in trouble. Their stock is getting hammered, Facebook is copying nearly all of its features wholesale across practically all of the Facebook-related apps, and Instagram is overtaking every popular Snapchat behavior and making it better inside of its own app.
Advertisers are noticing. I keep hearing chatter about ad budgets being moved from Snapchat over to Instagram, which offers a nearly identical product but with better advertising technology and a much larger base of users. If youâre an ad exec looking to spend dollars on digital ads aimed at youngsters, it seems like kind of an easy choice.
So perhaps a bailout acquisition by Google would actually make a modicum of sense. Think back to when Facebook bought Instagram. Mark Zuckerberg basically said, âkeep doing what youâre doingâ to Instagram, and acted to help supplement Instagramâs growth only by providing some of Facebookâs strongest assets. Facebook is sitting on a mountain of sophisticated ad technology, not to mention hundreds of thousands of eager advertisers looking for more space to buy ads.
I could see Google and Snap in a similar situation, especially since Snap is actively in the market to improve its advertising technology through a potential acquisition or two, as weâve heard rumors of over the past few months. Selling out seems like a no-brainer to me, even if itâs a tacit admission that the company couldnât make it alone on the public markets.
Farhad: On paper it would seem to make sense. But in reality Iâm not sure it would work out, which is perhaps why it didnât gel last year. For one thing, it doesnât seem as ifSnapchat wants to sell â part of the reason it has been so innovative is that it has set itself apart from the Silicon Valley tech giants, and I suspect it feels it would lose some part of what makes it special under Google.
Also, itâs expensive. Even for Google, tens of billions of dollars on a second-place socialnetworking company might be too much to swallow. Also, arenât we holding out for Google to buy Twitter? How many social networks can we expect Google to save?
Anyway, Iâm going to Disneyland, Mike! See you in a couple of weeks.
Mike:Â Happy trails!
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