Owen, tremendous article. It reshaped my version of the event, as I previously ranked Landmarks LAST not first for new items that day, so you changed my interpretation a bit. I particularly liked this comment (and quoted it on Twitter: John Pitts)
“Snap used millions of publicly shared photos from its service to create rich 3D maps of famous buildings, but it’s easy to imagine Landmarkers eventually working on any building or place in the world. All of this makes the feature incredibly difficult for competitors to clone”
also…
“ Snapchat was able to quietly build the most powerful understanding of the world around us while we were just sharing photos with friends.”
For your next trick you should really try to guess a strong use-case for the platform/tech behind Landmarks. It’s not just going to be photography that’s affected, but perhaps photographic search, mapping the location of everything (not just buildings, but trees, plants) including historically, and commerce (see Amazon photo search collaboration). But much more. but what? Remember they also created the SnapMap which is also a platform which can host the creations made by developers and artists.
The Platform = (like Apple’s App Store + xCode + Swift)
thanks and I hope you don’t mind me quoting you on Twitter.
