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Snapchat's Spectacles are a low-risk move into wearables
There's no question that Snapchat (now known as Snap Inc) is an experimental company. Some of those experiments fail wildly and insult its users at the same time, but the company has been extremely successful at introducing new ways of thinking about mobile messaging. Despite a tradition of pushing the envelope, it was still surprising to see Snapchat introduce Spectacles, its first hardware product. The $130 dollar glasses are designed to let you record 10 seconds of video at a time and sync it to your phone to post on Snapchat. Despite a limited initial launch, Spectacles actually represents the beginning of a pretty audacious goal for Snapchat: find the formula for a face wearable that people won't hate. The slow rollout suggests the company knows it needs to start small and slow. But Snapchat is in a unique position to find some traction here -- the company's young users are already comfortable recording and sharing everything around them. Even more importantly, they're used to being recorded and shared by their friends. In groups where people are initially using Spectacles, there likely won't be a big backlash to being filmed.
