Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, September 26

• Snapchat’s camcorder goggles are creepy cool and kind of brilliant: Snapchat’s first hardware product is a pair of $130 sunglasses that shoot first-person bursts of circular, wide-angle video. The Spectacles, as they’re called, are designed to make it easy to record what you’re actually seeing, in the moment, without having to awkwardly fish your giant smartphone out of your pocket and hold it in front of your face. The resulting recording is intended to be more lifelike, too.the last big camera-goggles launch, Google Glass, went about as poorly as possible. Glass, a too-serious attempt to put a computer on your face, looked ridiculous in a bad-taste, cyborg way. It introduced a creepy privacy violation — a face-mounted camera that you, as a bystander, couldn’t control — with poor explanation. Its early adopters, “Explorers” who spent $1,500 for the privilege, were derided as “Glassholes,” widely mocked, and sometimes abused. The whole thing came across as a poorly planned embarrassment. Spiegel is obviously trying to avoid these problems. Strategically, though, Spectacles are potentially brilliant. If Spectacles can intercept the smartphone camera and become the creative device that people use for any decent amount of recording — in what seems to be a proprietary format, with a custom-designed distribution network in Snapchat — that’s a pretty awesome position to be in.

• Snapchat, Known for Ephemera, Proves Its Staying Power With Videos: “Snapchat is the company that will figure out how to move TV viewers to mobile,” said Hemant Taneja, a Snapchat investor and managing director at the venture firm General Catalyst Partners. “YouTube and others have worked hard to bring video to mobile devices, but Snapchat is the first to crack how users behave on mobile.” Since introducing Discover in January 2015, Snapchat has become a web of highly edited video content — whether made by users, celebrities or media companies like Buzzfeed and CNN. That, in turn, has caught the attention of advertisers who want to reach Snapchat’s growing audience, which, the company says, includes 41 percent of Americans ages 18 to 34. By comparison, the company says that the average television network in the United States reaches about 6 percent of the same demographic. Now, Snapchat is preparing to deliver more original programming. Popular NBC shows including “Saturday Night Live” and “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” have agreed to create programming for Snapchat, and “The Voice” ran a five-part series made just for the app. E News now has a weekly Snapchat-only pop-culture program called “The Rundown.” Television ad dollars would “flood into online” if online ads could prove they were as effective as television ads, said Joe Marchese, president of advertising products for the Fox Networks Group. For Mr. Marchese, that means the ad takes up the full screen, probably plays with the sound on and is viewed in its entirety. While advertisers do not go so far as to say that Snapchat video ads are equivalent to television ads, they note that watching content on Snapchat mimics, in some crucial ways, the experience of watching traditional television. Videos play with the sound on. They take up the full screen. They tell a narrative story. Users flip between them like they do TV channels.

• Marc Andreessen suddenly deletes all his tweets, goes on Twitter break: he Twittersphere was just a little bit quieter this morning after Marc Andreessen, father of the Tweetstorm, vacated the platform last night. While there’s no clear answer from him or others as to why he decided to take a break, Andreessen is not the first popular Silicon Valley figure to abruptly leave the service.Earlier this summer, Sam Altman, President of the Y Combinator Group, left citing community issues on the Twitter platform. He argued that the social network “rewards negativity and snark,” and that he felt “worse after using Twitter.” Of course, even Altman couldn’t resist the urge to come back to Twitter after a brief absence. Given Andreessen described his actions as a “break,” it will likely end much in the same way with an eventual return. Twitter as a platform has increasingly come under fire for its dismissive approach to the toxic culture permitting from some of the site’s insensitive and trolling users, though Andreessen isn’t usually one to back away from divisive conversations.