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How Many Snapchat Clones Does It Take For Facebook To Lose Its Self-Respect? (theguardian.com)
Alex Hern, writing for The Guardian: Over the past year, Facebook has shown an almost monomaniacal dedication to taking on Snapchat by importing its defining features wholesale into the company's own apps. Facebook Live has "masks" now (think Snapchat's Lenses). Instagram has geostickers (like Snapchat's location-aware stickers.) WhatsApp has "Status" (think Snapchat Stories). Instagram has "Stories" (think ... Snapchat stories). The latest fruit of Facebook's labours is Messenger Day -- "a way for you to share these photos and videos -- as they happen -- by adding to your Messenger Day, where many of your friends can view and reply to them". It's Snapchat Stories. Again. [...] Facebook has seen potential threats on the horizon before, but its chequebook has always been enough to ward off real danger: that's why it bought Instagram, that's why it bought WhatsApp, and that's why it tried to buy Snapchat. But it couldn't get the company's fiercely independent co-founder, Evan Spiegel, to sell. And now it's in uncharted waters, with a competitor stealing advertising revenue, desirable millennial users, and industry credibility, and with no obvious way to reverse that trend. Facebook's time at the top probably isn't up. But its self-respect deficit is going to take years to pay off.
Bearing in mind what it is and what it does, self respect is obviously not high in Facebook's agenda.
Do you think the average teenager or soccer mom who uses these features actually cares who invented what first? They are not reading these stories, they are not concerned with abstract hand-wringing. They just care if the platform they use does that cute little trick where they can overlay a cat nose on their face in realtime. Facebook knows this. They are appropriately more concerned with their bottom line than with the opinion of tech journalists. I just don't see the point. Competitors in every industry copy each other and try to one-up each other. that's the whole point. If you feel you are losing ground to X competitor because they rolled out Y new feature, you're going to also roll out Y new feature and hopefully add Z innovation on top of it, and X competitor may copy Z new innovation back in return. Why single out the feature arms race of social media?
Come to think of it, "it's not Facebook" should be enough reason to use anything.
Thanks for the perfect explanation. :)