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Facebook Copied Snapchat a Fourth Time, and Now All Its Apps Look the Same (recode.net)
Facebook is copying Snapchat again. From a report on Recode: Today it launched Stories, the 24-hour photo and video montages that ultimately disappear, inside of its core Facebook app. This is the fourth time Facebook has cloned the key Snapchat feature in the past nine months; the social giant has already copied it into Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. On the surface, Facebook's move simply looks like an unabashed defense strategy against Snapchat, the company's most obvious threat since 2011, when Google tried to dive into social with a service that turned out to be much more like a bellyflop. This is getting serious. What many people don't realize is that even if Facebook manages to get half a percent of its users to use its copycat tools, Snapchat will lose a substantial number of potential customers that could have joined its service. With Facebook, which has over 1.8 billion users (+ the possibly tens of millions of people that use WhatsApp, Instagram, or Messenger app and don't have a Facebook account), increasingly offering all of Snapchat's features on its apps, the future of Evan Spiegel's company doesn't look all that good.
they already have the massive user base, just rip off any other successful app and cha ching!
In what universe is your competitors trying to copy you and failing translates into "he future of Evan Spiegel's company doesn't look all that good."
**Life is too short to be serious**
What the fsck is Snapchat?
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
It already doesn't look good - SNAP is insanely, stupidly over-valued and we all know it. The only ones who don't seem to be the ones hurling money at it.
Obviously, this is just my opinion - worth what you paid for it.
Why would anyone trust Facebook not to store the content? Even if they don't store the video itself, I'd expect them to run voice recognition on it and store and index the text so they can send you ads about whatever you talk about.
I can't actually decide which is worse. My hatred of Snapchat makes me want Facebook to crush them. But my hatred of privacy-killing Facebook makes me want them to fail just as much. Why can't any of these hot, new companies push open protocols and interoperating standards?
...it assumes that all potential users of Snapchat would actually use Snapchat. That is *never* the case. So yes, FB might take *some* real potential users of Snapchat, but the majority are probably people that would never use Snapchat any way and only use it because it is in the FB app.
Personally, I won't use it either way - thus I'm not in that "potential user" category...but you shouldn't make that assumption - it's a really bad one.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
My teenage daughters, and all their friends, live and breathe SnapChat. Not one of them is on Facebook. This could change, but I don't anticipate any of them switching.
Nope, no sig
There's something bothering me about the article and Facebook's announcement --
It talks as if photographs and content are deleted forever, but it's carefully carved out the language in a way such that they never directly say that: ..." ...We’ve also added Direct, an option that’s designed for sharing individual photos and videos with specific friends for a limited time."
* "The Instagram community has shown us that it can be fun to share things that disappear after a day, so in the main Facebook app we’re also introducing Facebook Stories,
* "Your friends can view photos or videos your story for 24 hours, and stories won’t appear..."
*
* "When you send a photo or video via Direct, your friends will be able to view it once and replay it or write a reply. Once the conversation on the photo or video ends, the content is no longer visible in Direct."
"view ... for 24 hours," "...a limited time," "...view it once..," "...no longer visible..."
OK, but nowhere does it ever actually say DELETED.
Given that there is likely going to be sexual and personally sensitive (black-mail?) content here, isn't this a big deal?
wake me up when they release FaceSnap
Is extremely risky business.
Unless you can get them to quickly buy you out, you can easily get run over. A few win, a lot lose.
I hope your stock tanks to 0
and I'll say it again. If your business plan depends on functionality of some other platform, be it Google or Facebook or whatever, and you're making money at it, someday that platform is going to cut off your revenue stream and keep the money for itself.
When will they learn?
Was this article description written by the CEO of snapchat?
This is getting serious. What many people don't realize is that even if Facebook manages to get half a percent of its users to use its copycat tools, Snapchat will lose a substantial number of potential customers that could have joined its service.
How, exactly, is that "serious"? What's going to happen when people find out what's happening?
Bugger all, I suspect.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Whatsapp is now almost as bloated and is as heft a download as Snapchat is. Ugh.
Snapchat should be afraid of Facebook. I think this action clearly shows Facebook is afraid of Snapchat. Oh well they both will eventually be replaced by TheNextChatBook that adds nothing new but has the advantage of not being known to your parents and employers.
I'm pretty sure Facebook's Poke app was out before Snapchat. It let users send view once messages/photos/video. So there's that.
...
Copying Snapchat's key gimmick, that photos/etc. are ephemeral, is missing the point. People join Snapchat to communicate with their friends that're already on Snapchat. Also, Snapchat is 'the hot new thing' while Facebook is yesterday's news. Facebook is so big it resembles a corporate behemoth, rather than something coded in someone's spare time in their bedroom that only a few people know about. Key word 'resembles', I know Snapchat is no longer actually that.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Whatsapp like soccer is popular everywhere except for the US.
for me, that's mostly what Snapchat is -of course I only use Signal already :-)
Herve S.
I'm not sur Signal covers all and every features of snapchat, but it's open, and in the tradeoff I made before adopting it there were a couple of others too...
Herve S.
just rip off any other successful app and cha ching!
The problem is that the features aren't the only reason SnapChat is successful.
It's not like the kids are there only for the emoji-stickers, face-tracking "doggy-face" filters, and "don't over-think you posts, it's for ephemeral consumption" agument...
(Though these are part of the reason why Snapchat started to get popular).
Now there's also a set of network and anti-network effect into play.
The kids are currently flocking to Snapchat because that where all their friends are already on.
And the kids are also flocking to Snapchat because it's explicitely NOT facebook, i.e.: it's *NOT* where their parents are, and neither the teachers, nor all the other people they with whom they don't want to be on the same network and in front of which they don't want to be embarrassed.
i.e.: At the current point of time, Snapchat not being Facebook IS one of the main reason of it's popularity.
Thus:
- Facebook trying to acquire Snapchat to avoid getting over-taken by it (like they've done in the past with Instagram, WhatsApp and any other popular platform) was their only hope, but they didn't manage to catch that boat.
- Facebook trying to integrate Snap-like features in their offering is not going to help them much. It's going to help them retain some of their current (ageing) user base. (Those who are already there and might be interested in the features : I've seen it on Instagram).
But it's not going to help re-capture the current "new generation", those are already building their network elsewhere.
For once, Zuckerberg is at the receiving edge of the network effect.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]