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Facebook Copied Snapchat a Fourth Time, and Now All Its Apps Look the Same (recode.net)

Posted by msmash on from the doing-whatever-it-takes dept.

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.

1 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Is the Content actually Deleted? by LionKimbro · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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:
    * "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..."
    * ...We’ve also added Direct, an option that’s designed for sharing individual photos and videos with specific friends for a limited time."
    * "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?