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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.
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
I didn't realize fucking Facebook owned them....ugh.
I do not want to give FB any personal information....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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?
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 do not want to give FB any personal information....
What's the difference between giving it to FB or giving it to anyone else? If you want to "dip your toe into the social media thing" (and you don't consider /. social enough), FB's probably the way to go. A lot of people find it worth the time/sacrifice. A lot of /. users love announcing that they avoid it (just like cable-cutters won't shut up about life without TV), but my guess is that most /. users are also FB users. Feel free to falsify information - They have exactly what you give them. I'm not an Instagram user, but my impression is that it's mostly media sharing - I'm not sure that's the aim you want to start out with for business use.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
What a coincidence that you mention this! I haven't had cable TV for over a decade!
#DeleteFacebook
They already have your information. Every page with an FB like knows your IP, browser info, etc.
Not if you have NoScript blocking all of the facebook domains.
WTB [sig], PST!!!
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.
They have exactly what you give them.
Hahahahaha, most amusing, sir!
http://www.zdnet.com/article/f...
and hundreds of other examples/articles along the same lines.
Well, the business is photography/videography...hence the Instagram thought of the first thing to try....
The thing with FB is, they require you to set up a personal account before you can set up a business account. And if you falsify on the personal one and they find out, you're off FB including the business account, which is the one I want in the first place.
So, was thinking of trying to set up a business only Instagram acct....but now, I'm rethinking that. Grrrr.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Not if you have NoScript blocking all of the facebook domains.
Bingo.
The two most valuable and useful extensions I know of are NoScript and Adblock. Other extensions may or may not be handy, but those two are a must for anyone who wants to browse the net without being bombarded by ads and exposed to Facebooks greedy little fingers.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Those top the list, easy to use. I'm fond of RequestPolicy, it's the same as NoScript from the user POV: Decide whether or not you want to render the page's attempts to fetch outside resources. Take back an inch of control over what your computer does without you.
I'm in the USA, we just passed a law encouraging ISPs to pimp us out to the highest bidder. Controlling opt-in pages isn't enough anymore, so I added TrackMeNot, a noise generator.
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.
...
A lot of /. users love announcing that they avoid it (just like cable-cutters won't shut up about life without TV), but my guess is that most /. users are also FB users. Feel free to falsify information - They have exactly what you give them. I'm not an Instagram user, but my impression is that it's mostly media sharing - I'm not sure that's the aim you want to start out with for business use.
I'd like to point out that I've not had cable TV in 20 years, nor do I have a facebook account.
I prefer yesscript, which is basically noscript as a blacklist instead of a universal block. That plus hosts plus ublock/abp plus heavy use of the element hider and custom filters solves 99% of issues without making sites unusable. Plus aggressively using element hiding and custom filters to nuke other superfluous page bloat (video players/sidebars/headers/footers/comments sections/unnecessary scripts/etc.) can reduce page size and load times literally by orders of magnitude.
AFA facebook, I have generic adblock filters completely blackholing all facebook domains. I could put it in hosts instead but that's slightly tedious to disable in the rare instances I actually need to see something on facebook.
Ooh..thanks!!
I'd not heard or TrackMeNot before, I'll look into it.
I was guessing the only thing else I could do was set up and start using Tor for browsing and/or sign up for a pay VPN service.....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
I try my best to filter out FB and Snapchat and a few others to at least lower my exposure to the data miners.
For users of Firefox there are a few useful plugins; "Ghostery", "Self-destructing cookies", "Privacy Badger", "Lightbeam" and of course "uBlock". It's hard to avoid complete exposure but minimizing the exposure is necessary these days.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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.
> Not if you have NoScript blocking all of the facebook domains.
I block their IP ranges at the firewall. I block the following both for input and output in IPTABLES...
31.13.24.0/21
31.13.64.0/18
66.220.144.0/20
69.63.176.0/20
69.171.224.0/19
74.119.76.0/22
103.4.96.0/22
173.252.64.0/18
204.15.20.0/22
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
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 ]