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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.

5 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Stupid Question by king+neckbeard · · Score: 3, Informative

    Photo/short video/messaging app. Posts automatically go away after some amount of time. Has automatic filters that make us of face tracking for funny pictures.

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  2. Facebook is for old people by drew_kime · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:Facebook is for old people by uohcicds · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Bingo! And that's the killer.

      To use those features, users would have to be inside the fb ecosystem, but Facebook's problem is that it is now the indoor plumbing of social media. A necessary evil, weird if you don't use it at least some of the time, but hardly fun for most, and certainly not for the people they are targetting. Snapchat's user base probably won't bite.

      Snapchat's demographics, and some of its use cases (let's be honest, sexting and porn are part of this), just don't overlap with Facebook. And the introduction of products like Spectacles points this up even more.It's also (from a personal point of view) interesting that I do use snapchat a little, but I have absolutely no inclination to use those features on any of the fb services - that's not what I'm there for. I could be an edge case, but I suspect that I'm not unusual enough for it to cause major problems for snap.

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  3. 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?

  4. Re:Such a Conundrum... by Voyager529 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why can't any of these hot, new companies push open protocols and interoperating standards?

    To be blunt, because it's boring work that, by definition, other people can make money off of.

    Who makes money off SMTP? Basically nobody that wrote the protocol.
    Who makes money off HTTP? Basically nobody that wrote the protocol.
    Who makes money off SIP? Basically nobody that wrote the protocol.
    Who makes money off SSH? Basically nobody that wrote the protocol.

    Nobody who makes interoperable standards is going to do so in a way that doesn't make them vulnerable to EEE by someone else, and you're basically signing up to allow any installed base to leave and take their data with them. These things are features to us (otherwise the world would still be using AOL e-mail), but for investors willing to value a company with a ten-figure dollar amount, minimizing the likelihood of a mass exodus instills a level of safety that straight protocols don't enable.

    If you make something anyone can use, you won't be a rockstar. If you want to be a rockstar, you can't become one making a standardized protocol. ...but that's just how I see it.