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Instagram's Snapchat Clone Is Now More Popular Than Snapchat -- and It's Only 8 Months Old (cnbc.com)
Facebook's top Snapchat clone Instagram Stories has hit 200 million daily active users, surpassing the last count of 161 million that Snapchat announced alongside its IPO. Instagram Stories launched in August, hit 100 million dailies in October, and 150 million in January, so it's hardly slowing as it grows. Meanwhile, Instagram is getting faster at copying even Snapchat's most technologically advanced features with a series of global iOS and Android updates. A report adds: Along with this announcement, Facebook is introducing new 'sticker' tools for Instagram, to make it a more appealing alternative to Snapchat, and more engaging for its users. Now Instagram's users can turn their selfies into stickers, which they'll be able to easily share, or pin within a video. The app is also launching new Geostickers for Chicago, London, Madrid and Tokyo to apply over photos. The stickers have been designed by artists from the respective cities, enabling users to tap to learn more about the art.
As an active user of NORMAL Instagram, I'm going to call absolute total bullshit on this. This is just like how Facebook tried to claim their video service was more popular than YouTube because they set videos to auto-play on the feed AND auto-loop, artificially inflating their view counts. With Instagram now, if you tap on someone's user icon in the normal feed, it'll take you to their stories instead of their profile. This artificially inflates their "stories" user count by taking people to a place they never wanted to go to in the first place (stories vs viewing someone's profile)
Its almost like finding out market analysts opinions about technology are really dumb, who knew.