Facebook lately, have been bringing a lot of snapchat features to it’s products. WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram all have snapchat cloned stories. Now, same goes for the main Facebook app.
Sometime last year, precisely August, Instagram rolled out Instagram Stories. Instagram stories was no doubt, a rip off of Snapchat’s stories.
Couple of weeks back, WhatsApp rolled out Status. The new WhatsApp Status is another SnapChat clone. Facebook Messenger rolled out Messenger’s day which in actual sense, wasn’t exactly different from the rest.
Facebook on Tuesday, rolled out same feature on it’s main app, Facebook stories. The feature was first tested in a handful of countries outside the US including Ireland and Chile. And perhaps proven to be worth it, is now available globally.
Same feature on WhatsApp, instagram, Messenger and now Facebook, all have one thing in common. A 24 hours validity period for pictures and videos being shared.
Facebook Rolls Out SnapChat’s Clone, Facebook Stories
If you have updated the Facebook app on iOS and can’t find the feature, simply double tap the home button, close the Facebook app and relaunch.
Connor Hayes, a product manager at Facebook, admitted this was pioneered by SnapChat. He said at a press briefing in San Francisco on Monday, “We think they did a great job of uncovering that stories as a format is the way that people really want to share photos and videos in social apps.”
The interesting thing with the new Facebook stories, is the ability to add filters and masks (Snapchat calls it “lenses”) to photos and videos being shared.
You can share the pictures or videos as a story, post on news-feed or send to groups or individuals with another new feature called Direct. And as earlier mentioned, this will self-destruct after 24 hours.
It’d be recalled that Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg tried to buy SnapChat for $3 billion in 2013. The offer was however, declined. Facebook has since then, tried building two snapchat clones, ‘Poke and Slingshot’ but both never got a spotlight.
SnapChat as since then, grew to become a strong opponent to Facebook. Earlier this month, Snap, SnapChat’s parent company went public in a $3.4 billion IPO.
In recent times, Facebook has also copied Google Maps by adding a temporary live location sharing feature to Facebook messenger. We should hopefully be expecting same feature on WhatsApp.
Facebook has over the years, proven to be an innovative company. However, in recent times, Facebook seem to be comfortable with copying.
