Facebook is bringing a new feature over to its app that closely resembles one of Snapchat's. Called Stories, it features short, user-generated photo or video montages that disappear after 24 hours, mimicking the ephemeral nature of Snapchat posts.
Facebook's New Snapchat-ish Feature
The new feature has only gone live in Ireland, the same country where Facebook is also testing a few other features related to Snapchat.
A company spokesperson told Recode and a slew of other publications that the deployment of Snapchat-like features are part of a test, which, like video or photo montages on Snapchat or Stories, may not last long.
Stories Feature To Roll Out Worldwide Soon
"We're hoping to bring Stories ... to the rest of the world in the coming months," said the spokesperson, hinting the Facebook's targeting a mass market release for the new feature, which isn't surprising given that Instagram, which Facebook owns, employs a "Stories" feature, which by extension even includes live video — a social media trend Facebook is pushing to champion.
Instagram, whose Stories feature was also undeniably borrowed from Snapchat, is already very successful, with 150 million daily active users — a pool as large as Snapchat's entire user base, no less — using the feature. Kevin Weil, Instagram's head of product, said that he expects the Stories to become something many people will start using, likening it to the popularity of using hashtags as handles for trending topics, especially on Twitter.
All told, Facebook hasn't been exactly very subtle about copying Snapchat. It spent most of 2016 trying to take pages off Snapchat's playbook, and Stories comes as yet another indication that Mark Zuckerberg is aware of Snapchat's rise, knows how to tap into the reason behind it, and can leverage that for the benefit of his own company's platforms.
Last April, a report by The Information claimed that "sharing" on Facebook has steadily declined for most of 2015, and that the same phenomenon was occurring on Instagram. Instagram's Stories feature might iron that crease, and perhaps it will also do the same for Facebook.
It's hard to determine what this'll mean for Snap, Snapchat's parent company. Evan Spiegel, Snap's chief executive, is about to take Snapchat public, and investors will most certainly try to observe if there's still plenty of room for the app to grow before they decide to dole out confidence on the platform, let alone money.
The Battle For Daily Active Users
Facebook as a social media platform has over 1 billion daily active users. Instagram has 300 million. Snapchat has far lower daily active users at 150 million, and that was in June. Needless to say that having its headline features copied by a powerful company such as Facebook is upsetting, to say the least. Snapchat is surely in a very awkward, if not precarious position of cobbling up ways to usurp the competition, whose newly accrued popularity stems from features Snapchat helped create.
What do you think should Snapchat's next move be? Feel free to sound off in the comments section below!
