The mimicry continues. Facebook has taken a page off Snapchat's playbook once again for the nth time and cloned the popular photo messaging service's "Stories" feature for WhatsApp, renamed it "Status," and gave it encryption.
WhatsApp Borrows Snapchat's Stories
The new feature is being rolled out Monday, letting users share photos, GIFs, or videos superimposed with drawings, emoji, or captions that'll show up on friends' newsfeeds, which will expire after 24 hours. The setup is, needless to say, dead-on Snapchat-y, although this isn't a surprise: Apps Facebook now own or have created, including Instagram and Messenger, have all tried and succeeded in borrowing photo-sharing features Snapchat first championed.
The premise of it copying the company, which is currently busy with its IPO, isn't even subtle, and in fact, the desire to do such a thing originates some years ago. In 2013, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, offered $3 billion to buy Snapchat. It declined. Since then, Facebook has tried to provide a similar set of features heralded by Snapchat, The New York Times reports.
The feature is a bigger change for WhatsApp compared with Instagram, since the latter had already been infused with photo-related purposes even before the Snapchat-like features emerged. WhatsApp, however, is chiefly a messaging app, and the feature potentially heralds an entirely new way of using it to its user base, the total number of which runs past the billion mark.
Until now, WhatsApp has been fairly utilitarian — people bring it up to check their messages, send some of their own, read and type some more, and then halt, not scroll through their friend's activity or content streams. That'll change very, very soon, obviously.
Advertisers' Playground
Apart from conventional photo-sharing features of "Status," it could also usher in a flurry of advertisers all running to take advantage of the platform. More than a year ago, as per a report by Forbes, WhatsApp said that it was looking for a way in which businesses could send messages to its users without coming off as intrusive. This could be the solution it has found — not that it had to look far.
WhatsApp executives shied away when asked about the feature's similarities with Snapchat's. A spokeswoman for Facebook Messenger, Jennifer Hakes, however, said, as per the New York Times's report:
"In some ways, the camera is now replacing the keyboard. As more people use Messenger in their everyday lives, we wanted to make it faster, simpler and more fun to send photos and videos — so we built the new Messenger camera," which is interesting, since it nearly parallels Snap CEO Evan Spiegel's comments about what the camera is for the smartphone in modern communication.
In its latest Roadshow materials to entice investors, Spiegel said that with Snapchat, the primary input method has been the camera, in the way the keyboard is the primary input for the computer.
WhatsApp has now become the fourth Facebook-owned entity to be inserted with the said feature. Instagram received it first in August, followed by Facebook Messenger and Facebook itself, both of which remain in testing across a number of countries.
Going Back To WhatsApp Roots
While the feature holds dead-on similarities, WhatsApp has positioned it as a "gift" to its users and also a coming-back-to-its-roots move. In a blog post, the company said that when WhatsApp started eighty years ago, it was an app for sharing status updates, which then grew into a messaging app, and then to what it has become now.
The feature's impact to Snap's roadmap remains to be seen. Its IPO is scheduled for March 2.
