Photo credit: AP via The Telegraph
As someone who is creating a product in the social media space, I woke up this morning, realising that the team may be trying too hard. Part of my night ritual is to check my newsfeed before I head off to sleep. I caught something that, as a knee-jerk reaction, I immediately had to dismiss as possibly misreported.
Morning came, and it turns out the report was not erroneous after all. Multiple news outlets have confirmed that Instagram, the hot blonde of all social media platforms, has launched a feature that is identical to Snapchat’s Stories feature. They did not even bother thinking of a name for it – it is the Instagram Stories feature. CEO Kevin Systrom probably knew that the question would be asked, so he acknowledged that Snapchat pioneered Stories and “they deserve all the credit”.
Wow.
In 2013, Facebook dropped a $3 billion dollar offer on the table of Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, only for the (incredible) offer to be rebuffed. Shortly after, Facebook made a copy of what Snapchat was back then. Does anyone remember Slingshot by Facebook? Me neither. They pulled it right off the app stores after a year of flogging it to the teenage users that Facebook no longer has.
I can understand the premise behind Slingshot – when you can’t buy out the competition, you rip them off.
This Stories situation is entirely different though. Instagram has the money and resources that few other tech companies can afford, and yet it isn’t even trying to out-innovate Snapchat – no new ways to engage, no new ways to stem the (probable) migration of its user-base over to Snapchat.
This is a very curious turn of events from a company that has always touted that they were the ones who brought photo filters to the forefront. And a worrying trend at that. Has Facebook Inc, bloated with money and structure and scale, become so complacent as to commit borderline intellectual thievery?
As far as I can tell, whilst the Instagram Stories feature has been launched, it is currently still not available in Singapore.
Editing by Sim Yanting
(And yes, we’re serious about ethics and transparency. More information here.)
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