Not content with taking on Snapchat by shipping two clones of Snapchat Stories, attempting two acquisitions (one of Snapchat, one of a Chinese company making Snapchat-style camera apps), making four standalone Snapchat-style apps, bundling two ephemeral messaging implementations, and creating five new cameras with AR lenses, (see also here, here, here, here, here, here and here), Facebook is again shamelessly taking on Snapchat.
Twice.
First up, on Monday, Android Police reported that the company began testing out a new feature in the Facebook app. Dubbed “direct photos and videos”, the feature is built into the camera in Facebook, and allows users to send pictures and movies to their friends straight from the camera interface, like in Snapchat.
The recipient can only view the message twice, whether it’s a photo or video, before it disappears forever, like in Snapchat. And, as Android Police puts it, “the camera itself seems to have some filters or something”, like in Snapchat.
But the bigger news came a few hours later, when Facebook messaging subsidiary WhatsApp announced a major new feature. Status lets users take pictures, add stickers and drawings, and share them to all their contacts for 24 hours. It’s pitched by WhatsApp as an update to the original, text-only, “status” feature, which lets you set a text status like “out for lunch” or “available to talk” within the app, but it’s also a lot like Snapchat Stories. That is, nearly identical to Snapchat Stories. Although, to be fair, it’s also nearly identical to the Instagram clone of Snapchat Stories, Instagram Stories.
The killer app of WhatsApp Status, for the privacy-conscious at least, is the fact that all the status updates are end-to-end encrypted, intended to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks from successfully eavesdropping on your updates.
For those keeping count, we’ve already documented WhatsApp Status once before in the running tally of Facebook v Snapchat, when the feature was leaked in November, which makes this the 17th time overall the company has fired up the photocopiers.
We aren’t the only ones to notice the one-way trend of inspiration, either. Model Miranda Kerr, the fiancé of Snapchat creator Evan Spiegel, lashed out at the company in an interview with the Times in February, telling the paper that she “cannot STAND Facebook.”
“Can they not be innovative? Do they have to steal all of my partner’s ideas? I’m so appalled by that,” Kerr continued. “When you directly copy someone, that’s not innovation.”
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