Facebook's WhatsApp Unveils Snapchat Inspired Features
Zacks Investment Research | Oct 03, 2016 09:08PM ET
Yesterday, Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) owned messaging service, WhatsApp announced new camera features. WhatsApp users can now write/draw on photos and videos and can add emojis to the same as well as change fonts and color style.
WhatsApp further added that a set of new editing tools will automatically appear when a person captures or shares pictures and videos. The inapp camera will now have a “front-facing flash” for taking “perfect selfies” along with “convenient zooming feature” for video recording.
The features appear to be heavily inspired by Snapchat. Facebook and its subsidiary platforms have long been copying features that are inherent to Snapchat. Earlier this year, Facebook added the “Stories” feature, a slideshow of photos and videos that vanishes after 24 hours, to its photo sharing app Instagram. This was a blatant rip off of Snapchat’s hallmark feature of the same name. Recently, Facebook is testing new feature on its Messenger platform called Messenger Day that essentially mimics Snapchat’s “Stories”. Further, Messenger Codes is almost the same as Snapchat’s Snapcodes.
Other “inspirations” include the now defunct Poke, Slingshot and Bolt, all toying with the idea of disappearing posts.
Will Facebook’s Imitation of Snapchat Prove Beneficial?
The question arises as to why Facebook, the world’s largest social media service, needs to imitate Snapchat? Snapchat is one of the most popular messaging and social media apps in the U.S. Launched in 2012, it is extremely popular with teens and millennials primary because of ephemerality. Photos/videos and text sent to friends via Snapchat disappear after sometime. Moreover, an interactive style of chat developed by the addition of stickers, doodling etc has really caught the fancy of teens.
Snapchat’s innovative ways have allowed it to move ahead of other popular apps like Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) and Facebook to become a favorite with teenagers. A key reason that can be attributed to Snapchat’s popularity is its “cool” quotient. Snapchat scores above all social media services for being the coolest social network as users aren’t going to bump into their parents or worse, grandparents on the same network.
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