Facebook has finally capped off its strategy of cloning Snapchat’s USP by slotting a camera-first, ephemeral multimedia sharing feature into its entire social..
Facebook has finally capped off its strategy of cloning Snapchat’s USP by slotting a camera-first, ephemeral multimedia sharing feature into its entire social sharing estate.
Today it’s flicked the official switch on a global rollout of the feature in the main Facebook app , where these disappearing Stories are pinned to contacts above the News Feed — thereby making them almost impossible to ignore, especially given their fleeting lifespan.
Earlier this month the social sharing giant added a similar visual sharing feature to its Messenger app — triggering complaints that it was messing with the user experience.
It did the same, in February , with its messaging platform, WhatsApp, and also annoyed users by trying to replace a text status feature ( which it’s since restored ).
The Facebook Snapchat cloning strategy kicked off in August 2016 when the company debuted the disappearing Stories format on its photo and video sharing platform Instagram, clearly the most natural home for the clone.
And Instagram Stories has since apparently managed to dent Snapchat’s growth , which was clearly a core strategic aim for Facebook.
That and creating vastly more video inventory across Facebook’s portfolio of social apps — into which it can inject more lucrative video ads.
Training users to share the kind of content where ads can natively blend is really what Stories is all about.
All video, all video ads
None of this should be surprising. The company has previously publicly suggested its entire platform will be “ all video ” in the coming years.
It’s also taken user-hostile design decisions such as removing the ability to send text messages from its main Facebook app. (And the aforementioned attempted rubbing out of text statuses in WhatsApp).
So, basically, if you want to spam all your Facebook friends with a video of yourself wearing an animal selfie lens, Facebook will happily put all its tech at your disposal. But if you wish to swap a few words with people in your Facebook network, Facebook actively discourages that by requiring you switch to its Messenger app to do so.
