Instagram efforts to copy and paste Snapchat’s story feature was a clear indication that Facebook was worried about losing market share to the rising star in the world of social media known as Snapchat.
It is now official though; Facebook is admitting that the future in social media would be for applications using photos and videos rather than texts; in other words, Snapchat seems to be the prepared app to face the social media demands of tomorrow.
During Facebook's quarterly earnings review this past week, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, announced that Facebook now sees the camera as the future of how people would share and communicate. "In most social apps today, a text box is still the default way we share," he said. "Soon, we believe a camera will be the main way that we share,” he said.
Zuckerberg did not mention Snapchat by name, but what he meant could not be more obvious. He already had history with the Snapchat when he planned to buy it for $3 billion back in 2013. It was a good call from the founder of Snapchat, Evan Spiegel, to turn down that attractive offer by then. Snap Inc. (the new name of the company) is planning its IPO these days that could bring them between $35 billion to $40 billion in funding.
Not only that, Snap Inc is clearly doing something good because one of the biggest names in the Silicon Valley, Google Capital, one of Alphabet’s two venture capital arms (the mother company of the search engine Google) has just added Snapchat to its investment portfolio.
Winnie King, a spokeswoman for Google, confirmed that Snapchat is one of Google Capital's portfolio companies, but declined to comment beyond that. Noah Edwardsen, spokesman for Snapchat, said the company does not comment on financing as reported by NBC.
Now, Facebook has a lot of catch-up to do in order to protect its social media market share, and in sequence, its advertising profits.
Currently, Facebook is providing a redesign of its main app and testing it in Ireland. The new design puts a Snapchat-like camera interface front and center just beside its popular News Feed.
It is an attempt to push users to share photo and videos instead of only texts, with a guarantee of disappearance after 24 hours, again an exact copy from Snapchat.
During Facebook's most recent earnings call, Zuckerberg said that the redesign will become available globally "hopefully sooner rather than later." He also said that Instagram Stories (another copy and paste of Snapchat's story), is already used by 100 million people every day, as reported by The Business Insider.
Also, there are reports that Facebook is conducting some trials on Instagram and WhatsApp with some similar features of Snapchat.
Clearly, Facebook is betting on persuading its huge base of users not to leave its network, and if they like Snapchat, it is bringing them similar services so they could decide to stay! Time would only tell how successful such approach would be, but there is no way to deny that it is casting Facebook in the light of a mere imitator rather than a market leader, ripping them of their originality.

Sourc: Arab News