For Facebook, Snapchat isn't an app to be feared.
It's a feature to be absorbed.
The world's largest social network relentlessly taunts Snap Inc., their much-smaller competitor, known mostly for its disappearing messages app, by lifting Snap's core functionality, and dumping it into a variety of products it doesn't really belong.
Who knows what Facebook's really thinking—the company tends to promote its features with fluff about letting you "share all the moments of your day"—but the ripoffs are almost certainly less about providing a service to users, and much more about outright killing Snapchat.
Some important background: An article in Bloomberg last year said Facebook was in a froth over a decline in "personal sharing" on its social network, which is used by 1.23 billion people every day. (Snapchat's got 158 million daily users, its IPO filing revealed.) Personal sharing's important: Your News Feed can't just be a wasteland of viral videos and news about Hillary Clinton harvesting baby organs or whatever—you return to Facebook to see what your friends are up to.
When friends post personal statuses or pictures, it encourages you to do the same. Then Facebook has a nice crop of eager content-sharers to serve highly personalized ads to. Then, Facebook makes several billion dollars. Great!
The rub for Facebook, here, is that Snapchat's all about intimate moments (and body parts) shared between friends (and lovers). You can take a snap of whatever, send it to whomever, and you don't have to worry about your aunt or kid seeing it—as you do on Facebook. It's a popular idea, and at the time of the Bloomberg report, Snapchat was enjoying explosive growth in its user base:
This lovely graph shows Snapchat's robust growth over a couple of years ending in December 2015.
Facebook's made all sorts of News Feed tweaks to push "personal" content to the top, but it seems that wasn't enough, because last year, it started ripping off Snapchat something fierce. For example: Facebook took Snap's "Story" concept—wherein users share a series of snapshots or videos that are no longer than 10 seconds, which are deleted after 24 hours—and shoved it into Instagram. The move was so transparently ham-fisted you could glaze it with honey and call it dinner.
It's kind of nuts that Facebook got away with it, but as FastCompany explained at the time, there was nothing illegal about it.
"It’s okay to take somebody’s idea so long as your expression of it is different," Duke law professor Arti Rai told the outlet. Even if the "Stories" functionality is essentially the same, the context of Instagram's app is, we suppose, fundamentally different than Snapchat—so, no crime here.
Facebook's "Stories" don't make sense
Instagram, meanwhile, has historically been about picking moments from your life, manicuring them, and showing them off to your friends and followers. Many people don't post to Insta more than once or twice a day, if even, because there's only so much in your life that's worth showing off:
Content shared on Snapchat is less manicured. The app outwardly encourages you to share with your friends constantly by gameifying "Streaks," which you get for having back-and-forth interactions with individuals. Stories, which are shared with more people than an individual snap would be, are perhaps more selective, but still maintain an off-the-cuff vibe:
Lord help us.
The introduction of "Stories" into Instagram thus takes a very specifically un-precious kind of content and shoves it into maybe the most precious social network this side of Pinterest. It's like putting pepperoni on chocolate ice cream. It doesn't really matter, because Facebook's version of Stories—and with it, we should note, a very snap-like individual-to-individual sharing feature—is purely a brute-force assault on Snapchat.
And that's the message Facebook wants to send the world: Snapchat isn't an app, it's a throwaway feature.
As TechCrunch noted last month, Instagram Stories seems to have kneecapped Snapchat, slowing its growth by 82 percent at the end of last year. After all: Why download a new app if you can get its features on the one you already use?
Meanwhile, Snap's stock hurtled downward since shares opened to investors earlier this month.
But Facebook's attack doesn't stop there.
The company's now rolled the Stories feature out far beyond Instagram. It's been deployed in some form on Facebook Messenger, which has 1 billion users; on WhatsApp, which has 1.2 billion; and it's being tested on the mack daddy of them all, the Facebook app.
Stories are coming to the Facebook app.
And that's the message Facebook wants to send the world: Snapchat isn't an app, it's a throwaway feature.
Facebook doesn't need you to use stories: It needs you to see that it's everywhere you look, and that it can be bundled with a bunch of other apps that you use anyway. In Facebook World, there's no need to download or open Snapchat—your friends are on Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and your News Feed anyway.
And it's pretty awful. Why? Well, Snapchat's vibe is a hundred times cooler than Facebook's Stories, which are littered with unimaginative stickers and filters. Snapchat has a vibe. It's an app, sure, but at least it's an app with an aesthetic. And Mark Zuckerberg's social behemoth could use some serious competition on its path towards gobbling up the world. Bottom line: Monopolies are never good.
The hard reality is that Facebook is winning the war for your Stories, and Snapchat needs to come up with a few new hooks—ideally beyond its not-so-cool-anymore Spectacles camera. Otherwise, that iconic ghost icon may prove all too prophetic.
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