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San Francisco - Instagram is copying Snapchat. (Watch video below).
Facebook’s app has a new feature that lets people share photos and videos that disappear, the defining feature of Snapchat. Users can write over the photos and add annotations - just like in Snapchat. The product lets people post photos or videos taken throughout their day in a slideshow form, just like Snapchat Stories. They vanish in 24 hours - just like Snapchat Stories.
To make it totally clear, Instagram is calling its product Stories too.
“This is the latest step in putting video at the centre of all our services,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on Tuesday, not mentioning Snapchat. “People are already creating and sharing more video, so we’re going to make it even easier.”
Snapchat declined to comment on the Instagram move.
It’s not the first time Facebook has tried to go after its Los Angeles-based competitor. The company unsuccessfully tried to buy Snapchat for $3bn in 2013, people familiar with the matter said at the time.
Facebook has launched two apps, Poke and Slingshot, that copied Snapchat’s basic functionality - both of which didn’t catch on. Instagram has even tried Snapchat-like features in the past for news events, creating streams of user posts related to live events like the Super Bowl and the Oscars, mimicking Snapchat’s "Live Story" product.
The move shows Facebook still feels threatened by its smaller competitor even as Instagram continues to grow quickly. Instagram has about 300 million daily active users, about double what Snapchat and even more established rival Twitter.
WATCH: Instagram launches ‘stories’: smart move or copycatting?
Roger McNamee, co-founder of Elevation Partners and Silver Lake Partners, discusses Instagram and Facebook’s competition with Snapchat.
Facebook tweaks news feed algorithm to punish click-bait posts
By Sarah Frier
San Francisco - Facebook is getting serious about quashing click-bait, two years after a first attempt had little success in curbing such posts.
Now, the company is doubling down, tweaking its algorithm to further punish senders of those stories that promise "you’ll never believe" something that happened, or that “he was shocked when he saw THIS.”
Facebook employees recently sorted through tens of thousands of headlines, categorising them as click-bait or not, to help come up with an algorithm that will automatically determine if a news story is suspect as soon as it’s uploaded to the site, the company said in a blog post on Thursday. The more a publisher posts click-bait, the more Facebook will limit how often its stories can be seen in the news feed.
The change comes after Facebook listened to users who reported that the problem persisted, even after the company tried to address it in 2014, said Adam Mosseri, who runs news feed.
“People are still complaining about it,” Mosseri said. “I think it’s bad for people, and it ends up in the long term being bad for publishers and also bad for Facebook.”
Click-bait headlines are defined as those that withhold crucial information or create misleading expectations for the reader. The headline "Wait Til You See What Selena Gomez Wore to the Emmys" creates false expectations if Gomez didn’t attend the Emmy awards this year, for example, he said.
In 2014, Facebook limited such spam by tracking who clicked on an article and quickly came back to the site. Now the company has noticed other factors: People tend to "like" a story, read it, then come back and un-"like" it, Mosseri said. They also tend to report such items as bugs or flag them as misleading or false. Facebook’s external panel of about 1,000 people who rank their news feed stories daily helped the company notice that the problem had persisted, he said.
The change won’t punish click-bait news sites forever - they can reform their ways, Mosseri said.
“If you are a publication and you post nothing but click-bait today, reach and referral traffic will go down,” he said. “If you then try to post more straightforward headlines, it will adapt and go up again.”
