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Facebook fails to copy Snapchat again

Michelle Avenant
By Michelle Avenant, portals journalist.
Johannesburg, 22 Jul 2016
Facebook has binned a feature that lets users send messages that disappear after 24 hours - its latest attempt to gain from Snapchat's popularity.
Facebook has binned a feature that lets users send messages that disappear after 24 hours - its latest attempt to gain from Snapchat's popularity.

Facebook has scrapped yet another feature imitating mobile app Snapchat, which captured an audience with its picture messages which disappeared forever after a few seconds, unless the recipient took a screenshot of the message.

Facebook's latest attempt at a Snapchat-like feature was called "Quick Updates," and allowed users to share multimedia messages with one another that would disappear after 24 hours.

Users of the feature were able to access it by clicking a smiley-face icon in the top right corner of their Facebook app, which would lead them to the Quick Updates interface, allowing them to create new multimedia or select old multimedia and send it to selected friends for a limited time period.

Quick Updates was rolled out to a test group of Facebook users before the social network decided it would not launch or move forward with the feature.

Other attempts

Facebook has been trying to leverage some of Snapchat's popularity since 2012, when it released a Snapchat clone called "Poke", which remained available via app stores for over a year after failing to gain traction upon its debut.

In 2014, Facebook launched Slingshot, a less direct copy of Snapchat, which allowed users to send one another photos or videos edited with text and digital doodles.

Yet unlike Snapchat, Slingshot required recipients to send a photo or video back to a friend before they were allowed to view the original message; a detail The Verge described as "frustrating, not exciting".

Facebook ultimately pulled Slingshot from the Apple and Android app stores.

In 2015, Facebook experimented with messages that vanished within an hour, which users could send via Facebook's Messenger app;

The social network recently offered users the option of hiding a post from their timeline, meaning it would show up only on their and their followers' newsfeeds and become extremely cumbersome to find after other users stopped interacting with it.

In 2013, Snapchat turned down a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook, and has since drastically increased in value, estimated at around $20 billion in May.

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