San Francisco May 31 (IANS) Does Instagram copy Snapchat? Most of you will instantly agree it does but for Instagram CEO the Facebook-owned photo-sharing app is just building on Snapchat.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday Kevin Systrom said that even if Snapchat had all of these features before it doesn t mean Instagram is blatantly copying Snapchat.
Systrom endorsed that Instagram s Stories feature is definitely similar to Snapchat s version but argued that it did not establish that they were copying.
Originally launched by Snapchat the Stories feature shows photos and videos shared in chronological order that disappear after 24 hours.
Facebook introduced something similar in its app Instagram last August. Today Instagram has over 200 million people using Stories daily -- more than even Snapchat.
Today Messenger WhatsApp and the main Facebook app have all added Stories feature (In WhatsApp it is called Status ).
However for Instagram CEO Snapchat-Instagram battle is akin to the early days of cars saying that more companies came along after the Model T.
In this scenario Instagram is simply building upon a technology that Snapchat created Systrom was quoted as saying.
That Facebook is going after Snapchat is not news but the battle has now become somewhat ugly.
At its recent F8 developer conference in San Jose in the US CEO Mark Zuckerberg launched Camera Effects Platform to encourage augmented reality (AR) effects -- a move reported by The New York Times as Facebook s brazen heist over Snapchat.
Facebook is not just learning/borrowing features from Snapchat (mostly to Instagram) but it has been borrowing features from other messaging apps too. For example Facebook Messenger learned a lot of features from WeChat (China) since last year s F8 such as creating branded accounts and letting brands use it for customer services Xiaofeng Wang Senior Analyst with US-based market research firm Forrester told IANS.
--IANS
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Instagram doesn t copy Snapchat but builds on it, says CEO
