I think this is Facebook's 9th or 10th thinly-veiled attempt to siphon users away from Snapchat. Previous direct attempts at cloning included Poke (2012) and Sl

I think this is Facebook's 9th or 10th thinly-veiled attempt to siphon users away from Snapchat. Previous direct attempts at cloning included Poke (2012) and Slingshot (2014), which didn't work at all, so they've settled for slowly cloning and integrating Snapchat features into Whatsapp and Instagram. Have to agree with the conclusion of this Guardian article that has documented the phenomenon: "With attempts six and seven coming in the same month, and eight, nine, and 10 coming in the same weekend, it’s clear that Facebook’s attacks on Snapchat are accelerating. Some back-of-the-envelope maths suggests that at the current rate of acceleration, there will be more Facebook clones of Snapchat than there are atoms in the universe by the year 2030. And yet Snapchat will probably still be more popular among teens." https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/31/facebook-tries-to-clone-snapchat https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/31/facebook-...