15 ms·

Facebook launches Stories in its main app

93 points by danijelb 10y ago

oakesm9 10y ago
Am I right in thinking that these are completely separate to the Instagram stories?
- bhouston 10y ago
  They are trying to kill Snapchat by coping it repeatedly in all their products. Pretty interesting strategy and I suspect it may work. Sort of feels like Google's desparate G+ attempt to clone Facebook. It does feel a bit hacked onto the main Facebook experience though.
  - mattnewton 10y ago
    What makes you think it will work? G+ is like the poster child for fighting the wrong way, a technically more advanced product that lacked the user base, and thus the point, of Facebook. Isn't Facebook doing the same thing with Snapchat, where the different user base is the real draw, not the tech?
    - yeukhon 10y ago
      G+ is a poster child, but G+ is a horrible product. It was an entirely a whole new application of its own, so comparing that to Stories is pretty awkward. The Stories is integrated within the main Facebook user experience. It's literally showing up as another feature on the main site/main app.
      - thomastjeffery 10y ago
        > G+ is a horrible product. Specifically how? The only reason I don't use it is that Facebook has all of the users. G+ has circles, which I really wish Facebook had. AFAIK, G+ doesn't have a constant sidebar with targeted ads like Facebook does.
    - L_Rahman 10y ago
      The difference is that Facebook already has a captive audience and G+ never did.
      - mattnewton 10y ago
        But, as a sibling comment suggested, it has the wrong audience: your mother, your coworkers, and your ex.
      - zepolen 10y ago
        Yes, Google doesn't have an audience...
  - EGreg 10y ago
    Why do these corporations each want to kill each other as an end goal? Why can't they innovate in their own space and collaborate? I think it's because they are built on two different platforms that it would not make economic sense to interoperate. Compare that to open source.
    - dude01 10y ago
      I think it's like a prisoner's dilemma -- if FB doesn't try to kill off SC, then SC will kill off FB. But it's like a one-off prisoner's dilemma, because this is two corporations that assume that both won't be around forever, so they don't care about building a nice long-term relationship for themselves. Honestly, I could see the same thing happening in open source, though you're right, it doesn't seem to very much at all.
- eric_h 10y ago
  That does seem to be implied by the article.
jasode 10y ago
I thought a big factor for Snapchat was that it did not have Facebook users. Teens and 20-somethings liked the fact that Snapchat was their smaller circle of real friends. Facebook has that goofy uncle, and coworkers from 5 jobs ago, and old classmates you don't really want to stay in touch with. Facebook has too many "weak ties". Therefore, Facebook could clone every feature of Snapchat but it can't change the fact that it is still Facebook. The new features might keep Facebook users from switching to Snapchat but would it entice Snapchat users to switch to Facebook? Sure, people can use social networks for a myriad of reasons but Snapchat the network seems to be a dominant factor.
- danijelb 10y ago
  When Instagram launched Stories, I noticed that most of my friends moved there. I rarely open Snapchat because it is almost empty, nothing is happening there. But apparently it stayed popular among high school students, so I guess it is different among different demographics - I'm 23 and most of my friends who switched are similar age. Facebook is probably hoping that similar will happen with the main app.
  - froindt 10y ago
    That's interesting. I'm 24 and have a different experience. Among my close friends, none use Instagram to the point that I feel the need to. Snapchat is fairly popular. In the last couple months, my girlfriend and I both realized that Facebook was giving tons of stuff about people we don't care much about, and It's definitely popular in high school. I know a police officer who works in a high school. Snapchat is a huge pain point for them. Someone takes a screenshot of a nude their girlfriend sent and passes it along to friends 6 or 12 months later after they broke up and suddenly 45 people have child porn on their phones. One person took a picture of a friend and in the background they noticed a student upskirting a girl.
    - Rumudiez 10y ago
      Those things happened before Snapchat, too.. unfortunately it's an expected part of high school culture in the US.
jakebasile 10y ago
Do these stories sync with those in Messenger? Seems weird if it doesn't but there's no mention in TFA.
- firloop 10y ago
  It appears that stories in Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and Messenger are all completely separate from each other. If you want to post to all Facebook products and Snapchat, you'll have to do it five times. edit: Facebook and Messenger may be linked. oops. Well, if you wanted to post to all Facebook products stories and Whatsapp, you'd have to post four times; tons of redundancy remains.
  - jakebasile 10y ago
    That's pretty goofy. I don't use all of those, but of the group Facebook and Messenger are the most directly tied so it'd make sense to sync, or more succinctly just make it the same product. I get the appeal of stories and I may actually use it, but I think their shotgun approach is a bit too unfocused.
    - scottmf 10y ago
      Facebook is trying hard to make Messenger a separate product from Facebook.
  - xd1936 10y ago
    I believe (though I'm not certain) that Facebook and Messenger's Stories clones are the same data
    - jakebasile 10y ago
      I got access to the Facebook version, and as far as I can tell they are not linked. I added a photo to Facebook stories and it didn't show up in Messenger. That's an annoying move.
fogetti 10y ago
"After 24 hours, posts in your story disappear forever" - Yeah, sure. You mean it stays in Facebook datacenters forever. Just a slight difference. :)
- castis 10y ago
  I would assume that snapchat doesn't delete your snaps after x amount of hours either. Probably for the same reasons.
  - froindt 10y ago
    Law enforcement has had a tough time with snapchat because they actually do delete the data according to their policy. They have a law enforcement guide which goes over what to expect for data requests, and it's quite sparse. Can't link right now, on mobile and it's a PDF. In 2014, they were seeing 400 million images per day, 88% of which were to one person [1]. Assuming 0.33 mb/image, no videos, and 100% going to 1 person, that's 132 TB/day. Per their recent SEC filing, they're now up to 2.5 billion snaps per day. [2] There's a strong business case for deleting the files as soon as you can. Before they were a gigantic company, their brand trust and keeping things lean encouraged deleting the photos. I believe that holds true today. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/how-many-snaps-snapchat-users-get-2013-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/how-many-snaps-snapchat-users... [2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1564408/000119312517029199/d270216ds1.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1564408/000119312517... Edit: I decided to run some quick 'n dirty estimation and was a bit surprised by how "cheap" it would actually be to store it all. Snap uses Google Cloud Services, and given their volume, will have a pretty sweet pricing deal. For that reason, I estimated with $0.007/GB, which is the coldline rate per [3] even though they probably wouldn't be doing coldline storage. http://imgur.com/a/Boqlm http://imgur.com/a/Boqlm Very rough estimate for 1 year of storing every image snap from now until next year is ~13.5 million. At 2.5 billion snaps/day, images only, it would cost ~$5775/month to store all the data generated today. As an aside, I do wonder if there would be an opportunity for Snap to get and store context from an image without storing the image. It may be a balance between big data and minimizing costs. I'm thinking something along the lines of the list of words from Clarifai [4] stored with the metadata. It wouldn't be very useful to the police because the image recognition is wrong sometimes. "Marijuana" as a tag would be very weak evidence to put forth in court if the police didn't also have the image. [3] https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing#storage-pricing https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing#storage-pricing [4] https://developer.clarifai.com/models/aaa03c23b3724a16a56b629203edc62c https://developer.clarifai.com/models/aaa03c23b3724a16a56b62...
castis 10y ago
I've been parroting for a while that Snapchat was a feature masquerading as a business (I got that idea from somewhere but I don't remember where). Once FB messenger gets the filter goofiness that SC has (maybe it does already, I dont know), that'll be everything SC had to offer that I am aware of. Unless SC does something novel soon, I wouldn't assume that it's going to be around for much longer.
- yeukhon 10y ago
  It will stick around for several more years but the business model for SC is really questionable to keep up with making profit ever. The whole "I've got a lot of active users" is pretty much a building on fire, much like Uber in general. The fire will go on for as long as there are enough oxygen and enough material to burn until users starts to drop or advertisers see no value returning from paying Snapchat. SC won't completely go away for a long time, much like MySpace is still a thing today. Uber on the other hand is sort of "too big to fail" because of the amount of users it has already accumulated and already invested. Don't think SC will be too big to fail ever, but it will be interested to see how SC plays out in the next couple years with its production evolution.
  - amyjess 10y ago
    > The whole "I've got a lot of active users" is pretty much a building on fire Isn't this what caused the dot-com bust of 2000?
    - yeukhon 10y ago
      Yeah, I think so. I think we are seeing this with Uber already, which I am afraid Uber will become the eventual too big to fail, but it can fail if nothing done right since in 2016 Uber has lost $3B already. Like I said, SC's failure wouldn't be a huge loss for investors. It's going IPO.
- spike021 10y ago
  FB messenger got the feature a couple weeks ago. In terms of adoption rate amongst people on my friends list, more people began using the Stories on Instagram immediately. Only 2 or 3 people out of 450+ "friends" on my FB have even posted to the story thing in messenger. The first day Stories was available for Instagram, people were posting either the same things to both Instagram and Snapchat stories, or just regular "snap"-type posts. If FB messenger adoption in my circle is anything like it is for the majority of regular users, then it won't be very popular.
EGreg 10y ago
Remember when Facebook copied twitter and pushed hard for everyone to write public posts on their wall? Facebook's character fundamentally changes - again.
- pugio 10y ago
  I just read Chaos Monkeys (http://amzn.to/2nr5THJ http://amzn.to/2nr5THJ) – a silicon valley insider tale with someone who worked at FB – and it points out that one of FB's cultural strengths was the ability and willingness to completely change their character in response to new conditions. As it grows, I'm sure inertia will continue to slow it down, but that willingness for reinvention seems like quite a powerful property. (Another current book – Antifragile (http://amzn.to/2nr15ST http://amzn.to/2nr15ST) – discusses systems that benefit from randomness and volatility. I wonder if the willingness for reinvention allows for a kind of anti-fragile generational selection to work: instead of waiting for selective forces to birth a different and new stronger generation, you transform yourself (or your company) to _become_ that new generation, allowing you to directly benefit from selective pressures. It's tough to do, psychologically and culturally, and the willingness to do so seems an extremely valuable quality to cultivate.)
- AJ007 10y ago
  This is an insightful comment. It is easy to forget not just how different Facebook of 2017 is from 2007 but the cycles they've gone through. Facebook measures and adapts to user engagement. When something spurs a loss of engagement eventually it disappears. In the social space, other tech companies struggle just getting a few new things shipped and then bail when they don't look like they are working out. It is in Facebook's best interest to see Snapchat fail. The next big thing that comes around, it will be a lot easier for Facebook to buy early on. On another note, if Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp, and Facebook all start looking like the same app, it gives Facebook a particularly powerful platform. Everything could end up being rolled up in to a single app in the future -- or a new device.
  - tqkxzugoaupvwqr 10y ago
    A single-purpose (=Facebook) device has already failed. And it doesn’t look like Facebook is going to role apps into one. More the opposite: Give the illusion of choice. Facebook is behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Many people repulse Facebook but still use their non-Facebook branded services. Some of the features converge, but the apps won’t merge. It is only to drown out the competition (Snapchat).
mici 10y ago
Did they betatest this feature? I swear I've had it for at least a week or two now, and I've seen some friends post a couple of stories as well. I thought it was much less popular than the stories in Instagram or Messenger, but maybe most of them didn't have the feature yet. Anyway, Snapchat still seems to be by far the most popular for this functionality, at least in my circle of friends.
- mi100hael 10y ago
  Facebook is well known for doing A/B testing. I'd reckon most of your friends didn't yet have it.
- capocannoniere 10y ago
  Facebook is known to A/B test features in other countries before rolling them out to the rest of the world. Stories in particular launched earlier this year in Ireland, Chile, Greece and Vietnam. > Facebook Stories, a feature that puts photos that disappear after 24 hours at the top of the Facebook mobile app, is rolling out to users in Chile, Greece and Vietnam, Facebook confirmed. However, it is not available to users in all markets. The feature was first tested among users in Ireland in January [...] [1] [1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/15/facebook-stories-roll-out/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/15/facebook-stories-roll-out/
miguelrochefort 10y ago
This is stupid. We now have stories in 10 different apps. Who thought this was a good idea?
- mrmondo 10y ago
  I think Facebook are gripping at anything to appear that they're still relevant
  - pugio 10y ago
    1+ (2?) billion users. You make it sound like they're a has-been.
    - dbbk 10y ago
      1.86B as of December.
  - spike021 10y ago
    I don't think it's a question of them being desperate to look 'relevant' as much of them just being afraid to lose market share. Enough people use Facebook and either don't use Snapchat or use Facebook for other types of communication that SC couldn't really kill FB. But it would definitely hurt.
- bpicolo 10y ago
  > Who thought this was a good idea? People who like snapchat?
  - miguelrochefort 10y ago
    Wrong.
chwilson 10y ago
Instagram and Whatsapp stories I can understand - I don't particularly think they're good decisions, but I can understand them. To an extent it makes even more sense in the Facebook app itself, but having the core app and Messenger have separate stories despite them using the same exact account is ridiculous to me.
- jakebasile 10y ago
  Yep, this doesn't make any sense to me. I get WhatsApp/Instagram not working together. But Messenger and Facebook are two sides of the same product and the snapchat clones in each are completely separate. They spent a lot of effort making both Facebook and Messenger required on mobile, and now that it was successful it seems they're trying to separate them out, but that leaves a functionality hole in Facebook itself - Messenger IS Facebook's messaging feature, except when it isn't. EDIT: Stories also don't appear to show up on facebook.com. EDIT 2: I just remembered that you can use Messenger without a Facebook account[1]. Having them separate still doesn't make sense. [1]: https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/1526848634305688 https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/1526848634305688
hmans 10y ago
The only app on my phone that's not trying to copycat Snapchat is Termux.
adamnemecek 10y ago
this is what a dying company looks like. fb is such a smorgasbord of features as is, putting more in really isn't the way forward.
- dbbk 10y ago
  A dying company with annual net income of $10B, okay.
  - sharkweek 10y ago
    I'd love to be running a business that is failing at 10B a year net income!
  - adamnemecek 10y ago
    I'm talking about cultural relevance. AOL still has a revenue of $700M btw.
    - dbbk 10y ago
      Yes because Aol is a media publisher now. What's your point? Facebook is a dying company because it's not "cool" anymore? That's not really an objective measurement.
- thomastjeffery 10y ago
  I have been wishing this to be true during the better part of the last decade. Unfortunately for me, Facebook has reached a critical mass, and its black hole holds all those I know captive.
chatmasta 10y ago
At what point will Facebook totally kill m.facebook.com and force users to download the app? They've already done this with messenger; it's only a matter of time before they do the same for Facebook.app. That will be the day I finally leave Facebook for good, because I have no interest in downloading that monstrosity of a spy device onto my iPhone.
- huseyinkeles 10y ago
  what makes you think that your iPhone is not a spy device itself?
  - r3bl 10y ago
    Because Apple, unlike Facebook, doesn't have any product that would benefit from utilizing your data? As far as I know (could be wrong, never had iPhone), Apple doesn't tweak your iPhone experience based on your previous usage.
- username223 10y ago
  I don't care so much about m.facebook.com, but I've been using mbasic.facebook.com on both desktop and mobile since someone on this site pointed it out. It's awkward, but it works with absolutely no JavaScript, and lets me keep in touch with Facebook-oriented friends (in the original sense) with much less potential surveillance. It's also part of their "altruistic" Free Basics program, so it has enough PR value to stick around for awhile.
- alasdairnicol 10y ago
  You can still read Facebook messages on the mbasic site. https://mbasic.facebook.com/messages https://mbasic.facebook.com/messages
- icefo 10y ago
  On Android you can download faceslim. It's the mobile site with the messages in an app. They used a special user agent to reenable the messages. You even have notifications ! (Manually checked every 30 minutes or so) Maybe you can have it too by downloading Firefox for iPhone and changing the user agent. (I haven't tried but it's worth a shot)
pkamb 10y ago
I've loved using Instagram Stories since they launched, but have absolutely no interest in using the equivalent features in Messenger or Facebook proper. And Snapchat never really took for me. The people I see on Instagram aren't my small circle of real friends, or my bigger bigger circle of old acquaintances, but rather (mostly random) interesting people posting interesting photography of subjects I'm interested in. The Stories feature (temporary, unpolished) compensates perfectly for the deficiencies of the main Instagram product (permanent, curated), and vice versa.
recursive 10y ago
What's the difference between a regular facebook post and a "story"? It auto-deletes in 24 hours. Is that the only difference? Why would anyone care? I don't get it.
- k-mcgrady 10y ago
  When you view your story it auto plays all posts in the last 24 hours in a kind of video reel.as for the point of the 24 delete it means people can post less important things they wouldn't usually bother posting. For example they could post 10 items in a day without clogging friends news feeds.

93 points by danijelb 10y ago

oakesm9 10y ago

Am I right in thinking that these are completely separate to the Instagram stories?

bhouston 10y ago
They are trying to kill Snapchat by coping it repeatedly in all their products. Pretty interesting strategy and I suspect it may work. Sort of feels like Google's desparate G+ attempt to clone Facebook. It does feel a bit hacked onto the main Facebook experience though.
- mattnewton 10y ago
  What makes you think it will work? G+ is like the poster child for fighting the wrong way, a technically more advanced product that lacked the user base, and thus the point, of Facebook. Isn't Facebook doing the same thing with Snapchat, where the different user base is the real draw, not the tech?
  - yeukhon 10y ago
    G+ is a poster child, but G+ is a horrible product. It was an entirely a whole new application of its own, so comparing that to Stories is pretty awkward. The Stories is integrated within the main Facebook user experience. It's literally showing up as another feature on the main site/main app.
    - thomastjeffery 10y ago
      > G+ is a horrible product. Specifically how? The only reason I don't use it is that Facebook has all of the users. G+ has circles, which I really wish Facebook had. AFAIK, G+ doesn't have a constant sidebar with targeted ads like Facebook does.
  - L_Rahman 10y ago
    The difference is that Facebook already has a captive audience and G+ never did.
    - mattnewton 10y ago
      But, as a sibling comment suggested, it has the wrong audience: your mother, your coworkers, and your ex.
    - zepolen 10y ago
      Yes, Google doesn't have an audience...
- EGreg 10y ago
  Why do these corporations each want to kill each other as an end goal? Why can't they innovate in their own space and collaborate? I think it's because they are built on two different platforms that it would not make economic sense to interoperate. Compare that to open source.
  - dude01 10y ago
    I think it's like a prisoner's dilemma -- if FB doesn't try to kill off SC, then SC will kill off FB. But it's like a one-off prisoner's dilemma, because this is two corporations that assume that both won't be around forever, so they don't care about building a nice long-term relationship for themselves. Honestly, I could see the same thing happening in open source, though you're right, it doesn't seem to very much at all.
eric_h 10y ago
That does seem to be implied by the article.

jasode 10y ago

I thought a big factor for Snapchat was that it did not have Facebook users. Teens and 20-somethings liked the fact that Snapchat was their smaller circle of real friends. Facebook has that goofy uncle, and coworkers from 5 jobs ago, and old classmates you don't really want to stay in touch with. Facebook has too many "weak ties". Therefore, Facebook could clone every feature of Snapchat but it can't change the fact that it is still Facebook. The new features might keep Facebook users from switching to Snapchat but would it entice Snapchat users to switch to Facebook? Sure, people can use social networks for a myriad of reasons but Snapchat the network seems to be a dominant factor.

danijelb 10y ago
When Instagram launched Stories, I noticed that most of my friends moved there. I rarely open Snapchat because it is almost empty, nothing is happening there. But apparently it stayed popular among high school students, so I guess it is different among different demographics - I'm 23 and most of my friends who switched are similar age. Facebook is probably hoping that similar will happen with the main app.
- froindt 10y ago
  That's interesting. I'm 24 and have a different experience. Among my close friends, none use Instagram to the point that I feel the need to. Snapchat is fairly popular. In the last couple months, my girlfriend and I both realized that Facebook was giving tons of stuff about people we don't care much about, and It's definitely popular in high school. I know a police officer who works in a high school. Snapchat is a huge pain point for them. Someone takes a screenshot of a nude their girlfriend sent and passes it along to friends 6 or 12 months later after they broke up and suddenly 45 people have child porn on their phones. One person took a picture of a friend and in the background they noticed a student upskirting a girl.
  - Rumudiez 10y ago
    Those things happened before Snapchat, too.. unfortunately it's an expected part of high school culture in the US.

jakebasile 10y ago

Do these stories sync with those in Messenger? Seems weird if it doesn't but there's no mention in TFA.

firloop 10y ago
It appears that stories in Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and Messenger are all completely separate from each other. If you want to post to all Facebook products and Snapchat, you'll have to do it five times. edit: Facebook and Messenger may be linked. oops. Well, if you wanted to post to all Facebook products stories and Whatsapp, you'd have to post four times; tons of redundancy remains.
- jakebasile 10y ago
  That's pretty goofy. I don't use all of those, but of the group Facebook and Messenger are the most directly tied so it'd make sense to sync, or more succinctly just make it the same product. I get the appeal of stories and I may actually use it, but I think their shotgun approach is a bit too unfocused.
  - scottmf 10y ago
    Facebook is trying hard to make Messenger a separate product from Facebook.
- xd1936 10y ago
  I believe (though I'm not certain) that Facebook and Messenger's Stories clones are the same data
  - jakebasile 10y ago
    I got access to the Facebook version, and as far as I can tell they are not linked. I added a photo to Facebook stories and it didn't show up in Messenger. That's an annoying move.

fogetti 10y ago

"After 24 hours, posts in your story disappear forever" - Yeah, sure. You mean it stays in Facebook datacenters forever. Just a slight difference. :)

castis 10y ago
I would assume that snapchat doesn't delete your snaps after x amount of hours either. Probably for the same reasons.
- froindt 10y ago
  Law enforcement has had a tough time with snapchat because they actually do delete the data according to their policy. They have a law enforcement guide which goes over what to expect for data requests, and it's quite sparse. Can't link right now, on mobile and it's a PDF. In 2014, they were seeing 400 million images per day, 88% of which were to one person [1]. Assuming 0.33 mb/image, no videos, and 100% going to 1 person, that's 132 TB/day. Per their recent SEC filing, they're now up to 2.5 billion snaps per day. [2] There's a strong business case for deleting the files as soon as you can. Before they were a gigantic company, their brand trust and keeping things lean encouraged deleting the photos. I believe that holds true today. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/how-many-snaps-snapchat-users-get-2013-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/how-many-snaps-snapchat-users... [2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1564408/000119312517029199/d270216ds1.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1564408/000119312517... Edit: I decided to run some quick 'n dirty estimation and was a bit surprised by how "cheap" it would actually be to store it all. Snap uses Google Cloud Services, and given their volume, will have a pretty sweet pricing deal. For that reason, I estimated with $0.007/GB, which is the coldline rate per [3] even though they probably wouldn't be doing coldline storage. http://imgur.com/a/Boqlm http://imgur.com/a/Boqlm Very rough estimate for 1 year of storing every image snap from now until next year is ~13.5 million. At 2.5 billion snaps/day, images only, it would cost ~$5775/month to store all the data generated today. As an aside, I do wonder if there would be an opportunity for Snap to get and store context from an image without storing the image. It may be a balance between big data and minimizing costs. I'm thinking something along the lines of the list of words from Clarifai [4] stored with the metadata. It wouldn't be very useful to the police because the image recognition is wrong sometimes. "Marijuana" as a tag would be very weak evidence to put forth in court if the police didn't also have the image. [3] https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing#storage-pricing https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing#storage-pricing [4] https://developer.clarifai.com/models/aaa03c23b3724a16a56b629203edc62c https://developer.clarifai.com/models/aaa03c23b3724a16a56b62...

castis 10y ago

I've been parroting for a while that Snapchat was a feature masquerading as a business (I got that idea from somewhere but I don't remember where). Once FB messenger gets the filter goofiness that SC has (maybe it does already, I dont know), that'll be everything SC had to offer that I am aware of. Unless SC does something novel soon, I wouldn't assume that it's going to be around for much longer.

yeukhon 10y ago
It will stick around for several more years but the business model for SC is really questionable to keep up with making profit ever. The whole "I've got a lot of active users" is pretty much a building on fire, much like Uber in general. The fire will go on for as long as there are enough oxygen and enough material to burn until users starts to drop or advertisers see no value returning from paying Snapchat. SC won't completely go away for a long time, much like MySpace is still a thing today. Uber on the other hand is sort of "too big to fail" because of the amount of users it has already accumulated and already invested. Don't think SC will be too big to fail ever, but it will be interested to see how SC plays out in the next couple years with its production evolution.
- amyjess 10y ago
  > The whole "I've got a lot of active users" is pretty much a building on fire Isn't this what caused the dot-com bust of 2000?
  - yeukhon 10y ago
    Yeah, I think so. I think we are seeing this with Uber already, which I am afraid Uber will become the eventual too big to fail, but it can fail if nothing done right since in 2016 Uber has lost $3B already. Like I said, SC's failure wouldn't be a huge loss for investors. It's going IPO.
spike021 10y ago
FB messenger got the feature a couple weeks ago. In terms of adoption rate amongst people on my friends list, more people began using the Stories on Instagram immediately. Only 2 or 3 people out of 450+ "friends" on my FB have even posted to the story thing in messenger. The first day Stories was available for Instagram, people were posting either the same things to both Instagram and Snapchat stories, or just regular "snap"-type posts. If FB messenger adoption in my circle is anything like it is for the majority of regular users, then it won't be very popular.

EGreg 10y ago

Remember when Facebook copied twitter and pushed hard for everyone to write public posts on their wall? Facebook's character fundamentally changes - again.

pugio 10y ago
I just read Chaos Monkeys (http://amzn.to/2nr5THJ http://amzn.to/2nr5THJ) – a silicon valley insider tale with someone who worked at FB – and it points out that one of FB's cultural strengths was the ability and willingness to completely change their character in response to new conditions. As it grows, I'm sure inertia will continue to slow it down, but that willingness for reinvention seems like quite a powerful property. (Another current book – Antifragile (http://amzn.to/2nr15ST http://amzn.to/2nr15ST) – discusses systems that benefit from randomness and volatility. I wonder if the willingness for reinvention allows for a kind of anti-fragile generational selection to work: instead of waiting for selective forces to birth a different and new stronger generation, you transform yourself (or your company) to _become_ that new generation, allowing you to directly benefit from selective pressures. It's tough to do, psychologically and culturally, and the willingness to do so seems an extremely valuable quality to cultivate.)
AJ007 10y ago
This is an insightful comment. It is easy to forget not just how different Facebook of 2017 is from 2007 but the cycles they've gone through. Facebook measures and adapts to user engagement. When something spurs a loss of engagement eventually it disappears. In the social space, other tech companies struggle just getting a few new things shipped and then bail when they don't look like they are working out. It is in Facebook's best interest to see Snapchat fail. The next big thing that comes around, it will be a lot easier for Facebook to buy early on. On another note, if Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp, and Facebook all start looking like the same app, it gives Facebook a particularly powerful platform. Everything could end up being rolled up in to a single app in the future -- or a new device.
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 10y ago
  A single-purpose (=Facebook) device has already failed. And it doesn’t look like Facebook is going to role apps into one. More the opposite: Give the illusion of choice. Facebook is behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Many people repulse Facebook but still use their non-Facebook branded services. Some of the features converge, but the apps won’t merge. It is only to drown out the competition (Snapchat).

mici 10y ago

Did they betatest this feature? I swear I've had it for at least a week or two now, and I've seen some friends post a couple of stories as well. I thought it was much less popular than the stories in Instagram or Messenger, but maybe most of them didn't have the feature yet. Anyway, Snapchat still seems to be by far the most popular for this functionality, at least in my circle of friends.

mi100hael 10y ago
Facebook is well known for doing A/B testing. I'd reckon most of your friends didn't yet have it.
capocannoniere 10y ago
Facebook is known to A/B test features in other countries before rolling them out to the rest of the world. Stories in particular launched earlier this year in Ireland, Chile, Greece and Vietnam. > Facebook Stories, a feature that puts photos that disappear after 24 hours at the top of the Facebook mobile app, is rolling out to users in Chile, Greece and Vietnam, Facebook confirmed. However, it is not available to users in all markets. The feature was first tested among users in Ireland in January [...] [1] [1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/15/facebook-stories-roll-out/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/15/facebook-stories-roll-out/

miguelrochefort 10y ago

This is stupid. We now have stories in 10 different apps. Who thought this was a good idea?

mrmondo 10y ago
I think Facebook are gripping at anything to appear that they're still relevant
- pugio 10y ago
  1+ (2?) billion users. You make it sound like they're a has-been.
  - dbbk 10y ago
    1.86B as of December.
- spike021 10y ago
  I don't think it's a question of them being desperate to look 'relevant' as much of them just being afraid to lose market share. Enough people use Facebook and either don't use Snapchat or use Facebook for other types of communication that SC couldn't really kill FB. But it would definitely hurt.
bpicolo 10y ago
> Who thought this was a good idea? People who like snapchat?
- miguelrochefort 10y ago
  Wrong.

chwilson 10y ago

Instagram and Whatsapp stories I can understand - I don't particularly think they're good decisions, but I can understand them. To an extent it makes even more sense in the Facebook app itself, but having the core app and Messenger have separate stories despite them using the same exact account is ridiculous to me.

jakebasile 10y ago
Yep, this doesn't make any sense to me. I get WhatsApp/Instagram not working together. But Messenger and Facebook are two sides of the same product and the snapchat clones in each are completely separate. They spent a lot of effort making both Facebook and Messenger required on mobile, and now that it was successful it seems they're trying to separate them out, but that leaves a functionality hole in Facebook itself - Messenger IS Facebook's messaging feature, except when it isn't. EDIT: Stories also don't appear to show up on facebook.com. EDIT 2: I just remembered that you can use Messenger without a Facebook account[1]. Having them separate still doesn't make sense. [1]: https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/1526848634305688 https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/1526848634305688

hmans 10y ago

The only app on my phone that's not trying to copycat Snapchat is Termux.

adamnemecek 10y ago

this is what a dying company looks like. fb is such a smorgasbord of features as is, putting more in really isn't the way forward.

dbbk 10y ago
A dying company with annual net income of $10B, okay.
- sharkweek 10y ago
  I'd love to be running a business that is failing at 10B a year net income!
- adamnemecek 10y ago
  I'm talking about cultural relevance. AOL still has a revenue of $700M btw.
  - dbbk 10y ago
    Yes because Aol is a media publisher now. What's your point? Facebook is a dying company because it's not "cool" anymore? That's not really an objective measurement.
thomastjeffery 10y ago
I have been wishing this to be true during the better part of the last decade. Unfortunately for me, Facebook has reached a critical mass, and its black hole holds all those I know captive.

chatmasta 10y ago

At what point will Facebook totally kill m.facebook.com and force users to download the app? They've already done this with messenger; it's only a matter of time before they do the same for Facebook.app. That will be the day I finally leave Facebook for good, because I have no interest in downloading that monstrosity of a spy device onto my iPhone.

huseyinkeles 10y ago
what makes you think that your iPhone is not a spy device itself?
- r3bl 10y ago
  Because Apple, unlike Facebook, doesn't have any product that would benefit from utilizing your data? As far as I know (could be wrong, never had iPhone), Apple doesn't tweak your iPhone experience based on your previous usage.
username223 10y ago
I don't care so much about m.facebook.com, but I've been using mbasic.facebook.com on both desktop and mobile since someone on this site pointed it out. It's awkward, but it works with absolutely no JavaScript, and lets me keep in touch with Facebook-oriented friends (in the original sense) with much less potential surveillance. It's also part of their "altruistic" Free Basics program, so it has enough PR value to stick around for awhile.
alasdairnicol 10y ago
You can still read Facebook messages on the mbasic site. https://mbasic.facebook.com/messages https://mbasic.facebook.com/messages
icefo 10y ago
On Android you can download faceslim. It's the mobile site with the messages in an app. They used a special user agent to reenable the messages. You even have notifications ! (Manually checked every 30 minutes or so) Maybe you can have it too by downloading Firefox for iPhone and changing the user agent. (I haven't tried but it's worth a shot)

pkamb 10y ago

I've loved using Instagram Stories since they launched, but have absolutely no interest in using the equivalent features in Messenger or Facebook proper. And Snapchat never really took for me. The people I see on Instagram aren't my small circle of real friends, or my bigger bigger circle of old acquaintances, but rather (mostly random) interesting people posting interesting photography of subjects I'm interested in. The Stories feature (temporary, unpolished) compensates perfectly for the deficiencies of the main Instagram product (permanent, curated), and vice versa.

recursive 10y ago

What's the difference between a regular facebook post and a "story"? It auto-deletes in 24 hours. Is that the only difference? Why would anyone care? I don't get it.

k-mcgrady 10y ago
When you view your story it auto plays all posts in the last 24 hours in a kind of video reel.as for the point of the 24 delete it means people can post less important things they wouldn't usually bother posting. For example they could post 10 items in a day without clogging friends news feeds.