IN A SNAP, SELFIE APP HAS RIVALS
Giants seek next big thing
This is shaping up to be the year that Wall Street giants tripped all over themselves to compete with Snapchat, rolling out new apps and gadgets that span the gamut from weird to winners.
Apple, Amazon and Facebook are the biggest bandwagon jumpers, clamoring to steal a bit of the Snapchat magic and satisfy investors who fear an exodus in advertising revenue and attention.
Most recently, an ingenious new device from Amazon takes a page from Snapchat’s selfie-obsessed handbook and feeds it to a machinelearning algorithm contained in the software of the upcoming Echo Look. It’s a new version of the hardware line powered by Amazon’s virtual assistant, Alexa — except now she’s judging your look. Those machine-learning algorithms are combined with advice from fashion specialists, according to Amazon, to form a new virtual opinion service called Style Check. Although most of the tech media has bought into the Amazon narrative that this is part of CEO Jeff Bezos’ play for a bigger chunk of fashion retail — and that’s certainly part of it — this is also another piece of technology that follows the Snapchat equation: take a selfie, get told you’re fabulous. I fully expect some Snapchatreminiscent features to come to the Echo Look, like face filters and fashion “stories,” to name a few.
Apple’s answer to Snapchat came last month: a free app called Clips that provides on-the-fly video sharing. With cheeky little sayings and filters that can be applied to any video, it’s like app designers borrowed some of what they thought made Snapchat cool, and then plopped Apple’s user interface on top. It’s not a bad app, it just doesn’t seem to fit in with anything else that Apple has done recently — almost as if a decree came down from on high in Cupertino to “get in on this Snapchat thing,” and it was built just to satisfy that decree.
But the most egregious Snapchat copycat is, of course, Facebook. First Facebook-owned Instagram launched a Snapchat-like Stories feature last year, then the largest network in the world rolled out a shameless knockoff of Snapchat’s core feature, My Story, in the form of Facebook Stories.
As it turns out, users are more loyal to the features of Snapchat than to Snapchat itself. The launch of direct competitor Instagram Stories was like a fatal blow to Snapchat’s user growth rate. Snapchat growth users were growing at 17.2 percent in the first quarter, then by just 7 percent in the second quarter as the new Instagram feature launched. Even worse: In quarter four, Snapchat’s growth rate dipped to a dismal 3 percent, according to federal filings.
Facebook is also cornering the international market, going after developing world markets on which Snapchat hasn’t had a chance to focus. The launch of an abridged version of the app, Facebook Lite, in countries like Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Cuba and even North Korea, is making Snapchat’s job harder by the day. The ending to this Wall Street fable is: Whatever you do, don’t compete with Facebook. Don’t even try.