F’book takes shot
’Chat falls 7% on rival’s camera move
Facebook’s habit of ripping off Snapchat has reached a whole new level.
The social networking giant is giving the camera a central place on its smartphone app for the first time, encouraging users to take more pictures and edit them with digital stickers — Snapchat-style.
Shares of Snapchat owner Snap Inc. tumbled 6.8 percent on the news.
With Facebook’s Tuesday update, users can get to the app’s camera with one swipe of their finger and then add visual details like a rainbow or a beard of glitter.
Users will be able to share a picture privately with a friend, rather than with their entire list of friends, and add a picture to a gallery known as a “story,” similar to a feature on the Snapchat app.
Facebook has added a number of Snapchat-like elements in recent months — funny stickers and photo sharing among them. By moving the camera to the front and center of its app, however, Facebook appears to be mimicking Snapchat’s app on a more fundamental level.
What isn’t clear is whether the copycat features will help Facebook lure back Snapchat-obsessed teens, who prize the app’s emphasis on privacy, a concern that has long been shrugged off by Facebook founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg.
Snap Inc., which went public this month under 26-yearold co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel, has recently emphasized its ambitions to build gadgets and has called itself a camera company rather than a social media firm.
Facebook, the world’s largest social network — boasting some 1.86 billion users — denies it took its camera ideas from Snapchat and says it got them from Facebook users.
“Our goal here is to give people more to do on Facebook and that’s really been the main inspiration,” Connor Hayes, a Facebook product manager, said in a briefing with reporters.
In a glimpse of how the features could tie in with other businesses, one of the first camera effects will be the capability to morph someone in a photograph into a yellow cartoon Minion.