Sina Technology Junlin
On August 5, Facebook Instagram launched its new function Instagram Reels.
Reels allows users to create and publish 15 second short videos, and provides a massive music library. The video publishing algorithm also allows users to see the most popular videos, rather than personalized content customized for user preferences.
Seemingly familiar? This is clearly a copy of TikTok.
Facebook also chose to launch Reels at this time node, which is well-known to Sima Zhao.
TikTok tweeted: Well, it looks familiar "Copy" competitors
Since 2014, Facebook has not seldom "copied" successful functions launched on competitor platforms. Reels is just the latest attempt.
Facebook will pay close attention to its competitors. If they release some successful products, Facebook will immediately follow up, "prevent competitors from taking a foothold in the market", and realize its rapid development, CEO Zuckerberg wrote in a series of emails in 2012.
This exposed email also shows that at that time, senior employees of Facebook went to China to visit the founders and Baidu Founder Li Yanhong learned from experience. In the report, the employee wrote: "Maybe this can accelerate development, because they are just copying others."
Zuckerberg is very interested in this, and COO Sandberg also agrees. Even a project manager revealed that they would like to see Facebook "more boldly and quickly" copy its competitors.
At the anti-monopoly hearing of technology companies that just ended in July, Zuckerberg refused to reveal how many companies Facebook copied after the 2012 email exchanges when asked by lawmakers. However, according to publicly collated data and media reports, Facebook has copied at least six applications in the past six years, except TikTok.
April 2020: Messenger Rooms
Messenger Rooms on the mobile side The epidemic has forced more and more people to work and study at home, and parties with friends can only be played online. At this time, video conferencing tools have become a necessity in people's lives during the isolation period, such as Zoom And Houseparty, etc.
In 2011, Yuan Zheng, a Chinese engineer, founded Zoom in Silicon Valley. The video conference application Zoom has been growing steadily since its release, but since the outbreak of the epidemic in December last year, the usage rate of Zoom has soared by 1900%; The number of daily active users has increased from 1 million to 200 million in just two months. Even "Zooming" has become a new synonym for video conferencing.
The phenomenon of "Zooming" naturally attracted Facebook's attention.
Seeing that Zoom and other video conferences harvest more new users every day, Facebook, unwilling to see competitors divert its own users, immediately launched its own group video phone function Messenger Rooms in April this year.
Rooms allows users to initiate video conference calls of no more than 50 people through links. Users without Facebook or Messenger accounts can also join the conference through links. The initiator of the meeting can set the meeting as private, prevent uninvited visitors from joining at will, or kick out unwelcome participants.
During online meetings, users can use Facebook's virtual reality filters and set virtual backgrounds to make themselves look like they are on the beach, on a farm, at Stanford University, etc.
Zoom has all these functions. In particular, the virtual background was originally a feature of Zoom.
Zuckerberg said that every day, about 700 million users make calls on Messenger and WhatsApp. Therefore, the company hopes to further help people launch group chat video calls to make communication easier and more efficient.
But in fact, Facebook has tried to develop independent group video applications before, and the object that will be copied is another video conference product, Houseparty. But last year, the project ended. However, the recent great success of Zoom and other video conferencing applications allowed Facebook to launch Messenger Rooms without hesitation.
April 2020: Facebook Gaming
Facebook Gaming Live games are another hot area. Especially during the epidemic period, as with video conferences, people's demand for game content and live games increased significantly.
About two years ago, before Facebook Gaming was released, there were already two powerful platforms on the market: Twitch and YouTube Gaming. YouTube Gaming prefers game content; In terms of live games, the preferred application for creators and consumers has always been Twitch.
In 2014, Twitch was Amazon After the acquisition, the growth showed an exponential trend. In the second quarter of 2020, the total viewing time on Twitter reached 5 billion hours, accounting for 67.6% of the market share. In addition to the live broadcast, Twitch has a huge user community, including players, e-sports players and game content creators, as well as the regular tournament "Twitch Rivals" that requires invitations to participate.
Facebook Gaming lags behind Twitter and YouTube Gaming except that its growth data is slightly better than that of Twitter.
Therefore, in order to maximize the opportunities created by the epidemic, Facebook launched an independent application for Facebook Gaming in April this year. In addition to the live broadcast and community functions, the application is also characterized by the "Tournament Mode" (tournament mode).
Similar to Twitter, but somewhat different. To be precise, it is a step forward than the invitation only Twitch Rivals. The "Tournament Mode" on Facebook Gaming allows users to hold various tournaments.
Although we can not strictly define the "Tournament Model" as plagiarism, there is also reason to suspect that the model draws on the creativity of Twitch Rivals, and has made improvements on this basis.
The purpose of this is also obvious: to replace Twitch and become No.1 in the field of live games!
October 2016: Marketplace
Facebook Marketplace Craigslist is a classified advertising website with a history of 25 years. In the United States, if people want to publish free local classified ads or sell some second-hand goods, their first thought is basically Craigslist.
Although Craigslist's interface is ugly and has not changed for decades, it is still "the world's first classified advertising website, both in terms of revenue and traffic," said Peter Zolman of AIM Media in 2019, "It's amazing that a single website can create $1 billion in revenue a year." (Note: Craigslist did not disclose revenue data. AIM Media estimates that Craigslist's revenue in 2018 is about US $1 billion based on its advertising display.)
Such a giant cannot escape the fate of being targeted by Facebook.
In fact, Marketplace does bring huge competitive pressure to Craigslist.
In the past two decades, Craigslist has hardly made any improvement and has always focused on web pages. Therefore, although classified ads are published, Marketplace has a better user experience. In addition to web pages, users can also access Marketplace from Facebook applications, which can release small ads more quickly, browse small ads more easily, and transfer second-hand goods more easily. More importantly, it is more secure than Craigslist (although Facebook's data security itself is also a big problem).
Craigslist, the former leader of the classified advertising website industry, finally launched its own application at the end of 2019.
Application of Craigslist Now, instead, Craigslist seems to copy Marketplace. This can only be blamed on Craigslist's failure to grasp the trend of mobile terminals, so that Facebook can take advantage of it.
August 2016: Instagram Stories
In terms of Facebook plagiarism, there is nothing more striking than Instagram Stories besides Instagram Reels. Of course, Instagram Stories is also Facebook's most successful plagiarism so far.
Snap Chat took the lead in introducing the Stories function in 2013, allowing users to publish a group of pictures or short videos. These published content will be automatically deleted 24 hours later, which is the familiar "burning after reading". Of course, this is Snapchat's biggest signboard.
In 2016, Instagram, which has been acquired by Facebook, moved all these functions to its own platform, even without changing its name.
Everyone knows that Facebook's Instagram Stories are copied Snapchat Stories.
Even Kevin Hirstrom, the CEO of Instagram at that time, admitted that "Snapchat is responsible for all this."
He also said: "For a long time, Snapchat links published by users were everywhere on the Instagram platform. Obviously, people want to splice these two different products. So we gave users the functionality they wanted. "—— Take the Stories function of Snapchat directly.
Histrom also spoke frankly about his view on "plagiarism": "Innovation is certainly worth encouraging. Instagram also innovates using filters. However, it is not who is innovating that matters. Facebook invented the feed function, which was later used by LinkedIn, Twitter They are in use, but their feeds are different and have different purposes. No one looks down on those who draw on the ideas that are generally recognized as great... Every company is applying the best form or the latest technology. The facial filters and slide show photos on Snapchat have existed for a long time? Is Snapchat not great? Gmail is not the first email client, and iPhone is not the first mobile phone. Are these companies not great? I think these companies are great, and Facebook is also great. It is interesting for Silicon Valley to innovate and improve together. "
More than that, Facebook is also full of scheming about the timing of publishing plagiarism functions. Just like dealing with TikTok and Zoom, Facebook chose Snaphat's parent company Snap on the eve of going public. Snap was launched in early 2017, Instagram Stories was released in 2016, and more interactive functions directly copied from Snapchat were updated immediately afterwards. Later, the share price of Snap fell by more than 12% on the third day after listing. The fierce competition from Facebook is one of the main reasons why many institutions are short of Snap.
Now, Facebook has already copied Snapchat's Stories function to Facebook applications and Messenger applications outside of Instagram, and the number of daily active users of each application exceeds Snapchat.
Snapchat is becoming more and more invisible.
On This Day, March 2015
"That year today" Everyone must be familiar with the "On This Day" function on Facebook, that is, "that year today". "That year today" can display the photos, posts, status, etc. released a few years ago today, bringing users full memories.
However, this function was copied from Facebook.
Since 2010, Facebook has been trying to ideal To display the content published by users in the past. More than a year later, a startup called Timeshop introduced the concept of "that year today".
However, Facebook waited until the success of Timeshop, that is, it saw the app harvest 6 million active users on the mobile end, before it launched the nostalgic function of "that year today".
Although it copied Timeshop, Facebook still has its limitations. Timeshop can collect memories from users' Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flicker, Dropbox, mobile phone photo albums and other places, but Facebook's memories are limited to the Facebook platform.
It may also be for this reason that the copied Timeshop appears very calm. Jonathan Wegener, CEO of the company, was even pleased when he heard that his application had been copied by Facebook. He said: "In a sense, this is a great recognition of our work, which proves that our efforts are valuable. One of our investors said very nicely, 'If Facebook did not invade your field, it is likely that your direction is worthless'." Weigner also said, Facebook plagiarism proves that "Timeshop is important, and memory is also important."
June 2014: Slingshot
Slingshot If being copied by a large company is a kind of recognition, Snapchat really does not know whether it is lucky or unlucky.
Before Facebook copied Snapchat Stories, Facebook had already targeted young and creative Snapchat. "Burning after reading" is the biggest selling point of Snapchat, which is very popular among young users.
As a result, Facebook also launched its own independent application Slingshot with the "burn after reading" element. Like Snapchat, when users open Slingshot, the camera automatically pops up first; After taking photos or small videos, users can edit the content immediately, add filters, scribble randomly or add text descriptions, background music, etc. When satisfied, users can directly send their works to friends.
Unlike the direct copying two years later, Facebook seems to have some integrity at this time. The basic function of Slingshot is Snapchat, but the difference is also obvious.
First, Snapchat is one-on-one content sharing, while Slingshot can be directly shared with a group of friends at the same time; Secondly, the biggest feature of Slingshot is not burning after reading, but "exchanging content for content". In other words, when you receive a photo or video from a friend, you cannot view it immediately. Only after you send back your photos or videos to the other party can you see the content sent by the other party. If the other party sends more than one content, you should also use the same amount of content to exchange
Exchange content with content Joy Flynn, Slingshot's product designer, said: "This can promote everyone's sense of participation."
"Replacing content with content" seems to be an innovation that can go beyond the feature of "burning after reading" and free applications from the suspicion of plagiarism, but this innovation is really a failure.
Because Slingshot is too similar to Snapchat, but after a quick operation, users found that it is totally different from Snapchat: Do not share or show other people's content?
Such a wonderful design, to promote the sense of participation, is probably the wishful thinking of designers.
Therefore, three months later, Slingshot deleted the most significant function that can distinguish Snapchat. More than a year later, the Slingshot project ended completely.
With this failure experience, Facebook will copy it again, instead of adding more to the picture, it will directly copy it.
Is Facebook innovation drying up?
Looking back at Facebook's product development history, we can find that Facebook has never successfully developed its own popular applications since the Messenger application.
The popular image sharing app Instagram and instant messaging app WhatsApp were acquired by Facebook. The popular Stories function on Instagram is copied from Snapchat.
Even at the hearing at the end of July, some legislators pointed out that Facebook had threatened the founder of Instagram when it bought it. If it did not sell, it would launch the same function and destroy Instagram.
But even plagiarism is not always successful.
"Over the years, most of Facebook's attempts to copy other companies' products have failed. The Stories function on Instagram is a special exception. Maybe Reels has a chance, but that doesn't guarantee success, "said Deborah Williamson, chief analyst of eMarketer.
In order to maintain innovation and bring more new applications, Facebook formed a new team a year ago, New Product Experimentation (NPE), to design, develop and release applications, giving users a "new community building experience.". The NPE team can quickly launch new applications, or even directly terminate the test when the application fails to meet expectations.
However, at the beginning of last month, the Hobbi application that the NPE team announced to terminate was still suspected of plagiarism. Hobbi allows users to manage and save pictures related to their personal interests, which are related to image management applications Pinterest Very similar.
Hobbi It is foreseeable that Facebook will launch more test applications in the future. But whether it is innovation or plagiarism remains to be seen.
