Snapchat today turned the tables on Facebook for once by mimicking one of the social media giant's favorite features – your year in review, based on photos and videos posted in the last 12 months.
The feature can be accessed using the memories icon at the bottom of Snapchat's home screen interface. Selecting "A Look Back at 2017" automatically generates a Story around your timeline of pictures, but the arrangement can be tweaked by selecting "Edit Story" and tapping the X on individual snaps to remove them from the collage. The Story can then be saved and shared with friends.
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As The Verge notes, the "Look Back" feature may not appear if there isn't enough media from the last 12 months to create a story, so only avid Snapchat users are likely to see it.
Facebook continued its seemingly relentless trend of copying Snapchat features last month, when it began testing a new feature that plays on the latter's chat streak challenge, which encourages users to "keep your streak going" when messaging friends.
Prior to that, Facebook created a carbon copy of Snapchat's day-long, vanishing post idea in Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram, which gained 100 million users following the update last year. The company also previously aped Snapchat's face filters and rewinded video features for Instagram, which also proved a hit.
Today's feature debut follows news yesterday that Snapchat is testing a feature that will let users share stories outside of the mobile app, in an effort to boost sign-ups to the app.
Top Rated Comments
Everyone copies everyone else. I'm not sure why some make such a big deal of it. In the end it only benefits us, the consumer, when a product we use copies something we find useful in another product.
Can you imagine how much it would have sucked if Android didn't copy the iOS interface when the iPhone was originally announced (the original Android plan was not to be all touchscreen but instead to be like Blackberry. They scrapped the entire thing when the iPhone was announced and went about copying much of the Apple design).
This works both ways just as Ford copied features from Mercedes, Windows copied features from Mac OS, Android copied features from iOS, etc. It's not a bad thing. It's how competitive products get better and the consumer ends up with better options.