Now FACEBOOK is Copying SNAPCHAT’s “Streaks” Feature for MESSENGER App

Mobile messaging apps have been embroiled in a battle of features for quite some time now. Said battle usually involves one app developing a new function for its platform, and the others copying said feature while trying to put their own improvements upon it.

Or to be more plain: Snapchat develops a new thing for their app, and then Facebook copies said feature to be used on any one of the messaging services under their banner: WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger itself. From “ephemeral” posting to imaging “face filters”, what Snapchat does, the others follow. The latest this has happened is with the “Streak” feature, now premiering (copy-wise) in Facebook Messenger.

According to The Verge, Facebook has started a trial implementation on Messenger of a feature that first saw light on Snapchat, the pioneer of ephemeral picture messaging, where image posts last only for a fixed time before they are automatically purged. Now their latest function has been copied by a rival messaging app backed by the most prominent social media platform.

“Streaking” is a feature that comes across as more like a game, wherein the platform encourages a user to send a direct message to a friend, who is then prompted to send a direct message in reply, back and forth, at least once a day for as many days as they can keep it going.

That was how it worked in Snapchat, and that is now how streaking works in Facebook Messenger. The app even does the “changing emoji” status of a currently ongoing message streak, where as a user and one of his friends continue to maintain the exchange of messages, an emoji status updates with different graphics. Thus far the streak feature has only been discussed by one Messenger user or two online, implying that this feature trial is only for a limited number of Facebook accounts.

Streaking has been proving itself a well-used feature in its original platform of Snapchat, as something about the need to pass messages back and forth has something of an appeal to its younger user base. Facebook’s tendency to mimic many of Snapchat’s features has been born of a drive to shed its image of a social network used only by grown-ups by injecting some younger blood.

However, many of its attempts to copy Snapchat functions sometimes end in failure. They even once created a Snapchat clone platform called LifeStage, which crashed and burned after a pitifully short app life due to its minimum user age for registration being 21 years old.

Photo courtesy of techjuice.pk