Less than a month back, Snapchat, reportedly turned down a $3 billion offer from Facebook (FB). Snapchat is an online photo/video massaging platform, which is gaining huge popularity due to some unique features like limited sharing, auto deletion of massages, unique photo filters, etc.
Now, nearly a month after rejection, Facebook has entered the online photo/video massaging services segment on its own. It has introduced a new service through Instagram. Instagram is a popular photo sharing platform, which was acquired by the company for $1 billion. The new service has some features that can offer the users, to some extent, a Snapchat like experience.
The new service:
On 12 December, 2013, Instagram launched a service named Instagram Direct. Instagram Direct is a new massaging service that allows its users to send photo and video messages. The service allows a user to send a picture/video as a massage or embed with a massage. The features of the service that makes it a competitor of Snapchat includes:
It's a private photo or video massaging service, and any massage can only be send to a limited number of Instagram users (up-to 15 users including followers and non-followers).
Only the sender and recipients can see the photo/video along with embed massage as the photos or videos sent through Instagram Direct can't be shared through Instagram to other sites like Facebook or Twitter (TWTR).
The service provides real-time updates for the comments and likes related to the photo/video.
Moreover, the sender can anytime delete the photo or video sent from Instagram server and make it unavailable to the recipients.
Instagram Direct snapshots (click to enlarge)
Reasons behind the launch:
Though, the company does not mentioned it specifically but it is quite clear that the company is introducing such a service to capture the growing demand of private photo and video massaging services, which allow the sender to have a control on the massages even after the recipients received the massages. The rising popularity of this kind of service is evident from the fact that the company reportedly offered $3 billion to Snapchat.
Snapchat is probably the most popular private photo/video massaging platform. Snapchat users process 400 million Snaps* (photo and videos) per day as compared to Facebook users who uploads around 350 million photos per day. There may be numerous doubts about the methods that how these numbers are collected and what they actually contain. But one thing is sure that the sender controlled private photo/video massage services with limited access are gaining popularity and the users are increasingly looking at it a as different service rather than just a photo/video sharing services. Moreover, this also means that users will share much more of their content if they get more control of their content.
*The photos and videos sent/shared as massage via Snapchat are known as "Snaps".
Conclusion:
The service is expected to get instant popularity due to the huge user-base of Facebook and Instagram. The recent failed attempt of the company to acquire the Snapchat will give the service enough media attention to further fuel the popularity. As the company reportedly offered $3 billion for Snapchat, thereby it is easy understand the importance for the service for the company. The launch of the new service also showed the company is well prepared to adjust according to rapidly changing industry trends and is ready to learn from others. The service will offer multiple benefits to the company as it will help the company to retain its user-base and will also attract new users. The service will evolve with the time and will contribute to the growing popularity of the photo/video messaging services.
All in all, the reported rejection of the offer by Snapchat saved billions of dollars for the company and prompted it to move ahead on its own to build its own photo/video messaging features. The company is all set to compete in the fast evolving photo/video messaging, and with its huge user-base the company can easily become a serious contender in the segment in a quick time. Good news for investors, but for competitors it only means some more competition from the social media giant.
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