Snapchat’s battle against social media titan Facebook and its legion of services has not gone quite the way the company probably thought it would.
Facebook has basically copied all of its best features and Instagram is experiencing extremely robust growth that does not show any signs of slowing down.
So Snapchat has decided that, if you can’t beat them, let them copy you – namely, give developers the tools they need to integrate Snapchat’s services directly into their apps.
As Josh Constantine from TechCrunch reports, “Why reinvent the wheel of Stories, Bitmoji and ads when you can reuse the original? A high-ranking Snap executive told me on background that this is indeed the strategy. If it’s going to invent these products, and others want something similar, it’s smarter to enable and partly control the Snapchatification than to try to ignore it. Otherwise, Facebook might be the one to platform-tize what Snap inspired everyone to want.”
Originally premised on ephemeral pictures and messages, Snapchat has since become a social media network more akin to a stripped-down Instagram.
The app’s most popular feature, its stories, are what Snapchat hopes to integrate into other apps, such as Tinder.
Snapchat’s Storykit, “can display a more traditional carousel of your friends’ Stories, or lace them into their app in a custom format. Houseparty’s Stories carousel shares what your buddies are up to outside of the group video chat app. Tinder will let you show off your Snapchat Story alongside your photos to seduce potential matches.”
As TechCrunch points out, the two things that Snapchat has going for it are a reputation for protecting user privacy and the much more intimate connection it delivers between users.
Of course, all of this is about making money at the end of the day and the company’s new Ad Kit package should help them do just that.
As always, let us know your thoughts in the comments.
