On August 2nd, 2016, all of us insta-users became privy to Instagram’s new ploy into making you use their app more. Enter, Instagram Stories, “a new feature that lets you share all the moments of your day, not just the ones you want to keep on your profile”. Sounds cool right? Sure! Except for the fact that it is literally Snapchat’s entire concept (i.e.: it’s been DONE). Instagram stories even employ the same “disappear magically after 24 hours!” principal, and include text and drawing tools to make your selfies that much more interesting.
This is all well and good, companies copy one another all the time, and plagiarism is the fiber that makes up most of our economies. If McDonald’s is having a special on Big Macs, Burger King will try to hit you with an even cheaper deal to make you buy the Whopper. Copying is a basic marketing tactic that has been exercised for millennia.
However, we can almost see Instagram’s swiping of Snapchat’s concept as a cry for help. With the app updating its features, changing its layouts and making Instagram a more widely accessible social media platform since their creation in 2010, they were bound to run out of ideas. And when you run out of creative steam – you copy.
It makes you analyze this entire social media thing – the hash tag (AKA, the pound sign) was something we had only ever used on telephones until the rise of Twitter. Now we use it to make posts findable within a large stream of information. And Facebook and Instagram and a host of other platforms took this concept and ran with it. Twitter is hardly able to escape this one, because their ‘real-time feed’ was inspired by Facebook’s playbook. When Snapchat was starting to gain popularity, Facebook introduced Slingshot (this came after the derivative Poke app), an app that allows you to ‘sling’ content back and forth between your friends.
We live in a world that has existed for billions of years, and there is really nothing new under the sun. All we are doing is taking basic human ideas and forming them in different ways. New generations have been indoctrinated into sharing heavily, regardless of the platform and will continue to do so, without ever thinking about “who copied who?”. Social media exists solely on this premise, but even more bizarre is seeing who can repurpose an idea and do it better than everyone else. That’s why people will continue to bounce back and forth between Snapchat and Instagram, or give up one app for good.
