How Facebook's 'Messenger Day' wants to challenge Snapchat

Through Messenger Day – and its many other attempts to channel Snapchat – Facebook is testing a feature in Poland to encourage users to post spontaneous content.

|
Dado Ruvic/Reuters
The Facebook logo behind a man with a Samsung S4 smartphone in Zenica, Bosnia, in August 2013.

Facebook is once again trying to be every social media platform rolled into one.

The social media giant has started testing a Snapchat Stories-like feature called “Messenger Day” through its classic Messenger app in Poland. The feature allows users to share filter-laiden images and videos that self-destruct after 24 hours with their Facebook friends.

“We know that people come to Messenger to share everyday moments with friends and family,” Facebook told TechCrunch. “In Poland we are running a small test of new ways for people to share those updates visually. We have nothing more to announce at this time.”

In the United States, Facebook users might see the test for what it is, an obvious attempt to copy Snapchat’s model, but in Poland Snapchat never caught on and so Facebook does not run the risk of annoying users. The strategy also allows Facebook to capitalize on the international popularity of its Messenger app and make it the place people go to post spontaneous content before they are introduced to Snapchat.

Similarly, Instagram also recently added a stories feature, which has done best in countries such as Russia, where Snapchat is not widely used.

Messenger Day is similar to Instagram's take on stories, with a row of tiles representing the daily stories of different friends appearing at the top of the existing messenger app screen. When making a new Messenger Day entry, users can pick from different categories of filters including “I’m Feeling,” “Who’s  Up For?” and “I’m Doing” to describe their day.

Facebook bought in Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 in an effort to recapture the audience of  young teens drawn away from traditional social media such Facebook to more image-based platforms. A year later, it tried to buy Snapchat for three times that, but the purchase offer was turned down. Since then, Facebook has been attempting to emulate Snapchat's simple yet wildly successful features.

First it was Slingshot, and independent app the Facebook made to allow users to send self destructing photos to multiple friends in a group message. However, the app never caught on and it was removed from the app store last year.

Facebook has also tested a variety of other semi-permanent content including status updates that only appear in the newsfeed but don’t end up permanently attached to a user’s profile, messages that disappear after an hour, and a stories feature on its regular app, as opposed to Messenger.  But none of these features have been rolled out to a wider audience.

Through Messenger Day, and its many other attempts to channel Snapchat, Facebook is attempting to fight the social pressures that have developed in the community where it is only acceptable to post the most inoffensive content and users hold back from posting too frequently.

Instagram had a similar goal when it launched its Stories feature in July.

“Our mission has always been to capture and share the world’s moments, not just the world’s most beautiful moments,” Kevin Systrom told The New York Times. “Stories will alleviate a ton of the pressure people have to post their absolute best stuff.”

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to How Facebook's 'Messenger Day' wants to challenge Snapchat
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2016/1001/How-Facebook-s-Messenger-Day-wants-to-challenge-Snapchat
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe