Instagram surprised about five people on the internet when it unveiled “Stories” Tuesday — an option to share photos and videos that, much like Snapchat’s feature of the exact same name, will disappear from your recipients’ screens in 24 hours.
This incredibly obvious borrowing from a rival fits into a long history of social networks mirroring each other. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and their offspring have repeatedly copied things like hashtags, algorithmically filtered feeds and advertising-driven business models from one another. Have they succumbed to the kind of desperate mimicry we cringe-watched Jennifer Jason Leigh’s creepy character do to her roommate in the movie “Single White Female”?
Indeed, social networks will likely keep copying their rivals, à la Jennifer Jason Leigh. So we can only hope it’s not too late to tell them which features should be off-limits.
Facebook: LinkedIn’s “Who’s viewed your profile”
Although little of what you do on the 1.7-billion-user social network goes unrecorded at some level, Facebook (FB) has always ensured other users can’t see if you’ve been peeking at my profile, and you can’t see when they inspect yours. Third-party apps may promise that kind of insight, but they can’t actually deliver it.
At the buttoned-down, business-minded LinkedIn (LNKD), the opposite prevails. The professional-networking hub that Microsoft (MSFT) is buying for $26.2 billion will tell you who’s viewed your profile — and even sends emails suggesting that you sign up for a premium account to get even more insight into who’s been eyeing your page.
That kind of a feature would be a disaster on Facebook. Gathering intelligence on bosses and coworkers, basking in schadenfreude at the political leanings of relatives and, yes, stalking exes would never be the same if they could tell you’d been reading their old updates. Please don’t, Facebook.
Twitter: everybody else’s typing-indicator bubbles
Almost everybody running a messaging service has figured out that letting the user know when somebody is typing a reply will keep them staring glassy-eyed at the screen until that response appears.
Sometime, somewhere, somebody at Twitter (TWTR) must have thought that including the same kind of typing-indicator bubble icon to indicate who was typing a response to your latest tweet would make the service that much stickier. Some wiser heads must have then pointed out how horrifically distracting this would be — and how much of a drain on server resources it would be for a company now facing serious pressure from investors to start yielding Facebook-sized returns.