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Snapchat today turned the tables on Facebook for once by mimicking one of the social media giant's favorite features – your year in review, based on photos and videos posted in the last 12 months.

The feature can be accessed using the memories icon at the bottom of Snapchat's home screen interface. Selecting "A Look Back at 2017" automatically generates a Story around your timeline of pictures, but the arrangement can be tweaked by selecting "Edit Story" and tapping the X on individual snaps to remove them from the collage. The Story can then be saved and shared with friends.

2b46fcfc_01be_455f_b7a0_025b480678b0_edit_2017_story.png.jpeg
Image via The Verge

As The Verge notes, the "Look Back" feature may not appear if there isn't enough media from the last 12 months to create a story, so only avid Snapchat users are likely to see it.

Facebook continued its seemingly relentless trend of copying Snapchat features last month, when it began testing a new feature that plays on the latter's chat streak challenge, which encourages users to "keep your streak going" when messaging friends.

Prior to that, Facebook created a carbon copy of Snapchat's day-long, vanishing post idea in Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram, which gained 100 million users following the update last year. The company also previously aped Snapchat's face filters and rewinded video features for Instagram, which also proved a hit.

Today's feature debut follows news yesterday that Snapchat is testing a feature that will let users share stories outside of the mobile app, in an effort to boost sign-ups to the app.

Article Link: Snapchat Copies Facebook Feature For Once With 'A Look Back at 2017'
 
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"For once"? They've copied several.

This works both ways just as Ford copied features from Mercedes, Windows copied features from Mac OS, Android copied features from iOS, etc. It's not a bad thing. It's how competitive products get better and the consumer ends up with better options.
 
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Snapchat is slowly dying. At least based on the people i follow. It gets too exhausting to share the same thing on two social networks i suppose.
 
"For once"? They've copied several.

This works both ways just as Ford copied features from Mercedes, Windows copied features from Mac OS, Android copied features from iOS, etc. It's not a bad thing. It's how competitive products get better and the consumer ends up with better options.

For the benefit of those of us who don't use Snapchat, what are the features they've copied?
 
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For the benefit of those of us who don't use Snapchat, what are the features they've copied?

Ability to go back and look at previous stories along with a number of smaller navigational changes. I'm sure there are others too.

Everyone copies everyone else. I'm not sure why some make such a big deal of it. In the end it only benefits us, the consumer, when a product we use copies something we find useful in another product.

Can you imagine how much it would have sucked if Android didn't copy the iOS interface when the iPhone was originally announced (the original Android plan was not to be all touchscreen but instead to be like Blackberry. They scrapped the entire thing when the iPhone was announced and went about copying much of the Apple design).
 
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Wait, I thought the "snaps" always disappeared forever. I'm not a fan of social media, so the one thing I like about Snapchat is that it isn't really social media. It's messaging, except there's even less state to maintain than iMessage.
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"For once"? They've copied several.
My friends used it right when it came out, and I've been using it occasionally since 2014. I can't think of anything they copied. Even the navigation flow was their own, which isn't surprising because it's not worthy of being copied.
 
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My friends used it right when it came out, and I've been using it occasionally since 2014. I can't think of anything they copied. Even the navigation flow was their own, which isn't surprising because it's not worthy of being copied.

They've both copied stuff from each other.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/8/13565030/snapchat-stories-rewind

Instagram is absolutely crushing Snapchat at this point. It took Instagram Stories just 5 months to build as many daily users as Snapchat Stories took to do in 5 years. Now Instagram has FAR surpassed them.

Snapchat is seeing a huge slowing of their growth and struggling as a company because of it. Their stock is down and they're going to be in big trouble soon if they can't find something to really catalyze things for them. Instagram on the other hand has seen record growth quarter over quarter and is seeing revenue come in nicely.
 
Is rewinding stories with a tap on the left really a novel enough feature for it to be considered copying? Seems like common sense. I expected Snapchat to do that the first time I used it, but it didn't. I don't care cause I don't have any stake in either Snap or FB, but Instagram really did rip off the entirety of Snapchat, and it's the only reason they're popular now.
 
Is rewinding stories with a tap on the left really a novel enough feature for it to be considered copying? Seems like common sense. I expected Snapchat to do that the first time I used it, but it didn't. I don't care cause I don't have any stake in either Snap or FB, but Instagram really did rip off the entirety of Snapchat, and it's the only reason they're popular now.

And what does it matter if Instagram ripped off Snapchat with their stories function?

Instagram was popular well before taking any Snapchat features. You forget they had hundreds of millions of members before ever adding Instagram Stories to the product. Instagram didn't take anything more than some functions within the Stories area of the app.
 
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