Facebook Attack Of The Clones

With almost a quarter of the world’s population on Facebook, wild success is an understatement -

Beyond what Friendster, Bebo, MySpace, or even Facebook themselves could have ever imagined.  I check it a few times a day, the in-between times, lately keeping up with my network for political rants *sigh* and articles, family and travel photos.  Facebook has integrated themselves into our daily lives, but every time a talking head says they’re innovative, we Product People cringe.  While they’ve been an exacting, fine-tuned execution machine; they’ve unabashedly jacked their great product ideas all along the way.   

Here’s a brief history of Facebook’s Greatest Lifts, starting with, well, Facebook.  

At this point, Facebook is biting Snapchat’s rhyme so hard that if they launched a feature that flushed your toilet on closing the app, Facebook would have it in Messenger and WhatsApp the following week, for both home and office.   

Will history serve as a precedent? will Facebook do Snapchat better than Snap?   

THE BOTTOM LINE

Is it better to be the innovator or the fast follower?  Lately the clones are winning.  In fashion, China usurps Italy and France.  Globally in tech, China again syphons ideas, from Silicon Valley: Alibaba-Amazon, Baidu-Google, Xiaomi-iPhone, Didi-Uber, Tujia-AirBnB.  We’ve seen this play before.  Facebook has taken a leaf out of Microsoft’s book, pinching cool ideas from competitors (so many well documented Mac rip-offs) and then executing better than the innovators.  While not first to run this playbook, they’re now masters of this domain. 

In fact, Facebook’s most innovative accomplishment is creating a fine tuned machine to refine good ideas, tweaking and improving even after starting from behind.  It’s impressive, Facebook will take your invention and beat you over the head with it, not only rolling you for your idea, but your users as well.  Through acquisition or straight up copying, they’ve proven they can do you better than you - Friendster, MySpace, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, and Snapchat, you’re next! 

Facebook is more an operations excellence company than pure product innovator, and that’s fine, it’s clearly working.  They didn’t invent hip photo filters, they acquired Instagram and made this better, while seamlessly integrating into their existing photo user experience.   They didn’t invent messenger app, but they executed a bold strategy to force users onto theirs, at the risk of backlash, then eclipsing 1 billion users by June, 2016.  So for now, the Death Star, Facebook, has its sights set on Snapchat, it will clone, improve, grind until all of our rainbow puking, dog and deer squishy faces are shared through their lenses.  

Product innovation? Nah, Facebook would rather achieve greatness in executing a simple plan of cloning innovators to a growing base of 1.8 billion monthly active users on their way to galactic domination. 

Snapchat!  Facebook has eyes on you.  "Mess with the bull and get the horns."

Facebook Greatest Lifts references:

1. The Harvard Crimson facemash article

2. Jon Loomer’s detailed timeline of The Facebook, illuminating my foggy memory

3. Facebook acquires Friendster patents

4. The new News Feed is Google Plus

5. Facebook stories are Snapchat stories

6. Facebook copies Snapchat again

7. Facebook attack of the Snapchat clones

Meerkat v. Periscope, Next Episode

Whoa!  that was fast, just a week after my June 30th blog, Meerkat rolls a major update, addressing key areas that were begging for improvement.  

Their V1.5 release is ambitious and demonstrates: 

1. they get it (or at least they read this blog, haha) and
2. they have a strong ability execute   

Let’s walk through it; then compare to the July 8 release from Periscope. 

CAMEO

As the name suggests, enables the broadcaster add a viewer for a brief appearance in their livestream.  Simply tap on a viewer’s icon from the audience and invite them to cameo.  

• Cameo meerkaters must be invited by and accept the broadcaster's invitation 
• Cameos are one at a time
• Cameo streams display nested inside the host’s livestream 
• Cameo streams last 60 seconds

This is awesome! a creative way to improve Engagement  and even better than my suggestion: allow livestream viewers to leave voice memos (like “love line” call in shows) but why stop there? it’s all about live and video, duh!  

Well played.

FACEBOOK CONNECTION

Connect your Meerkat account to Facebook to “magically” Discover friends and interests.  It’s about time (easy for me to say).  But this had to happen, my #1, NOT-SO-BOLD-PREDICTION from last week.  Time to move on from the Twitter episode; I have 1.44 Billion reasons why.

NO SOCIAL MEDIA, NO PROBLEM!

For those out there without a Twitter or Facebook account… wait... do you even read blogs? was this printed and mailed to you? anyway, now Meerkat accounts can be created with just a phone number, welcome!

MEERKAT LIBRARY 

Livestream videos live on; now Meerkat will host your finished streams so you and others can watch them later.  This is close to my suggestion of a more seamless connection to YouTube, letting Google store the ended streams; perhaps Meerkat learned their lesson from another company, eh hem, tweet, tweet. 

SHARE BEYOND TWITTER

Sharing is seminal for growth and Meerkat now allows notifications of upcoming streams to be shared out to Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr.  

SEARCH

Meerkat now has search!  previously there was a sad text box masquerading as search; not anymore.  Meerkat. Now. Has. Search.  This is a good start for the Discover use case, but limited to finding friends; still plenty of opportunity for improvement here.  

LEADER BOARD UPDATE

Now there’s both “Past Week” and “All Time” leaders *yawn* but more importantly for Discovery the “Suggested” list helps you find people to follow based on your connections; and thus Meerkat Social Graph begins.

AND IN OTHER NEWS…

Periscope released 1.1.2 with the following, it’s not fair to compare, but let’s do it anyway:

• Profile edits of name, photo, and description
• Blocked comments displayed as such (to the broadcaster)
• Polished the design of “Featured Users” and Broadcast Share” sections

THE BOTTOM LINE

Meerkat won this round.  V1.5 shows great promise, as the team focuses on Discover, Engagement, and Share use case to enhance their ability for grabbing and holding users, well after the initial novelty wears off.  Periscope unfortunately, dropped a point release on the same day; was this a true comparison?  No.  But will the ongoing Twitter management drama weigh down their ability to execute?  because, the ‘kat moves fast and they’ll have to sprint hard to keep up.