Facebook Unveils Snapchat-Like “Messenger Day” Feature For Its Messenger App

On Thursday, Facebook launched a new feature for its Messenger app that would now allow users to post raw or edited images or videos as a status message of sorts viewable by friends for 24 hours. Called “Messenger Day,” which was initially rolled out to users in Poland and Australia, has now been launched globally, TechCrunch reported.

Several news outlets call out similarities of the latest Messenger feature to the highly popular Snapchat, with some going even as far as saying that Facebook is copying ideas from the company which recently debuted on Wall Street last week. CNBC even lists the various features the Mark Zuckerberg-led company has initiated across its products, including its flagship, social media platform Facebook.

Michelle Castillo for the news site wrote, “For at least a year, Facebook has rolled out features across its various products that bear a striking resemblance to Snapchat's functions. Not only do they do the same thing, in some cases they look eerily alike.”

Highlighting the similarities, Mike Murphy for Quartz points out how Facebook explained how it had cloned Snapchat without even mentioning its biggest competitor. Facebook product manager Tony Leach, Murphy notes, “Leach said that the company gets inspiration for the product “from what our friends are using and doing, that they’re posting to Facebook, that they’re sharing with us in Messenger.” He added that, “We get to go talk to a lot of people in a lot of different countries to see how they want to communicate.” Later in the interview, when asked who he thought started the “modern visual communication” that Messenger rolled out, Leach said that “AOL Instant Messenger inspired some of the stuff that we’ve been doing recently.” So apparently a decades-old chat program had more of a direct impact on Facebook’s Snapchat clone than Snapchat. Leach also mentioned that Instagram (which, remember, copied Snapchat) is another instigator of this trend, and even Facebook itself. The closest acknowledgement that any company outside of Facebook (and AOL) may have shaped visual messaging Leach gives is, “There are a lot of good tools out there.””

Snap Inc, who owns Snapchat, has yet to respond to the latest similarity in the Messenger app. However, Snap did acknowledged before that the Stories feature on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, could be a direct competitor. CEO Evan Spiegel nonetheless, blamed cheap Android phones as the reason for Snapchat’s slowdown in growth.