Instagram copies Snapchat with new Stories feature
Facebook is once again taking on Snapchat, this time using Instagram Stories to do so. The feature, in which users can post pictures or video to their Stories, which are then visible for 24 hours, is very similar to Snapchat Stories. The feature has been rolled out on iOS and Android, and has been described by Instagram as something that "lets you share all the moments of your day, not just the ones you want to keep on your profile." This also come three years after Snapchat rejected Facebook's $3bn buyout offer.
The photocopiers in Menlo Park must be overheating: for the fifth time, Facebook is trying to steal Snapchat’s thunder with a new feature that is, er, heavily reminiscent of something that started its life on the ephemeral sharing app.

Today’s attempt comes not from Facebook directly, but from its subsidiary Instagram. It’s called Instagram Stories, and the best way to describe it is “like Snapchat stories, but on Instagram”.

As with Snapchat Stories, Instagram Stories lets users post pictures and video to their Stories where they will be available to replay for up to 24 hours after they’re posted. Like Snapchat Stories, the Instagram Stories don’t appear directly on the user’s profile, and reactions and conversations started with them are private. Also like Snapchat Stories, users can doodle on their Instagram Story with text and drawing tools.

The feature is rolling out on iOS and Android from today, and Instagram describes it as a “feature that lets you share all the moments of your day, not just the ones you want to keep on your profile”.

It’s the fifth time Facebook has tried to take on Snapchat. In 2012, it coded Poke, a flagrant clone of Snapchat, in just 12 days. In 2013, Facebook tried to buy Snapchat for a reported $3bn, but Snapchat declined, so in 2014 Facebook launched a full-featured rival Slingshot, with a few unique features of its own. It quietly pulled the app a year later. In 2015 Facebook began testing self-destructing messages in Messenger but the test wasn’t rolled out widely. And last month, the company rolled out encrypted conversations for Messenger, a new feature that Snapchat doesn’t have – which was accompanied by the ability to send Snapchat-style ephemeral messages.

Interviewing Instagram’s founder, Kevin Systrom, the New York Times wrote that he “did not mention Snapchat by name in an interview about Instagram Stories, but obliquely referred to ‘competitors’ and acknowledged that ‘other companies deserve all the credit’ for popularising disappearing photos and videos”.

Will fifth time be the charm for Facebook, or will Zuckerberg’s titan yet again be the Goliath to Snapchat’s David?