Through the years, Facebook has constantly made changes to itself and tried to add new features to keep up with trends or to outright box out an emerging competitor.

This year, Zuckerberg’s team is looking at Clubhouse, the fast-growing audio-only livestreaming app currently only available on iOS. Facebook unveiled their upcoming audio products on April 20. To be fair, Twitter, Spotify, LinkedIn, to name a few, are also stepping foot in the audio-only space.

Facebook, because of the size of its userbase though, can immediately scale, potentially pushing out the competing app that they took inspiration from. This has drawn accusations of anti-competitive behavior from critics and the American legislative body itself.

U.S. lawmakers hit Facebook for acquiring, copying competition

Facebook knows how to throw its weight around. With its seemingly unlimited resources, it can roll out a feature with the snap of a finger. And again, with its massive userbase, it has the potential of quickly scaling.

Not all efforts have succeeded. Facebook Dating hasn’t taken off against the likes of Bumble or Tinder while Facebook Workplace isn’t top of mind when it comes to true-blue work apps such as Slack or Microsoft Teams.

Those that have succeeded though, as you’ll see below, can be quite threatening to the apps Facebook “took inspiration” from.

Facebook’s Stories as a take on Snapchat

Facebook’s Stories is its own take on Snapchat’s “disappearing photos and videos” feature. While Snapchat’s system was originally meant for friends to share things for a short time, Stories appeared to be more geared towards both the average user – which assumes they already know how to operate a Snapchat-like system – and the content creator.

The latter is evidenced by Facebook’s inclusion of a handy guide for content creators on its business side. Snapchat meanwhile has a more generalized user guide.

As to the reason why Facebook made Stories, it’s because Snapchat’s CEO, Evan Spiegel is said to have turned down at least two offers to be acquired by Facebook through the years.

Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012. If Instagram had fought back the acquisition, we could be using a different image-oriented app now or a Facebook-free Instagram.

Facebook’s Reels as the TikTok challenger

Facebook didn’t only take inspiration from Snapchat. In August 2020, Facebook also started taking on the popular short video platform TikTok with its Reels feature.

At the time, TikTok was facing scrutiny from the US government, because TikTok was seen as a national security risk owing to it being a Chinese-made app.

Facebook’s Reels feature was an alternative launched at seemingly the right time to capitalize on TikTok’s troubles, though it helps that it has the money to lure in TikTok content creators to its platform, as per the Wall Street Journal.

Reels hasn’t taken off though, and TikTok remains the big player in the full-screen short-form video space.

Image from Open Whisper Systems.

Encrypted messaging on WhatsApp

Facebook-owned WhatsApp had to find a way to keep up with its brethren, Signal and Telegram, which had encrypted messaging as a feature.

What did it do? It teamed up with the competitor to get encrypted messaging going on WhatsApp.

Facebook partnered with Open Whisper Systems – which develops Signal – to get end-to-end encryption on WhatsApp in 2016.

Facebook and Instagram Live as the Periscope analogue

Also on the lineup of Facebook-adapted features has to be Facebook and Instagram Live, which is its own take on Twitter’s Periscope offering.

Periscope was released on January 2015, and Facebook Live followed just a few months later.

While originally only usable by verified public figures, Facebook Live was opened up to the public in January 2016, and is now a staple of the Facebook experience for many.

Facebook Gaming as Twitch’s contemporary

Facebook Gaming, the social media company’s take on video game streaming for its users, was actually bolstered by Microsoft.

Microsoft tried to make its own service, Mixer, take on Twitch, but eventually found “the time needed to grow our own livestreaming community to scale was out of measure with the vision and experiences that Microsoft and Xbox want to deliver for gamers now.” Microsoft shuttered Mixer on July 22.

Facebook Gaming is now Twitch’s contemporary, as Mixer tried to funnel its users and its hired streamers into Facebook Gaming. That said, some popular streamers taken on by Mixer eventually just went back to Twitch. – Rappler.com