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Comment by jtmarmon | Hacker News Reader

"If a snapchat clone came out tomorrow, snapchat wouldn't be as sticky"

there have been plenty. facebook even launched one

I outlined my thoughts, a large social network would have to do it. linkedin, google, twitter, microsoft or facebook. LinkedIn, twitter, facebook being the most profitable. Maybe apple, for the security, weird FBI hacking thing although their software has gone down hill. I digress,

what was the Facebook snapchat clone? I haven't heard of a large scale effort to clone snapchat yet. If I were to build a comparable universe of companies for snapchat, I would say it is a lot like tinder, twitter and foursquare.

It was called FB Poke and was built in 12 days after Zuckerberg flew out to talk to Evan and Evan turned his offer down. When it launched it was basically better than snapchat in every category, but people didn't switch to it.

Then Evan responded by copying Apple and saying 'Welcome Facebook, Seriously'. On an unrelated meta note I found this annoying because it originally came from people building personal computers and not dumb ephemeral messaging apps.

Maybe Snapchat can do what Facebook and Google have done and become a real technology company, but so far feels more like twitter (lots of users, but unclear vision).

Its launch: http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/facebook-poke-app/

A comparison with snapchat: http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/facebook-poke-vs-snapchat-w...

Its death: http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/9/5700732/facebook-poke-is-de...

interesting. going to dig up the advert. maybe they have a long play here. thanks.

> I haven't heard of a large scale effort to clone snapchat yet

That's how absurdly sticky Snapchat is.

It's been emulated many times over (incl. as mentioned above, by Facebook) – yet you haven't even heard of a single one.

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