Instagram CEO on Stories: Don’t Call It a Copycat
foxbusiness.com
foxbusiness.com
WSJ: You seem to have thought about this a lot.
Mr. Systrom: It's because I do a lot of these interviews where people ask a lot of these questions.
I'd go so far as to say that the difference is what allowed them to coexist with myspace for so long. It's not as though they launched and then myspace promptly fell over. The two were side by side for years, the same way FB and snapchat are/were.
Compared to that, the IG stories feature is a much more direct imitation. The geofilter and text implementation are so similar that, to anyone but a power user, a screenshot of a post from each would be indistinguishable.
With that said, I can't say I'm mad to see snapchat in decline. They put pepsi ads between videos of people I care about. Straight to the dumpster with that.
my IG stories (the snapchat competitor) are, at the moment, ad free, as is my feed.
Facebook is certainly guilty of that, so I'm off there too.
I mean I'm all for it, it was well-executed on Instagram.
But past that was complete overkill. WhatsApp, really? I'm shown stories from everyone in my contact list, really? It's completely useless. And Facebook? For the love of God why?
Example: http://i.imgur.com/aMruFbg.png
Literally 30% of the screen is useful and the rest of bloated by some non-dismissable crap
Because Snap didn't accept the cheque, it's starting to feel like a personal vendetta.
I find it hard to believe it being anything else I mean what's the alternative? That all 3 teams completely ran out of creativity at the same point and decided to clone the same features at the same time? Far more likely that these orders are coming down from the top.
Also, it sucks that one can only send "story" pictures in DMs now, which delete after 24h and you can't even download them after you send them, in contrast to the old "photo" send mode, where the images stayed in the conversation and were visible online.
I completely agree with your second point however. Make it more like Snapchat and have both types of direct messages; ephemeral and permanent.
You're in favor of autoplay that can't be disabled?
Especially not for fucking ads. Worst is: most Instagram videos are crapshoots. Low quality, high compression - typical for selfie videos. Which means they're tolerable. But story ads tend to be high-quality productions... requiring sometimes 10+MB.
For reference: common smartphone data plans in Germany are 1-3 GB per month, for 10-30€. 5GB offers are rare and you won't get more than 10 even with expensive business packages.
Using the web is becoming a pain due to this waste of data, at least IRC still works.
I also live in Germany and my experience is a little different. I know several people with 6gb plans for less than 20€, and if you're willing to pay 30€+/mo then 10/15/20gb LTE plans are possible.
Have you tried a comparison site such as Check24? You'll usually find great deals on high data packages. You might have to sacrifice on SMS or Telephone minutes for a high data plan though.
Also, all non-first-class customers (i.e. everyone except direct contract customers of the three telcos) get lower priority on the network, both for calls and data.
The O2 network here is terrible for 4G I agree the other two are much better.
Is the lower priority actually noticeable though? Like have their been any third party tests? I'd never heard that until today but it does make sense I guess. They want their own traffic to come first.
The question is, which level of LTE? If it's capped at anything between 10-15 MBit/s there will be no advantage over HSDPA, versus the 150+ MBit/s you can get via proper LTE.
> The O2 network here is terrible for 4G I agree the other two are much better.
Yeah, but markedly more expensive.
> Is the lower priority actually noticeable though?
Go to any bigger event, say a huge anti-nazi rally, Oktoberfest or rock festivals. I was in Cologne a couple of weeks, approximately 20k people attended. My LTE tablet (O2) had no internet at all. My business phone (Vodafone) had proper internet access, and my private cellphone (Lebara, using Telekom network which is inarguably the best) had massive issues.
However, the typical consumer plans are pretty limited.
For example: https://twitter.com/OFFICIALTALLAL/status/848412009146331136
"Copy this Snapchat feature" vs "Stories are a new storytelling medium" vs. "We need to do this because Snap is a grave threat and Facebook's survival depends on your work" are all very different narratives to sell to the team.