Facebook on a copying spree; this time it's a Snapchat-like camera with filters

The dust on the Snapchat-inspired Stories had barely settled down, and Facebook is out with yet another feature and this time emulating a Snapchat-like camera-first main screen. It is being tested in Brazil and Canada, right now. This new main screen is just like what you see when you launch Snapchat. A live camera will replace half the display that earlier showed a text format. Interestingly, Facebook has even lifted features like adding filters and face altering lenses. It is simply testing the feature and there is no word on the rollout to other regions yet. Sachin Monga, Product Manager, Facebook told BuzzFeed, “If we want to make it easy for people to share photos and videos on Facebook, we need to make it really easy for people to capture photos and videos on Facebook. It’s our job not only to make it easy to capture photos and videos, but to give people the tools that they want to enhance their stories.” By making it easy to capture photos and videos, the company is trying to give a push to original content, something the company has been struggling for sometime now.  Facebook is even known to have tweaked the algorithm around what kind of posts people see in their News Feed so that original posts are given higher priority. Facebook is also said to be conducting a survey to motivate original content sharing. Snapchat, a fairly smaller platform than Facebook, has been giving the social giant a stiff competition. For instance, in March, Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel had revealed that Snapchat gets over 8 billion views per day. Now, Facebook revealed to have doubled its video views late last year, with 8 billion views. We don’t know the most recent figures for both. But the catch is Snapchat got those views for its roughly over 100 million daily users who spend an average of 25 to 30 minutes on the app each day. On the other hand, Facebook has a whopping 1.2 billion active users. Going by the user base, Snapchat, who refused to sellout to Facebook, unlike WhatsApp and Instagram, seems like a potential threat, or at least Facebook thinks so. It was just last week that Facebook-owned Instagram rolled out Stories on Android and iOS, similar to Snapchat’s Stories feature . In fact, Instagram CEO accepted that Snapchat deserves credit for Stories. Well, some have even mocked Facebook stating it should probably start paying Snapchat’s research and development team, instead of its own. We’ve already seen Snapchat-like Slingshot  fall flat on its face, and in the years, Facebook has borrowed several features from Snapchat. Looks like its obsession with owning Snapchat-like app has no end.