It wasn’t long ago when Facebook’s picture sharing service Instagram added the ‘Stories’ feature to its app. The feature was first seen on Snapchat that allows users to share shot bursts of photos or videos that disappears after 24 hours.
Instagram amassed 150 million users after the feature was added. Now Facebook’s instant messaging service WhatsApp plans to join the league by offering a similar feature. The new feature will enable users to take photos or videos, draw on them, and share them with your contacts. And these will be encrypted, like the rest of WhatsApp’s communications. Previously, users could just set a text status on WhatsApp.
This could cause trouble to Snapchat’s mother company Snap, which will be going public shortly. Snapchat service is mostly popular in North America, and the company believes that it can gain more traction elsewhere. WhatsApp on the other hand, has a huge user base in Europe and Asia that can increase after the video-status feature rolls out.
Snap claims that 158 million people use Snapchat on a daily basis, while Facebook says that 1.2 billion people use WhatsApp every month. The new move by Facebook can hold back Snapchat’s international growth aims.
