In a very funny news, Snap Evan Spiegel CEO has assigned himself as the VP of Product at Facebook’s parent company Meta owned by Mark Zuckerberg. On his new LinkedIn Profile, Evan wrote this in his bio:
“Loving husband, father of four boys, VP Product @ Meta.
Evan Spiegel is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Snap Inc. Snap is a technology company that empowers people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world and have fun together.”
We assume that this is a joke that actually taunts Mark Zuckerberg and Meta for copying product features initially launched by Snapchat or Snap.
It is a well-known fact that the most popular type of social media content other than videos are ‘stories’ which are basically status updates that disappear after a period time.
Snapchat is said to be the father of this baby called stories. Now, we see it everywhere including all the major Meta platforms: Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook.
Snapchat also introduced the feature of disappearing messages which was later copied by Meta.
Evan has always been vocal about this and Meta has also accepted this by terming it as “using good features developed elsewhere” or “basic industry practice”.
Even the AR filters were initially a feature by Snap and was later adopted by Meta.
Meta was reportedly developing a feature called “Peek” which would let Instagram users post single-view pictures but it wasn’t launched. However, WhatsApp has adopted one-time-view feature for photos and media. This was also initially Evan’s idea.
We all know that Snap is quite popular, and Meta has tried buying the platform in past which wasn’t a successful attempt.
Evan termed the denial to sell Snap as “staying independent” which means he termed how Meta owned the social media world and someone had to stay independent from them.
Currently, Spiegel owns 13% of Snap’s stock but he also controls 51% of the voting stock. This gives him significant control over the company’s decision making.
Snap’s current market cap is around 17.69 billion USD whereas Meta stands with 1.78 trillion USD.
Not just Snap, Meta has copied features from other platforms as well. For example, Reels is a direct copy of TikTok videos and the new Threads App is a replica of Twitter which is now X and is owned by Elon Musk.
If we’re talking about copying and “not developing a feature”, Even Facebook is often cited as a stolen idea by many. Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss of two of the prominent accusers of this. Along with their partner Divya Narendra, they term Facebook as their own idea called ConnectU which was stolen by Zuckerberg while he was working as a programmer for them.
Winklevoss brothers later on ended their lawsuit with a big settlement and invested all their money in cryptocurrency. They own a big chunk of crypto now.
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