Facebook(now Meta) tried buying snapchat multiple times before and around 2013. But the visionary founder Evan Spiegel didn’t sell. In response, Mark Zuckerberg copied everything from snapchat, large portion of the major new feature in the Meta group of apps has heavy inspiration from Snapchat. You can even check out this list of things that Facebook copied from snapchat feature wise. Imagine being Evan Spiegel in the last decade, he watched all of his babies being copied by facebook mercilessly, features such as filters, stories, and him trying to innovate faster and think ahead 10 years to win this race.

The most recent copy paste happened on Facebook’s famous Metaverse presentation, on October 2021, where they revealed their name change, focus change to AR/VR hardware and software. Now take a look at this presentation from Snapchat CEO Evan Speigel on their version 4 of Snap Spectacles, and this was on may 2021, 5 months before metas announcements. Lets compare these two presentations,

1. Facebook announcing smart glasses with Ray ban on October 2021, Snapchat doing the same with their Spectacles Version 1 product on September 2016, 4 Years Apart!!!
2. Facebook announcing their AR glasses, which is not even in beta, and will take at least 1.5 year for public preview. Snapchat on the other hand announced their version 4 of spectacles product, which is a functioning AR glass, which is already released to their developer community, but not to general public, so you an call it a invite only beta right now.
3. Meta talked about avatars, snapchat has Bitmoji Avatars for a while, and starting from 2020 it can be used in snap games.
4. Just look at the damn presentation, lot of the theme was copied as well, such as Zuckerberg being in the metaverse during the presentation, how you will interact in a virtual or augmented world.

Now, lets talk about Metaverse, or Web3, whatever you like to call it. Essentially it allows you to immerse more into the digital world, either complete immersion through virtual reality headset, like oculus, or through a augmented reality system such as Microsoft’s Hololens, Snapchat’s Spectacles, or just through your smartphone, a good example is Snapchat’s lens product.

Why does this matter businesswise? More immersion would mean more hours with digital content. Now you are browsing facebook every few minutes, or for the disciplined ones every hour to check your feed, if you are living your life in oculus, facebook has more opportunity to show ads. Same is true if you have a augmented reality headset on and spend the day in that augmented environment.

So, digital goods is set become more valuable than ever, a good example of a valuable virtual/augmented reality product is Skins. If you follow gaming community you will know that it is one of their primary money generating product. When you are spending most of your day within a virtual or augmented environment, you will want to spend on your avatar’s look, just like you spend on cloths, perfumes on the physical world. This is even bigger for augmented reality, check this out. Right now somebody has to scan their surrounding with their smartphone to see what kind of virtual clothes and pets the other person has, once people start wearing those AR glasses, they will see a whole different world where everybody will wear creatively made fancy clothes, made just for them, customized. Fashion in virtual/augmented reality is going to be a big market, probably as big as physical fashion industry, because the value of the digital cloth will be driven by how many hours people will look at you through a digital lens. A digital avatar/cloth/skin lets you show your personality even better and more expressive way than a physical one.

And skins also allow for newer social media interaction, imagine being in a highschool/university campus filled with teenagers/young adults who are trying to attract the opposite sex, how these digital clothes will allow them to express their personality to everyone else in the campus. You will poke somebody you think is wearing a interesting avatar or has a interesting pet, similar to how you are attracted to somebody who is wearing a good dress, or good perfume.

And this is just one digital product, think about how many things in your physical surrounding is just showing information, and can exist as a snapchat lens in a augmented reality environment.

And all of this is enabled by another technology, blockchain, proving the ownership of a digital goods to somebody. So a channel dress or purse in the digital world can be verified as real channel through blockchain. This is clearly illustrated by the NFT phenomenon, you see how people are announcing to everybody that they are part of a club, by buying bored ape NFTs, and putting them up as their profile picture. Twitter just allowed verification of ownership of a NFT profile picture, imagine what this will be in augmented/virtual reality skins/avatars/digital cloths.

Meta is trying really hard to monetize their e-commerce side of business, but it is hard for them to do in the wester market where there is Google Search and Amazon Marketplace. In the developing world Facebook is trying to put search and commerce into one, but they are losing users on the developing world to Tiktok rapidly, and slowly but surely to Snapchat as well.

So Zuckerberg realizes that this is a big shift, and that is why they want to launch their Libra currency, to enable global marketplace for physical and digital goods, also to prove ownership of digital goods. To win this, what they really need is a good AR glass, and an ecosystem of developers who will take advantage of that AR Tech. Facebook does not have it at the moment.

But Snapchat have that AR tech, they also have a community of creators who are constantly building new application on that tech. Snapchat released their Spectacles version 4 only to select creators, and my guess is they are ironing out the technology, and also preparing a marketplace with lot of items before launching it to the public.

You can see the signs of this in their augmented reality developer portal here, some of the stuff here are pretty crazy. Facebook also has their spark ar studio creator community, but its pretty shabby compared to what Snapchat has done. Facebook’s ar studio primarily focuses on making you look cool when you are posting selfies, or having a video call through messenger. But Snapchat’s Lens allows you to build utility with the software, such as,

1. A virtual cloth try on and shopping.
2. Virtual makeup try on and shopping.
3. AR games based on physics and landmark.

Essentailly snapchat is handling the hard to handle Augmented reality and machine learning requirements at the lower end, and allowing developers to build their vision very easily. There is only one competitor who have thought the way snapchat has, that is Niantic which made the Pokémon go game, they have their lightship platform. But Niantic does not have a social media distribution platform with 300MLN plus user as Snapchat does.

Overall, my gut tells that facebook is at least 3 years behind on the AR tech, and in general younger users does not like using facebook anymore, there is nothing new happening on the Instagram side as well.

Another side of Snapchat is the vision of troubles that may arise, have you ever seen Evan Spiegel to be called by US regulators and ask him about election influence, or data privacy issues. Mostly no, because Evan Spiegel saw this from miles away and had policy in place a long while back. While Zuckerberg is busy preparing answer for US congressmen, Spiegel focused on innovation. Watch the following interview and you will know what I mean.

All in all, Facebook is behind on both AR hardware and software, AR Monetization, AR Commerce, Developer/Creator community and also is failing to attract younger audience.

What Facebook has is Oculus, which is designed for a future where people will put a tv on their nose for 12 hours a day. I personally feel we are not going there, until and unless there is another flu pandemic with death rate of 5% or more. To know more about the vision of oculus, please read Ready Player One, it is a required reading for every Oculus employee, and they are emulating the concepts in OASIS from that book.

If you are into Stock investing you may ask, what’s the earning implication and stock price? That a is a separate article. But what i believe is due to Snapchats innovation and strategy, they will have a higher market cap than Facebook in next 10 years. In tech investing, by the time you have number showing up in the books, the stock is probably already priced, look what happened to TSLA.

And if you are developer, its time to build for AR, and Web3. Ill be doing so in the coming years. Go read up Snapchat’s Lens developer docs and build something.