Facebook built but won’t launch a “Facebook Stories” Snapchat clone

Facebook built its own version of Snapchat Stories called Quick Updates, but will not release it. Though Instagram Stories launched this week, Facebook isn’t going to follow suit.

Quick Updates created a special place to share within the Facebook app but outside of the News Feed. Accessible from a button at the top of the feed, Quick Updates would have let people share 24-hour disappearing photos and videos with overlaid text. These posts wouldn’t appear in the feed or in people’s profiles.

Quick Updates featured its own design style, opposed to Instagram Stories which much more closely copies Snapchat Stories. When asked about cloning Snapchat, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom even said “They deserve all the credit.”

TechCrunch received screenshots of a test of Quick Updates two weeks ago, but the test quickly disappeared after we published about it. Facebook told me at the time that “Quick Updates” was an experiment shown to some people, and that Facebook would not move forward with it.

But the release of Instagram Stories begged the question of whether Facebook won’t modify the feature or release something similar, perhaps called “Facebook Stories”.

I asked Facebook, and a spokesperson told me “Quick updates was something we were going to test. It’s an idea we’re not pursuing anymore.” When pressed on the issue, the Facebook spokesperson provided this official statement:

“We often conduct small tests of new feature concepts, and this particular experience was an old test feature that was shown to some people.  We don’t have any plans to launch it more broadly.”

So at least hardcore social media users won’t have to post non-stop daily updates to three networks, just two.

That said, on Facebook’s successful earnings call last week, Mark Zuckerberg vowed that “We see a world that is video first, with video at the heart of all of our apps and service.”

Yet Facebook hasn’t significantly updated its video uploader in nearly three years, despite me calling for them to modernize since 2013. You still can’t overlay filters, text, drawings, or stickers on videos. You can’t combine multiple clips into a single video, add soundtracks, create transitions, or use features found in other apps like Snapchat, YouTube, Vine, andeven Instagram.

Facebook did recently acquire MSQRD, an app for applying animated selfie filters similar to Snapchat’s lenses. But there’s been no official integration of MSQRD into Facebook or Instagram Stories, though Instagram says that’s coming.

Facebook’s video sharing tool is embarrassingly archaic and is sorely due for an upgrade. Instagram Stories just makes that even more clear.

Facebook hits 1.71B users as it crushes Q2 earnings with $6.44B revenue, shares soar 9%

Coming off an all-time high stock price of $123.34, Facebook in Q2 2016 smashed earnings again. The social network continued steady growth just slightly slower than at 3.63% compared to last quarter’s 3.77%, adding 60 million this quarter to reach 1.71 billion monthly users. It scored $6.44 billion in revenue and $0.97 EPS, surpassing estimates of $6.02 billion and $0.82 EPS. That’s its 16th beat out of 17 quarters since it went public at $38 per share. Wall Street reacted to the positive earnings with a 7.5% bump in after hours trading to $132.60.

Revenue growth was 59% year over year, which looks favorable compared to competitor Twitter, who yesterday announced its YOY revenue growth sunk to 20% from 60% a year ago. With 84% of ad revenue from mobile, total ad revenue was $6.24 billion.

Though the big monthly user count gets the spotlight, Facebook’s daily active user count is a better measure of its health. Total DAUs reached 1.13 billion, with 1.57 billion mobile MAUs. 

Facebook’s efficient social network operation raked in $2.05 billion in profit, compared to $719 million a year ago, while average revenue per user is now $3.82, up a big 15% from last quarter.

Facebook hit with bad press while product keeps winning

Facebook’s Q2 was marred by several bouts of negative press. Allegations from anonymous sources suggested it was purposefully suppressing conservative news Trends. Facebook denied the allegations and its internal investigation found no proof, but it vowed to better train Trend curators to avoid bias.

Later, on the behalf of its users, it changed the News Feed algorithm to prioritize posts from friends and family over stories from news publishers and brands. It’s still too early to draw conclusions on the size of the drop in reach and referral traffic for publishers, though Facebook admitted it’d be significant.

Facebook Live continued its growth, pulling some attention from Twitter’s acquisition Periscope that beat it to market last year. Live got new creative expression features and an API to help broadcasters use professional equipment.

Facebook’s secondary products enjoyed big milestones. Facebook Messenger hit 1 billion active users, thanks to constant product iteration like the new addition of an end-to-end encryption option, though also the fact that Facebook removed chat from its main app and forced users to download Messenger.

Meanwhile, Instagram reached 500 million users. Its community bristled at the announcement that an algorithmic feed would start highlighting the most popular posts instead of showing a purely reverse chronological stream. But that backlash hasn’t seemed to hurt Instagram too bad.

Overall, it looks like Facebook isn’t slowing down despite its massive size.