Yep, it's true: Facebook Collections, a competitor to Snapchat Discover, is on the way
Facebook is coming for Snapchat—specifically, Snapchat Discover—via the development of a new publisher program, according to a Business Insider report published Friday. A source familiar with the program's development has also confirmed its existence to Mashable.
The social network is reportedly asking publishers to create more content for them within a new feature called Collections.
The feature would include curated stories from individual publishers that would appear in Facebook's News Feed, according to potential Collections partners Business Insider's Alex Heath spoke with, as well as documentation of the program reviewed by him, too. Sound familiar?
At face-value, Collections resembles the development of Twitter's Moments and, of course, Snapchat's Discover. In October 2015, Twitter released Moments to a handful of media outlets to curate collections of tweets. Now, anyone can create one. Discover is Snap's nearly two-year-old exclusive network of media and entertainment companies (of which Mashable is a partner).
While Snapchat's offering is selective and thus limited in its choice of participants, it's been heralded by partners for its attentive audience of millions of daily users who provide another revenue source for publishers that wasn't there before.
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Facebook's held talks with media outlets and entertainment companies over recent weeks about Collections, according to Business Insider, though no other timeframe for the new offering was reported.
Facebook declined to comment.
If the Business Insider report turns out to be completely accurate, it comes in an interesting moment. For one thing, Facebook finds itself continuously fending off criticism for both the way it won't call itself a media company (despite so many publishers' fates now being inextricably linked to Facebook's users) as well as its role in spreading fake news. The company fired its own curation team for a section of the site called Trending Topics, following Gizmodo's report on the potential suppression of conservative news.
Additionally, it's yet another example of Facebook copycatting some of Snapchat's features.Most notably, Facebook introduced a user-curation feature called Stories, similar to Snapchat Stories, and disappearing messages to Instagram. The company is also testing a Snapchat Stories-like feature in WhatsApp and in Messenger.
The aggressive pursuit follows in the company's failed effort to acquire Snapchat and gain traction in its nearly identical copy of Snapchat called Poke.
Instead of engaging users in Snapchat-like features, Collections puts the effort at the hands of publishers, many of which would hate to see their traffic from Facebook disappear.
Kerry Flynn is a business reporter for Mashable covering the tech industry. She previously reported on social media companies, mobile apps and startups for International Business Times. She has also written for The Huffington Post, Forbes and Money magazine. Kerry studied environmental science and economics at Harvard College, where she led The Harvard Crimson's metro news and design teams and played mellophone in the Band. When not listening to startup pitches, she runs half-marathons, plays with puppies and pretends to like craft beer.
