This is getting ridiculous. Facebook just ripped off Snapchat's navigation.
If you can't beat them, join them.
That seems to be Facebook's approach to winning over the youth of the world, who just can't get enough of its fast-growing competitor, Snapchat.
Mashable has confirmed Facebook is currently rolling out a navigation bar that looks remarkably similar to Snapchat Discover's original navigation. It's at the top of another new feature: A feed of Facebook Live videos and video on demand straight from Facebook pages you follow.
The video feed is accessed by clicking a play button icon at the bottom of the app -- just to the right of the news feed icon -- to open up the new feed.
Facebook confirmed on Friday a new "video tab" has been rolled out slowly since April, but the company upped the ante in recent days and pushed the feature to more users. It urged users to visit its updated blog for further details.
"Over the past few months we have been rolling out the Video tab slowly to test and learn from people, and we’re now excited to make it available to more people in the U.S. on iOS and Android," the company wrote.
Within the feed, there is a notifications panel that shows you the videos currently live from the publications you follow, but if you scroll down, Facebook also serves up suggested Live viewing and other videos. It isn't clear how these suggestions are selected and, on the version Mashable saw, most look like bad quality Live ads from product pages.
If you click on the publication you follow from within the navigation bar, it will bring up a window that allows you to unfollow and turn notifications on or off.
One assumes turning notifications on would notify you when a live stream from that publisher begins à la Periscope. If you scroll down from here, you will see a feed of that specific publisher's previous Live videos and Facebook videos.
This newest iteration even functions like Snapchat, in that awkward and confusing-for-anyone-older-than-a-teenager way.
It lets you exit a publisher's video by hitting or dragging down a button in the top left corner and you can scroll across the publications -- displayed in circles like the original Snapchat navigation -- to find and select the publisher you want to check out.
We have known about an upcoming dedicated video section since last year, while a similar Live video tab was first seen on Android devices back in May. Its main difference, though, was that back then it looked nothing like Snapchat. It was simply a new feed with the play button logo that aggregated Facebook Live videos.
In recent times, Facebook has been replicating numerous features from the new, cool kid on the scene.
In late October, Mashable reported Facebook began testing out an experimental camera feature in Ireland that allowed you to take a photo and add filters before sharing the photos with your friends. The feature is currently unnamed, but we'd suggest "Snapbook."
A week before that story, Mashable dropped the news that Facebook was testing its Messenger Day feature in Australia, which allows you to add stickers and doodles to photos and videos that expire within 24 hours. Stories, anyone?
Then, on Friday, Business Insider reported Facebook was launching a new publisher program called "Collections," which would see Facebook working with media partners to create curated content for the platform. You may have heard of a similar feature by Snapchat, called Discover, that has turned the relationship between content producers and the platform on its head. News has never looked so sexy.
And just this week, Facebook obviously thought "screw it, let's just become Snapchat" and threw in its new geofilter service to really take its youth conversion to the next level. The feature, which is also being tested in Ireland, will apparently be called "location frames" and work with the camera feature.
Whether the upcoming changes can help the platform appeal to the younger demographic Snapchat has cornered so successfully, is yet to be seen. If all keeps going to plan, though, by the new year we may be wearing Facebook glasses on our faces.
UPDATE: Friday, 12:23 p.m.: This story has been updated to note the new feed also features videos on demand from publisher and with Facebook's confirmation.
Jenni Ryall is Mashable's VP of Content Strategy. She spends her time launching cool, new things such as Mashable Deals and Mashable Reels. On the other days, she is developing strong partnerships with companies including Apple News, Flipboard, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.
