You’ve probably seen Facebook’s most recent innovation – or more properly termed “imitation” – popping up under the search bar in your News Feed. It’s called Facebook Camera and it looks almost exactly like Snapchat, a fact which Facebook has admitted.
Although very much like Snapchat (and Instagram Stories for that matter), Facebook’s new feature is more open. Unless you’re not following a friend, you will be able to see everything they post on Camera, which encourages a less candid attitude for users. But aside from this minor difference, Facebook Camera is an almost identical clone of Snapchat, but bigger.
Here’s a list of the pros and cons Facebook Camera from TechCrunch.
What’s in Facebook Camera:
- Drawing with resizable marker and chalk brushes
- Emoji stickers
- Colored captions
- Animated selfie lenses and masks
- Environmental effects like highlight lines and funhouse mirrors
- Reactive filters that respond to movement like lava lamp colors
- Iterative filters that surprise you with new effects if you get more people in frame
- Fine-art-style transfers that make your images look like line drawings or impressionist paintings
- Professional artist filters like Hattie Stewart’s doodle bombs and Doug Copeland’s psychedelia
- Licensed filters from six movie studios, including a Minions filter
- Cause-supporting filters like rainbows for gay pride
- Geotagged location filters for certain places
- Country-specific filters for around 10 initial markets
What’s missing:
- Simple Instagram-style color filters for boosting exposure or contrast (Snapchat, Instagram)
- 3D stickers for pinning text, emoji or drawings to objects in a video (Snapchat)
- Playback effects for slow-mo and fast-forward (Snapchat)
- FaceSwap (Snapchat)
- User- and business-submitted filters (Snapchat)
- Caption background colors for easy reading (Instagram)
- Location tags for turning any place-name into a stylized sticker (Instagram)
- Mentions for tagging friends (Instagram)
- Computer-generated filters that turn any text into frames (Messenger)
- Who’s Up For? filters for inviting friends to hang out (Messenger)
Since it’s still in its infancy, Facebook Camera has a lot of innovating to do before it can definitively beat Snapchat. But size does matter, and if Camera succeeds, Snapchat could be in serious trouble.