Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Jorge Serna

Is the right approach for Facebook to clone HouseParty?

Last week some rumors have popped up around Facebook wanting to launch their own app that “clones” the functionality of HouseParty.

This follows an existing trend in Facebook, in which they are addressing the threat from competing services by adding their features into Facebook’s portfolio. The best example, in which this has happened “with a vengeance”, has been the addition of SnapChat’s Stories functionality into their full product suite.

The ‘Stories’ approach

Facebook went probably overkill when they decided to add the same functionality, one by one, to all of their main products: Facebook Messenger, the Facebook Social Network, Instagram and Whatsapp.

There is a strategic explanation for this, which is reflected in other products like Microsoft’s Skype doing the exact same thing. That explanation would be the expectation that this kind of “moment sharing” will become one main paradigm in personal communications, and customers will expect it in every communications product. If that is the approach, then it makes sense to put it everywhere, just as photo sharing (with very specific and different approaches) is also available everywhere.

But it looks like this kind of experience is not really demanded everywhere. I would argue “Stories” work in Instagram and in the Facebook Social Network, but they don’t fit other products.

Stories don’t fit everywhere

WhatsApp, and to some extent Facebook Messenger as it increasingly becomes a place to interact with businesses, are utilitarian social networks. Yes, they allow people to stay together and definitely group chats are more about sharing than about specific intents, but this is the “social” aspect. The address book is what defines the “utilitarian” one, because in WhatsApp your network is defined by “everyone in my address book”, and you use it to communicate with friends, but also with bank managers, plumbers or the parents at your kid’s school. And that is not the right audience to broadcast “instantaneous moments” of my life.

I don’t have specific numbers of whether the “Status” feature in WhatsApp is being successful, but while my address book includes close to a thousand WhatsApp contacts(!), this is an example of an unusually crowded Status screen:

Very few contacts are using this

Instagram, on the other hand, is about projecting your own self-image (almost) publicly, while also receiving images/videos from friends, celebrities, etc. There, Stories has a clear product fit, and that’s why Instagram is getting a big success with them, even beating SnapChat.

The Facebook Social Network could also benefit from it, but as it is becoming more and more about sharing content from others rather than personal (news, blog posts, etc..) the usage of the Stories feature is getting behind.

Hey! Zuck is the new Tom from MySpace!!

— @jserna

Facebook could leverage Instagram to move from the 700 million users target to the 2 billion one. What I would do is facilitate the cross-pollination. Your photos can be shared in Facebook and Twitter from the Instagram app with just a switch, why not allow a Story to be automatically reposted on your Facebook Story too?

That would help Facebook to really leverage the strength of their network, and further mainstream Stories.

Facebook strength

Even without the additional lever into their main social network, Facebook’s approach to bring the Stories feature to market has been an astounding show of strength.

I would argue that this has been a massive A/B test, in which a feature has been tested across different channels to find the best fit. And these channels are huge, and bring gigantic network-effects.

The fact that FB has been able to do it in a short period of time, taking the risk of significantly changing properties with hundreds of millions or even billions of users, is the show of strength I mentioned before. That and a demonstration of their ability to keep a competitive advantage.

Usually big players (incumbents) are disrupted by new entrants based on the approach discussed in the Innovator’s Dilemma:

they target a small niche which is not — initially — worth to be fought by the incumbent
and the incumbent finds it very complex to fight them later on, because the legacy in their products (be that technological complexity, or more importantly not changing the expectations of their existing customers) makes it difficult for them to address those specific needs.

But Facebook has shown they can:

Copy relatively fast
Challenge the expectation of the existing customers if needed
Do that in a sensible way (and simultaneously in a couple of less sensible ones)
And finally overtake the market of their disruptor.

This is great news for Facebook, and places them in a really enviable position. But maybe this is not so good for the market, because it reduces the incentives to new entrants creating exciting new offerings in communication products.

The high risk of being replaced by Facebook once the market validation has been done by the entrant is very high.

What will happen with group video?

Now Facebook is facing another threat to their Social Communications dominance, by the players in a market led by HouseParty, but with enough potential that has other contenders like Fam or Tribe.

Facebook interest in group video is not new, and Facebook Messenger has launched group video support a while ago. But that is probably not working as they expected, because rumors now say they are trying a different approach, with a separate app called Bonfire.

I believe launching a separate app is actually a way for them to learn first-hand about this specific market. This is their approach to doing a MVP before risking their bigger base into a new unproven feature. They have done the same in their process of fighting SnapChat: first they tried their own apps (Slingshot and Bolt), before focusing on the feature with the most scale (Stories), and then they grew it by properly leveraging their existing network.

I don’t think a separate app, even viciously pushed in some way through their existing channels, is the right *final* product for Facebook. It is an experiment to understand what makes sense for group video.

And if they do their experiment right, they will learn that the HouseParty differential is not just about video, but about a different presence model.

Can this model be applied to the Facebook communication apps? I think it can for some, but I don’t think it fits in Instagram (same as Stories do) and putting it directly into a product like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp as it works right now in HouseParty makes little sense: you don’t want your plumber or bank manager to be notified so you can hang out with them!

Applying it in the right way within the confines of (certain) WhatsApp groups, already safe places for sharing, can be the key, and may drive this capability to an incredible scale worldwide. And if Facebook can do this fast enough — and past evidence shows they could — it can be a great success for them, but will make it much more difficult for the next new idea to make it to the market.

In the meantime, let’s see how HouseParty can maneuver to expand and defend their currently-owned space.

Facebook and the Attack of the Clones was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Facebook and the Attack of the Clones

Cool stuff, every week

More Articles