Recently released emails from April 2012 show that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives were frustrated by slow internal prototyping and weighed the benefits of quickly copying and iterating on smaller apps like Pinterest.
A chain of messages begins with Zuckerberg recounting a meeting with the founders of the Chinese social media application Renren. “In China there is this strong culture of cloning things quickly and building many different products,” he wrote. “Seeing all this and the rate at which new mobile applications seem to be coming from other companies, makes me think that we are moving very slowly. … I wonder what we could do to move much faster. “
The messages were released Wednesday as part of an investigation by the House Judiciary Committee.
Other employees, some of their redacted names, agreed that “copying is faster than innovating,” even if they were concerned that this would give Facebook a bad name in the industry. “We spend a lot of time on products and iterations on products that aren’t as widely used,” one person said. “If you gave the top-down order to go ahead, copy for example Pinterest or the gameplay on Foursquare … I’m sure [a] very small team of engineers, a [product manager], and a designer would do it super fast. “
“I would love to be much more aggressive and agile in copying competitors at the interface / last mile level,” said another. Let’s Copy “(aka superset) Pinterest! “
The chain’s latest email compared this approach favorably to the slow development of two internal products, known as “Snap” and “Roger.” There’s not much information on these, but Roger was apparently a messaging system comparable to WhatsApp, which Facebook acquired in 2014, and Snap was a potential competitor to Instagram. “We spend a lot of time making sure that our designs conform to conventions or settings that are future-proof. … I have noticed that this is something that has delayed us in Roger and other projects, “said the email.” Startups have the best of both worlds: [they] deflect our graphic to build a new system … and allow them to create a different product experience. “
Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) yesterday suggested at a hearing that Facebook used the threat of cloning products to push smaller competitors to sell, including Instagram, which was acquired days after these emails were sent. “Has Facebook ever threatened to clone another company’s products while trying to acquire that company?” she asked. “Congressman, not that I remember,” replied Zuckerberg.
Since then, Facebook has developed a reputation for cloning applications. A number of app features were launched that copy Snapchat’s features, including Instagram Stories in 2016. It launched, then closed, a TikTok-inspired app called Lasso and a Pinterest-like app called Hobbi. This exchange presents some of the possible reasoning behind these decisions and describes an alternative approach that Facebook decided simply did not work.
