Emailed on April 12th, 2019 in The Friday Forward

Snapchat's CEO Evan Spiegel unveiled a new plan this week to let other apps embed the best parts of Snapchat rather than building their own half-rate copies.

They're offering this service through a platform called Snap Kit.

For 2.5 years, Snapchat foolishly tried to take the high road versus Facebook, with Spiegel claiming “Our values are hard to copy.” That inaction allowed Zuckerberg to accrue more than 1 billion daily Stories users across Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook compared to Snapchat’s 186 million total daily users. Meanwhile, the whole tech industry scrambled to build knock-offs of Snap’s vision of an ephemeral, visual future.

Now, instead of watching these other apps spin up mini competitors that further fragment the Stories world, Snap saves developers the slow and costly hassle while instantly giving them best-in-class tools to boost their own engagement.

Later this year users will be able to display a more traditional carousel of their friends’ Stories, or lace them into their app in a custom format. Houseparty’s Stories carousel shares what your buddies are up to outside of the group video chat app. Tinder will let you show off your Snapchat Story alongside your photos to seduce potential matches. But the camera stays inside Snapchat, with new options to share out to these App Stories.

More here.