Silicon Valley feuds are always very entertaining – we like to imagine man bun-sporting, chia seed-munching CEOs sitting angrily in the lotus position and plotting dire revenge, their faces lit by flickering computer screens.
Tech giants Instagram and Snapchat have been in a quarrel for some time, and overnight, Snapchat laid a pretty damn sick burn on its rival by way of an April Fools prank.
The bad blood between the two arises from the fact that last year, Instagram up and copied their competitor’s Snapchat Stories feature, chucking it on their own platform and renaming it Instagram Stories.
Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom openly admits that this is what happened, and even told a TechCrunch interviewer that the original creators deserve “all the credit” for coming up with the game-changing Stories format.
Overnight, Snapchat got some subtle but no-doubt satisfying revenge on Instagram, by copying one of their key features:
Hidden among Snapchat’s filters was one that resembled Instagram’s well-known interface. It showed a post with only three likes, one of them from “my_mom”, the word ‘Instagram’ simply replaced by ‘Spanchat’.
Burn.
Meanwhile, Snapchat founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy recently set up shop in the bohemian LA enclave of Venice Beach. They have since bought more than 1000 employees to the area, and locals are not happy about the rapid expansion.
Venice Beach natives have been protesting outside Snapchat’s offices, saying that they are ruining the character of the neighbourhood by buying up real estate, filling it with security guards and turning it into a corporate campus.
Local resident Jason Moore, who has been part of the protests against Snapchat, told Bloomberg that he and a group of friends are monitoring the properties that the company buys in the area, saying:
“If individuals like us don’t do it, and the politicians don’t do it, then in 10, 15 years we’re going to wake up and it’ll be like American Airlines moved into Disneyland.”
Source: TechCrunch.
Photo: Twitter.
