Now Instagram wants to copy BeReal

In the great battle for social media supremacy, BeReal seems set to be the champion of 2022. Indeed, with 7.67 million new users gained since January of this year, the social network's growth seems exponential and appears to be fueled by another social, TikTok, on which numerous users have been advertising the app. According to Fortune, in the week of last July 11 alone, the app was downloaded 1.7 million times-a huge number of downloads that places the French app founded in 2020 by Alexis Barreyat among the fastest-growing in the digital world. It's a kind of growth that has made Instagram's Adam Mosseri jealous, according to the Twitter account specializing in leaks by Alessandro Paluzzi, who leaked the rumor that the social media giant is trying to copy BeReal with its new IG Candid feature. This feature will ask users to take a photo at random times of the day and within a two-minute time window - basically the same feature as BeReal. Not surprisingly, The Verge called the new feature a "murder clone" that is, a product or service created to destroy the competition by imitating it and thus preventing its spread.

Meta told The Verge that the prototype exists but, at the moment, it is intended for internal use and therefore no tests with regular users of the social network are currently planned. Still, although the new feature will probably not appear in the near future, the announcement that Instagram is trying to create a new format similar to that of another successful app is by no means new. A few months ago, in fact, Mosseri had been forced to backtrack on a new version of the app that prioritized the display of video content making the social very similar to its main rival, TikTok. Major influencers on the app, including members of the Jenner clan, had shared a viral post pointing out how Instagram was good precisely for photos, not videos, forcing the app to clamor to resume its original form. 

The news highlights in an even more blatant way how Instagram, despite being a social media with gigantic reach, still tries to compete with members of the "new guard" of the social media world, probably to avoid suffering the same fate as Facebook. Urgency of which we do not really understand the reason given that, in 2022, Instagram remained the second most downloaded app after TikTok: it does not hold the first place, it is true, but compared to rivals it has existed for many more years without having substantially changed its concept. A horse that wins cannot be changed - but do they think so in Silicon Valley as well?