Facebook too was working on a Snapchat-like feature

Instagram recently ‘stole’ one of the biggest feature of rival Snapchat – disappearing pictures and videos. The company launched Instagram Stories that allows its over 500 million users to post pictures and videos with 24-hour limit, a feature similar to the signature feature of Snapchat.
Now, according to a report in Tech Crunch, Instagram’s parent company Facebook had already built a similar feature called Quick Updates. The social media giant, however, never went ahead with the plan and the particular feature stayed stuck in testing stages.
According to the report, Quick Updates by Facebook was supposed to be accessible via a single button placed on top of the News Feed. Just like in Snapchat, the posts made on Quick Updates were said to disappear after 24 hours. It was also possible to edit the image or videos with an overlaying text, all of which would appear on the user’s profile pages.
On the UI front, the Facebook’s Quick Updates feature reportedly resembled closely to that of Snapchat stories and was nowhere near to Instagram stories. The social media giant while showing it to limited users confirmed that Quick Updates existed but later told TechCrunch, “We often conduct small tests of new feature concepts, and this particular experience was an old test feature that was shown to some people. We don’t have any plans to launch it more broadly.”
Launched earlier this week, Instagram Stories showcases pictures and videos uploaded by a user in a slideshow format. Instagram says the new feature does not allow users to “like” an image or post a comment, but followers can send direct messages to the uploader.
The photo-sharing social network Instagram was few days back also reported to roll out comment moderation feature to all it users. The feature seems to be aimed at tackling online harassment and trolls.