Why Facebook is 'cloning' ideas

Facebook has been on a cloning tear recently. On Thursday, the social media company announced that its photo app Instagramwas adding support for 15-second videos, a la Twitter's hit Vine app. There are a few minor differences: Vine is only 6 seconds; Instagram has filters; Vine loops; Instagram lets you delete a clip. But they are essentiallythe same tool. This is not the first time Facebook has tried replicating another company's features. It imitated Foursquare with its Places check-ins, Instagram with the Camera app, Twitterwith profiles you can follow and Snapchat with the Poke app. Last week, Facebook finally added hashtags, another creation started on Twitter, though the outrage seems to be more that it took so long. While perhaps disappointing, it is unsurprising that a minor feature gets so much media coverage (Yes. This is my third article on the topic). Facebook has more than a billion users around the world. Instagram says 130 million people use the photo-sharing service every month, and most will be excited to get a cool newfeature like video. In just 24hours, 5 million videos wereuploaded to the service, according to Instagram. What happens on these tools, even when they are tiny, has an immediate impact on a huge amount of people. "Facebook is a very important company in the world," said Brian Singerman, a partner at the Founders Fund investment firm. "Anything Facebook does impacts a billion people. That in and of itself,becoming a communications platform for a billion people, is a pretty impressive feat in the world." The small features can also have big effects for the company itself. Originality is risky, and Facebook is now a public company tasked with making investors money after a particularly harrowing first year on the stock market. For Facebook, advertising, particularly on mobile devices, is where that money will come from. In 2012, 84% of Facebook's revenue came from advertising, and videos aregoing to play a bigger role in future online advertising revenue. There are no paid ads on Instagram, but it is very brand-savvy. A handful of major companies seem to have been given early access to the new feature and posted promotional videos on the service. Major companies to post such videos include Burberry, the Los Angeles Dodgers, Gap and MTV.