A Tale Of Two Patents: Why Facebook Can’t Clone Snapchat

Facebook released Slingshot, its second attempt at an impermanent sharing app, last Tuesday. The app borrows heavily, in concept and features, from Snapchat, as well as smaller startups like Frontback and Look.
Slingshot and Facebook Messenger feature the same photo and video recording interface–a very user friendly mechanism where you tap the main button to take a picture, and hold that button to record a video.
There’s just one problem: Facebook may be violating Snapchat’s patent, “Single mode visual media capture” that was approved over a year ago.
Representatives from both Facebook and Snapchat declined to comment for this story, but the patent appears to describe the way both companies’ apps record media:

“An electronic device includes digital image sensors to capture visual media, a display to present the visual media from the digital image sensors and a touch controller to identify haptic contact engagement, haptic contact persistence and haptic contact release on the display. A visual media capture controller alternately records the visual media as a photograph or a video based upon an evaluation of the time period between the haptic contact engagement and the haptic contact release.”

To some extent, this copying is commonplace in a playing field where ideas and features overlap significantly.
But Snapchat isn’t the only startup involved with a patent claim. Look debuted the idea of a messaging app in which people have to send back content to view friends’ messages at the TechCrunch Los Angeles Pitch-Off, which it won.
Look’s website has a “patent pending” sticker near the top; while Look CEO Megel Brown wouldn’t comment directly on whether Facebook violates Look’s patent application, he did note, “We never imagined Facebook would use our messaging mechanic to compete with Snapchat. Neither company has reached out to us.  However, we have been in contact with a major Silicon Valley player about our app after Facebook initially released and pulled their app from the App Store.”

A Second Snapchat Patent

A second Snapchat patent may show how each company thinks about this space–and why I believe Snapchat will continue to beat Facebook.
The patent, “Apparatus and method for single action control of social network profile access,” describes the way users view content in Snapchat Stories. Particularly, when you view another user’s story, Snapchat only shows you content you haven’t seen yet:

“A computer implemented method includes allowing a user to access a user-controlled social network profile page with posts in a specified order. A user is permitted to traverse an interface element across the specified order to establish a set position for the interface element. Access to posts is provided on a first side of the set position to define a viewable profile. Access to posts is blocked on a second side of the set position to define a non-viewable profile.”

The most interesting aspect of the patent? It was filed on November 8, 2012. So, when Facebook launched its first Snapchat clone, Poke, on December 22, 2012, Snapchat was already thinking far ahead.

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