A few years back, a number of misguided analysts were so taken with Snapchat that they boldly declared that Facebook was in trouble and that the company’s best days were behind it. Interestingly enough, the success of Snapchat, if anything, served as a strong motivator for Facebook. Indeed, Facebook over the past few years hasn’t exactly been shy about liberally borrowing some of Snapchat’s more distinguishing features and incorporating them into Facebook and Instagram.
These days, Facebook is as strong as ever and boasts 2.07 billion monthly active users. Translation: 1 out of every 4 people on the entire planet uses Facebook at least once a month. And showing no signs of slowing down, Facebook is still taking many of Snapchat’s more interesting ideas and adding them to its own properties.
The most recent example involves Facebook testing a new feature which alerts users as to how many days in a row they’ve chatted with a certain person. The feature then encourages these users to keep the streak alive, which of course, only serves to deepen user engagement.
Facebook confirmed that it was testing the feature in a statement provided to Mashable earlier today.
For example, a lightning bolt may appear next to the name of a person you’ve messaged with for at least three days in a row, and a counter will indicate how many consecutive days you’ve been chatting. We’re interested to see if people enjoy this insight, but we don’t have any additional information to share at this time.
There’s no telling if Facebook will ultimately roll out this feature to its entire user base, but the overarching takeaway here is that Facebook is constantly tinkering with ways to keep its users glued to the site and that it’s not going to sit idly by and let Snapchat usurp its position as the top social network in the world.
A Twitter user posted a screenshot of what Facebook’s streak feature currently looks like.
Messenger is testing out streak counts… Streak counts really bug me. pic.twitter.com/leDRemkSR3
— case (@CaseSandberg) November 22, 2017
