Facebook might believe in copying some features off competitors, but it believes in doing them to the best of its abilities. And CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes that the company has now managed to leapfrog competitors to stand at the forefront of visual communication involving AR and cameras.
Speaking at the company’s earnings call, Facebook CEO emphasized upon the fact that his company might be late to visual communications however, with the launch of Camera Effects, the company is now in a position to move ahead as the leader.
As per Zuckerberg:
I think we were a little bit late to the trend initially around making cameras the center of how sharing works. But I do think at this point we’re pretty much ahead in terms of the technology that we’re building, and making an open platform I think is a big step forward. A lot of people are using these products across our family of apps. And I would expect us to continue leading the way forward on this from this point on.
This is a pretty impressive claim considering that Facebook basically believes that it now exceeds Snapchat and all of its peers, when it comes to communication that has a camera at its center. And that, when Snapchat is basically centered around communicating with your camera — that is its premise after all — whereas Facebook arrived at that base fairly recently.
As far as monetization is concerned, Zuckerberg talked about an AR loaded future wherein you would be able to just whip out your camera, point it at stuff and see a but button pop up. So, it seems as if the company is being cautious here and is keeping a tight control over monetization.
However, the company is likely to get in outside developers when it comes to building AR content. This is in sharp contrast to Snapchat, which has its in-house teams working on AR without any outside support.
With this though, Facebook could actually come up with a large number of products in short order whereas Snapchat still has around merely 20. Getting outside developers in could allow Facebook to build selfie-filters and other stuff in short order and by the hundreds.
