Line Chat app adds stories that disappear in Snap style – TechCrunch



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Facebook instant cloning death may be old news, but others just follow. Line, the highly popular Japanese email application, has recently become the latest to clone Snap's ephemeral story concept.

The company announced today that it was adding stories that disappear after 24 hours to its timeline function, a social network similar to a thread that is in its application and user profiles. The update is being rolled out for users and the concept is very similar to Snap, Instagram and others that have adopted content limited in time.

"As publications disappear after 24 hours, there is no need to worry about over-publication or the presence of publications in the feed," said in an updated US-listed line. in Japan. "Stories allows friends to discover real-time information about the timeline that is only available for that moment."

Snap pioneered self-destruct content in its application, and the concept is now present in most of the world's most popular Internet services.

In particular, Facebook has added stories at all levels: to its main application, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, the world's most popular chat app with over 1.5 billion monthly users. Indeed, Facebook claims that WhatsApp stories are used by 500 million people, while the company has integrated Instagram into a service that has long had more users than Snap – currently over a billion.

However, the approach does not always work – Facebook is launching its most daring copy of Snap, a camera app built around Instagram direct messages.

WeChat, the best chat application in China, added its own version earlier this year and, although it said in its results this week that users are downloading "hundreds of millions of videos every day" on its platforms social, she did not give any figures on her feature photos.

Line has nothing to do with Facebook's or WeChat's social application constellation, but it is Japan's dominant messaging platform and is popular in Thailand, Taiwan, and Indonesia.

The Japanese company does not disclose the number of users worldwide but has declared 164 million users per month in its four key markets in the first quarter of 2019, a drop of one million per year. Of this figure, Japan has 80 million, ahead of Thailand (44 million), Taiwan (21 million) and Indonesia (19 million).

While the growth in the number of users has stagnated, Line has been able to generate an increase in revenue. In addition to an incursion into services – in Japan, its range covers revival, food delivery, streaming music and payments -, advertising has been expanded in the "timeline" tab of the program. application, which is probably one of the main reasons for the publication of articles. The new feature can help the timeline get more glances, while the company could follow the initiative of Snap and Instagram to monetize stories by allowing businesses to access them.

In the case of Line, it could work quite well – for advertising – since users can already choose to follow the business accounts. It would therefore be logical to let companies pass on their stories to users who have chosen to follow their account. But it's a long way into the future and it will depend on how users get the new feature.

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