When Facebook offered $3 billion to Snapchat’s CEO Evan Spiegel to acquire the popular picture messaging app, Spiegel’s flat “no” didn’t deter the social media enterprise for very long. According to Philly.com, Facebook’s engineers took matters into their own hands, creating a new Snapchat-like feature for their users’ statuses that is now in the early stages of testing.
Select Facebook users might notice that, when they go to post a status, link, or picture on their mobile Facebook app, there’s an extra step: “Choose Expiration.” One such user posted a screenshot of the new feature on Twitter, showing a few different options. Facebookers can have their posts disappear within a few hours, a day, or even a week. The feature could work best for timely posts, such as event invites or trending news articles.
