It goes without saying – wherever success is, you can expect others to follow in your footsteps. Snapchat is not exempt from this particular model either after its meteoric rise, leading to a mushrooming of copycats. It seems that the folks over at Instagram intend to disrupt Snapchat’s groove through Bolt, a service that has been described to cater “one tap photo messaging”. Bolt was spotted in a banner that appeared at the top of Instagram’s mobile app just last night, only to have the announcement pulled not too long afterwards.
Thankfully folks out there who spotted this banner had the presence of mind to capture a screenshot at that point in time, to keep it for posterity. Then came Twitter, which proved to be the ideal platform to send this Bolt banner all over the world and back again, but other than the banner alone, there is nothing else that can be garnered from the situation.
However, is Bolt going to add much value to the Instagram brand? For instance, it does not look like it is going to do much other than integrating itself into the current Instagram app, while Facebook’s Slingshot does offer photo and video messages already, making Bolt seem more like a direct clone in terms of functionality. Maybe there is something else that Instagram is not letting on…
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