There are certain inalienable facts of life. Prices will go up. Politicians will philander. And tech companies will rip each other off. When they’re not buying each other up, the benevolent overlords of Silicon Valley aren’t above just lifting whatever ideas they like, adapting or improving them and repurposing them as their own. It’s what happened with Facebook’s Instagram-style stories (does anyone ever use these?), which in turn was Instagram’s appropriation of Snapchat stories. Now it’s Instagram and TikTok.
The former is reportedly developing a new in-app feature known as Clips, which on further inspection sounds suspiciously similar to a feature already popular on TikTok, source of all great music mash-ups, e-girl factories and cursed memes.
In a post on Twitter, Jane Manchun Wong, a reverse engineer who regularly finds unreleased developments planned for social platforms, revealed the planned Clips feature. Jane reveals that the feature would allow users to post videos on their Instagram stories which are recorded in snippets and then spliced together. It also allows Instagram users to speed up and slow down their videos, overlay music and edit their length.
Sound familiar? The ability to edit videos and collaborate with other users has often been cited as central to TikTok’s huge success (back in February the app celebrated 1 billion downloads). Instagram Clips sounds like it would take those innovations and move them over to an app with even more users.
While Instagram is staying tight lipped on the development — it declined to comment on the existence of Clips when contacted by Business Insider — Jane’s blog reveals that the social network began work on it back in July. Which means we could all be recording drunk lip syncs onto our Instagram stories sooner than you might think. Buzzing.