Toutiao copies Snapchat to fight Tencent?

January 15, 2019

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We wrote about the clashes between Tencent & Toutiao (thus renamed ByteDance). It seems today ByteDance is finally moving into the frontier that Tencent guards very carefully for its WeChat – social.

ByteDance today announced Duoshan, its social app:

It seems that Duoshan is built on the success of Tik Tok, another app owned by ByteDance.

ByteDance claims that Tik Tok’s Chinese version, Douyin, has 250 million DAU by end of 2018

The users can log into Duoshan using their Tik Tok account, and synchronise their existing Tik Tok interactions with Duoshan.

Short videos – the key of Tik Tok – also feature prominently in Duoshan. The users are able to send video messages to their friends and exchange video ‘red packets‘.

The other functions of Duoshan include:

taking and posting videos that will be visible for 72 hours
adding special effects to videos
discovering videos around the world.

You might say, wait a minute, aren’t these features of Snapchat?

Thus far, Duoshan seems to be luckier than many other social apps developed by different parties in attempts to challenge WeChat. At least its promotional page on WeChat has not become this:

“This web page has insecure content” and WeChat has blocked it to “protect green internet environment”