Instagram is proof shameless copying pays off

The best way to beat your biggest competitor is to straight-up copy them. 

That may go against everything they teach you in business school, but that's the lesson we can draw from the past two years Instagram has spent relentlessly copying Snapchat.

It's been almost two years since Facebook gave up building its own Snapchat clones and instead announced Instagram had simply created its own version of Snapchat's signature feature.

Since then, Instagram has gone on to unabashedly copy a whole bunch of other features, from face filters to disappearing messages. It now happens so routinely, in fact, that we're legit surprised when the app introduces an original feature not lifted directly from Evan Siegel's playbook.  Read more...