Google was reportedly looking to buy Snapchat for a whopping $30 billion early last year. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel apparently wasn’t very interested in making a deal, so it never happened. In 2013, there was even a rumor that Google was trying to buy Snapchat for $4 billion, just after Spiegel declined an offer from Facebook. Now it looks like Google will be more than ready to compete by taking a page from Snapchat’s book.
Both the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg are reporting that Google is about to launch something similar to Snapchat Discover. For those that don’t know, Snapchat Discover is a designated area within the Snapchat app where users can skip to a new story or ad with the swipe of their finger. The upcoming Google product will echo this, with articles popping up in a magazine-like design. It will apparently be called Stamp.
“The success of the open source AMP project is down to the constant collaboration with publishers that involves working early on upcoming features,” Google said in a statement released on Friday, August 4. “We don’t have anything to announce at the moment but look forward to sharing more soon.”
For Stamp, the “ST” stands for Stories, while the “AMP” stands for the Google Accelerated Mobile Pages initiative. AMP, much like Facebook Instant Articles, allows the loading of online news stories to go at a much faster speed. In terms of testing with publishers, Stamp is in the early stages. WSJ suggests, however, that we could see Stamp in Google Search and/or other Google apps as early as next week. The publishers include CNN, Time, Vox Media and The Washington Post.
If this feature does move beyond Google Search and into other Google apps and publisher’s websites, this could mark a very key difference between Stamp and Snapchat Discover. Since the latter supports stories through its own app. Snapchat has developed some cool features to set itself apart from the rest of the competition, like the Snapchat Spectacles. Google, meanwhile, continues to advance its tech and products, making things more convenient for consumers. Stamp being the most recent example.
