What’s the real innovation that makes BeReal different to TikTok and Instagram?
The growth recently experienced by the latest app to hit the social media world, BeReal, which now exceeds fifteen million daily active users worldwide, most of them very young, seems to be making Meta and ByteDance very nervous. They have reacted as they usually do, by copying what they understand as BeReal’s originality and incorporating it into their products.
What is this attribute that supposedly makes BeReal so different? The application sends, at an unannounced time, a notification to all its users, giving them two minutes to capture an image with both front and rear cameras and share it either with their network of friends, or in the open. Users can skip or ignore the notification and post a “late BeReal”, but that’s more like using BeReal a la Instagram, when the idea is to adapt to how the app works and get a picture of what all your friends are doing at any given time.
While it could be called novel, the idea is not exactly radical, and in fact, can easily be copied: Meta is launching a new feature for Instagram…
