What is one thing common between Facebook and Instagram? Well, neither of them are shy about copying Snapchat features and making them their own. Instagram for instance, is so familiar with the Stories feature that you would think they invented them in the first place. And now, Facebook is rolling its Stories feature out globally as well.
We got our first look at Facebook Stories when the company started testing it in Ireland, in January. There wasn’t really much information available upon when the company would make the inevitable move to global. It appears as if the time is now and the company is finally readying to roll the feature out to users across the globe.
How does the feature work? Facebook’s new feature lets you share temporary pictures and videos in a slideshow like format with everyone. These pictures and videos disappear 24 hours later and as such, you can share stuff that you wouldn’t usually do on a social media platform.
There are also a bunch of little circles that are placed above the news feed on the platform, and let your friends and followers keep track of your stories. Each circle corresponds to a particular fiend and has their picture on it. These circles are right above your news feed in the Facebook application so there is no danger of missing something new posted by a friend.
The next Snapchat killer? Facebook has started implementing stories on their app. IG stories took most of the users of Snapchat. pic.twitter.com/jpyK7pGUhA
— Neil Enore (@neilenore) March 15, 2017
Meanwhile, many people are questioning the wisdom of copying Snapchat’s core features and integrating them into Facebook and even WhatsApp. If you remember, WhatsApp received its new status a couple of weeks ago, status that is suspiciously similar to Snapchat. Copying Snapchat features and using them in Instagram is on thing, after all the two apps are highly similar and share a similar audience in millennials. Adding them to Facebook just cause they turned out to be popular on Instagram doesn’t seem very well thought out to me.
After all, Facebook already has temporary profile pictures, and updates made by your friends are usually displayed all too prominently on your news feed. Going to the trouble of creating a separate section above the app where you can visit updates from your friends, doesn’t seem to make much sense to me. However, each to his own. I haven’t used the feature firsthand yet and there is a possibility that Facebook has tweaked Stories to make it more suitable for its platform.
The new features appear to be rolling out to Facebook audience globally, although not everyone is getting access just yet. We will update you as soon as we know more about the topic.
