Facebook, which could be consideredas the king of social media platforms, isnow finding a middle ground by optionally unlocking the history of your Stories that otherwise vanishes after 24 hours.
Soon, Facebook will start testing Stories Highlights. Similar to Instagram Stories High lights, it will allow you pick your desired photos and videos from your gallery, compile them into themed collections with titles and display them on your profile.
It will further differentiate Facebook Stories from the Snapchat Stories feature it copied. Here Facebook is thinking smart, as highly persuasive content was disintegrating each day, dragging potential ad views to the critical with it.
Moreover, for its 150 million daily users, it could make the time we spend consuming over social media Stories a wiser investment. If you’re going to waste special moments to capture them with your phone, for the best ones should still pay extra community connection beyond a day later.
When Snapchat made social media about just today, Facebook made it about forever. The 2011 famous “Timeline” redesign of the profile and keyword search unlocked your past, cheering you to put colorful posts about your life’s happy and top moments. That was truly an inspiration for Snapchat, as its CEO Evan Spiegel mentioned in its IPO announcement that “We learned that creativity can be suppressed by the fear of permanence.”
A Facebook spokesperson provided this statement about its Stories Highlights feature:
“People have told us they want a way to highlight and save the Stories that matter most to them. We’ll soon start testing highlights on Facebook – a way to choose Stories to stay on your profile, making it easier to express who you are through memories.”
You will get these Highlights on a horizontal scroll bar on your profile, and you can see how many people viewed them just like with your Stories.
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By launching the Stories Archive in May, Facebook has already paved the way for Highlights. This routinely backs up your Stories privately to your profile in order to save your storage space so you don’t have to keep the saved versions on your phone.
That Archive is the base for being capable to select dead Stories to show off in your Highlights. Together, they’ll encourage users to shoot unplanned and silly content without that “fear of permanence,” as an alternative with the opportunity.
It’s a fact that Facebook Stories continually adding new features like “Blur effect” which was recently spotted to its Stories.
Despite the fact that many tirelessly criticize Facebook for stealing the Stories from Snapchat, its fast iteration and innovation on the format means the two companies’ versions are piercingly shifting.
Snapchat still doesn’t have a Highlights feature even with launching its Archive-style Memories back in July 2016. Instead of improving the core Stories product that made the app a teen trend, it’s focused on Maps, gaming, Search, professional Discover content, and a terribly unnecessary redesign.
The relentless force to add new options and smooth out performance has paid off. Currently Instagram has 400 million daily Stories users, WhatsApp has 450 million and Facebook has 150 million, whereas Snapchat’s whole app has only 191 million.
CEO of Instagram Kevin Sitcom admitted about Snapchat, “They deserve all the credit.” Yet, it hasn’t had a big hitapart from Stories and AR puppy masks. The company’s enthusiasm for inventing fresh ways to entertain is worthy, however not always a sound business strategy.
In start, the Stories warfare was a race, just copy functionality and invades new markets. Now, Instagram and Facebook are making ephemerality elective for their Stories shows social media platform are heading toward a second phase of the war.
The main idea of broadcasting content that disappears after a day has become commoditized and institutionalized. Let’s see who’s the next winner, as from now the winner will be not the one who invented Stories, but the one who perfected them.
