Facebook clones another Snapchat feature with the debut of Stories

By Kyle Wiggers January 25, 2017

facebook journalism grants login smartphone

The joke is becoming old at this point: Facebook can’t seem to stop grafting the competition’s features into its own social web. It launched Facebook Live, a streaming video feature “inspired” by apps like Twitter’s Periscope and Meerkat, in 2015. It recently added a Stories feature to Instagram, a subsidiary, shortly after the introduction of Snapchat Stories. Now, it’s doing more of the same. On Wednesday, Facebook announced Facebook Stories — a collection of automatically generated ephemeral montages.

Using Facebook’s new in-app camera, users can put filters over friends’ faces and tag photos and videos with locations, and add that content to Stories. Like Instagram and Snapchat, Stories stick around for 24 hours.

Recommended Videos

Stories don’t show up in the News Feed or on a user’s timeline by default, but tapping on a friend’s circle pulls up their most recent Story. Viewers then have the option to sending a direct message, or sharing the Story with their broader friend group.

“The way people share today is different to five or even two years ago — it’s much more visual, with more photos and videos than ever before,” Facebook said in a statement. “We want to make it fast and fun for people to share creative and expressive photos and videos with whoever they want, whenever they want.”

It’s an attempt to prod users into sharing more of their personal moments on Facebook. A report from The Information in April found users were uploading fewer videos and photos to the social network, preferring instead to “reshare” existing content. Stories might help to reverse the trend.

“[We] built on a format that Snapchat invented,” Instagram’s head of product Kevin Weil told Recode. “We believe that format will be universal.”

It couldn’t have a wider audience. Stories are initially rolling out to Facebook users in Ireland for the moment, but a spokesperson told Business Insider that the company planned to bring it to more countries in the coming months.

Facebook’s cloned more just Snapchat’s Stories feature in recent years. It bought MSQRD, an app that creates face filters, in March, and added the feature to the Facebook app and Messenger. It recently began testing Snapchat-style cameras in the Facebook app. It also built a virtual copy of Snapchat called Flash for emerging markets.

It’s a winning strategy. Facebook says that more than 150 million people use Stories every day, which is roughly the same number of active users on Snapchat. That is just in the five months since the debut of Instagram Stories. Instagram has roughly 600 million users, and Facebook more than 1.2 billion.

Snap, Snapchat’s parent company, is readying an initial public offering that’s expected to fetch between $20 billion to $25 billion. It could be one of the largest U.S. technology IPOs in recent years. Facebook reportedly attempted to buy Snap for $3 billion in 2013, but the startup declined.

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Kyle Wiggers is a writer, Web designer, and podcaster with an acute interest in all things tech. When not reviewing gadgets…

Social Media

What does the lock mean on Snapchat?

A person using Snapchat on an iPhone.

If you're new to Snapchat (or just a casual Snapchat user), you might not be aware of all of its features, including a certain lock-shaped icon. If you've ever wondered what that little lock icon means on Snapchat, you've come to the right place. In this guide, we'll explain what the lock is for and how it's connected to a Snapchat feature.
What does the lock mean on Snapchat?
In Snapchat, that lock icon indicates that the Snapchat story you're seeing is what's known as a Private Story.
What exactly is a Private Story?

A Private Story is a type of Snapchat story that allows the Snapchatter who posts it to restrict that story's visibility to only a few, select friends. That is to say, if you post a Private Story, you can choose which of your friends can see it. Additionally, the only user who can invite other users to it or add Snaps to a Private Story is the user who created the Private Story in the first place.

Social Media

Instagram to soon let creators make NFTs and sell them to fans

Series of four mobile screenshots showing the selling of collectibles on Instagram.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on your favorite social media platforms are apparently here to stay. At least that seems to be the case for one Meta-owned platform.

On Wednesday, as part of its Creator Week event, Meta announced that Instagram will soon let creators make and sell their own NFTs on the app itself. The new ability was described as another way for fans to support their favorite creators.

Social Media

What do the eyes mean on your Snapchat Story?

The Snapchat app store listing on a mobile device with a stylus resting on it.

Snapchat (and Snapchat+ for that matter) offers quite a few features to its users and it's understandable if you're not familiar with all of them. One feature, in particular, seems to have a function that doesn't seem obvious at first glance. If you've ever looked at one of your Stories on Snapchat and noticed a pair of eyes emoji next to it and wondered what it meant, you've come to the right place.

In this guide, we'll go over what that pair of eyes icon means in relation to your Snapchat Stories and take a closer look at the Snapchat feature it represents.
What do the eyes mean on a Snapchat Story?
Essentially, according to Snapchat's Support guide on the matter, the pair of eyes emoji is an indicator that your friends have rewatched a given Story that you've posted. In fact, next to that pair of eyes should be a number that denotes the number of friends that rewatched a given Story.