USA TODAY International Edition
Facebook rolls out Stories feature
Shared photos, videos disappear after 24 hours
SAN FRANCISCO Facebook on Tuesday began rolling out Stories, which encourages people to share photos and videos with friends that vanish after 24 hours.
The new feature, borrowed from popular messaging service Snapchat, is being introduced along with a slew of new camera effects and a new way to share photos and videos privately with friends on iOS and Android.
The visual bent is a radical departure for Facebook, which got its start in a Harvard University dorm room 13 years ago as a way for college kids to connect with words. Now the camera is taking the place of the keyboard as the dominant way that people express their thoughts, feelings and experiences online, Facebook says.
With Facebook Stories, people will share snapshots of interspersed moments from their lives strung together in a digital slideshow for friends to view and comment on before they disappear into digital dust.
For Facebook, this is a bid to coax young people — and people of all ages — to share more on the giant social network. The more time people spend on Facebook, the more ads they can be shown.
The social network experience didn’t always lend itself to prolific and ephemeral visual sharing. For years the question “What’s going on?” and a flashing cursor would greet Facebook users expectantly.
But as people shifted their focus to smartphones, their habits changed, too. With cheaper and faster Internet connections, better cameras and a general reluctance to type long messages on small screens, people started developing more expressive ways to interact, increasingly relying more on images than sentences.
The proof, says Facebook product manager Connor Hayes: In markets where Facebook Stories launches, people tend to share more and more often. Facebook has been testing the new features since August.
Of course, this is a page ripped straight out of the Snapchat playbook, as Facebook freely admits. “We think they did a good job,” Hayes said. “We think it’s the best format for people to share videos and photos with friends in social apps.”
Facebook freely admits that it ripped a page from the Snapchat playbook. “We think they did a good job,” Facebook product manager Connor Hayes says.