Facebook is planning on building an app that closely resembles Snapchat’s Stories and deploy the upgrade sometime in the near future.
The social media company is currently testing Snapchat’s Stories feature on its platform in Ireland together with a bunch of other Snapchat related features. Stories was introduced for the first time on social media by Snapchat and refers to a series of user-generated pictures or video montages. Facebook has now taken interest in this feature and designed a similar one that erases the videos or pictures automatically after 24 hours.
Instagram has recently upgraded to include a similar feature. However, since Facebook now owns Instagram, it comes as no surprise that Zuckerberg wants Stories for his own platform, as well. A spokesperson for Facebook said that the Snapchat-like features deployed in Ireland are part of a test and will not last long.
“We’re hoping to bring Stories to the rest of the world in the coming months”, said the spokesperson.
This could mean that Facebook is, by all means, serious to adopt the feature in the near future. Moreover, the feature also includes live streaming by extension, which Facebook has been pushing to champion recently.
So far, Instagram’s version of Stories experienced great success. A survey revealed the social media platform is home to approximately 150 million users a day, more than Snapchat’s entire user base. Instagram’s head of product, Kevin Weil, expects Stories to grow extremely popular in the near future, much like hashtags did, especially on Twitter.
In the meantime, Facebook was not exactly subtle about copying some of Snapchat’s key features since it first started to take pages off the former company’s playbook in 2016. This could also mean that Mark Zuckerberg acknowledges Snapchat’s rise to fame and uses some of its most prolific features that drew the public’s attention in the past to his own social media platform’s benefit. Even more so since a survey conducted last year revealed that “sharing” on Facebook dropped significantly in 2015. At the same time, the same trend was observed on Instagram, as well.
However, since Stories brought a breath of fresh air to Instagram, maybe the same will happen to Facebook, as long as the feature is put to good use. At the moment, Snapchat is struggling to build a steady relationship with its investors. No wonder, since Facebook registers almost 1 billion active users per day, Instagram 300 million, and Snapchat comes in shortest, with only 150 million daily active users.
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