Social networking may be the Facebook’s core proposition but over the years it has employed various strategies and tactics to make networking engaging, in order to ensure interested and growing user base.
Facebook Stories, complete with new ways to share from Facebook Camera with some fun filters, is one of the newest attempts in that direction.
Stories is a chronological picture series, pioneered by Snap in the social media space. Facebook has taken this feature across the main brand Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and even WhatsApp.
“We hope that with the new Facebook camera, Stories and Direct, it will be easier than ever to see the world through each other’s eyes, and we can’t wait to see the photos and videos you create,” said a Facebook post by Connor Hayes, Product Manager at Facebook.
Like in the case of Snap, Stories will disappear from the app after 24 hours. The post quoted, “The Instagram community has shown us that it can be fun to share things that disappear after a day, so in the main Facebook app, we are also introducing Facebook Stories, which lets you share multiple photos and videos as part of a visual collection atop News Feed.”
A user’s friends can view photos or videos from their story for 24 hours, and stories won’t appear on Timeline or in News Feed unless the user posts them there too.
In addition to Story, the feature Direct allows users to share photos and videos with specific friends for a limited time.
Facebook Camera comes with masks, frames and interactive filters. In addition to its own options, Facebook is also partnering with brands to create masks for upcoming movies like ‘Alien: Covenant’, ‘Despicable Me 3’, ‘Guardians of the Galaxy 2’, ‘Power Rangers’, ‘Smurfs: The Lost Village’ and ‘Wonder Woman’ for this feature.
This is not the first time Facebook has added a feature from its competition in the space. For instance, in 2013, Facebook had popularized the use of hashtags in its conversations, to create a Twitter like experience in conversations without the word limit. The social media major has not even shied away in taking the features across all its platforms, WhatsApp included – an indication of its determination to be all things social to keep its users interested in the longer run.
