When Facebook brought their Snapchat Stories clone over to Messenger, it felt mostly out of place for dedicated messaging app. Continuing with their long standing obsession with Snapchat, the social network is finally ready to bring their Snapchat Stories ripoff to Facebook proper, rolling out the feature to new countries (like the US) starting today.
It’s been in testing for a few months now, so there’s a chance you may have already seen it. For everyone else, it works very much the same way as Snapchat Stories. Photos and video you post to your “Story” (yup, same name), will be live for 24 hours before they disappear forever and there are a handful of filters, geofilters, and 3D masks to spice things up. Oddly enough, Stories can’t be viewed on Facebook’s web interface, but it’s possible they’re still working on that.
It’s nothing ground breaking, but something that was badly needed on Facebook where typically photos and videos you post follow you around for the rest of your life. By adding auto-expiring posts, my hope is that users will see fewer sh*t posts on their News Feed (memes, baby photos, etc.) and more candid posts from friends and family. Quite frankly, it’s about damn time Facebook finally introduced something like this, we just don’t know what took so long. To get started, just install the app on Android (or iOS).