After testing the feature outside the US, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network is bringing the format Snapchat “pioneered” to its marquee app.
Facebook Stories, similar to Snapchat’s popular feature, is launching globally.
Facebook just made its biggest move in its war against Snapchat.
The social network on Tuesday widely released Facebook Stories, a near-identical clone of rival Snapchat’s popular feature, also called Stories. The feature lets people post a string of videos and photos that disappear after 24 hours.
If it sounds like you’ve heard this before, you have. Facebook has already brought Stories to many of its other apps: Instagram has Instagram Stories. WhatsApp has something called Status. Messenger’s version is called Messenger Day. But this is the first time Facebook is bringing Stories globally to its marquee app, which gets more than 1.7 billion mobile visitors a month. (Facebook had previously been testing the feature in a handful of countries outside the US, including Ireland and Chile.)
“Yes, this is something that was pioneered by Snapchat,” Connor Hayes, a product manager at Facebook, said during a press briefing in San Francisco on Monday. “We think they did a great job of uncovering that Stories as a format is the way that people really want to share photos and videos in social apps. ”
You can add filters to photos and videos.
With Facebook Stories, you can add filters or masks — what Snapchat calls “lenses” — to your pictures or videos. For example, you can give someone a unibrow, mustache, sunglasses or glitter beard. (Yes, that’s a beard made of digital glitter.) Or you can filter a video so it looks like it was created in the style of a famous artist, like Picasso.
