Watch out, Snapchat: Facebook launches Stories, camera effects
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 way 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."
And that's why Facebook has been placing its bests on this more visual format.
Earlier this month, Facebook Messenger introduced Messenger Day, the latest app to mimic Snapchat's popular photo-sharing features. In February, WhatsApp unveiled Status, which lets people share images, GIFs and videos as a status update. Status, like Snapchat's Stories feature, disappears after 24 hours. In August, Facebook-owned Instagram, which has 600 million users, debuted Stories, a look-alike of Snapchat's Stories feature.
Of the recent rollouts, the most successful was Instagram Stories, which grew to 150 million daily users in five months. Stories features on messaging services WhatsApp and Messenger have gotten some negative feedback from users.
Jan Dawson, chief analyst with Jackdaw Research, says Stories may find a natural home inside the Facebook mobile app.
"If Facebook gets this right, it’s obviously both another reason to use Facebook and also another reason for Snapchat users to shift some time and use to Facebook instead," Dawson said. "So Facebook could increase time spent and stickiness for its own products, while putting another dent in Snapchat’s user growth."
With its nearly 2 billion users, this move by Facebook certainly escalates competition with the smaller yet nimbler Snapchat.
Growth in Snapchat's number of daily users slowed toward the end of 2016 to 158 million users, casting a shadow over its initial public offering earlier this month. The Venice, Calif., company blamed technical problems with its Android mobile app as one reason for the slowdown in user growth but the timing coincided with Instagram's launch in August of its Snapchat Stories clone.
If these Stories features catch on with Facebook users, that could spell trouble for Snapchat's future growth, especially overseas.
For Facebook users, Stories will be in your face when you open the mobile app. But Facebook isn't transforming itself into the next Snapchat. Instead it's channeling the instincts of Snap co-founder and chief executive Evan Spiegel, who wrote in a letter to investors before the Snapchat parent's initial public offering earlier this month: "We believe that the camera screen will be the starting point for most product on smartphones."
The camera is not the starting point for Facebook. For now the News Feed retains its place at the center of the Facebook experience, even on mobile. But visual sharing is getting more real estate.
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In the Facebook app, the "Your Story" icon will appear in the "Stories" bar at the top of the News Feed. Your friends can view photos or videos of your story for 24 hours and in turn you can view theirs. To add your story, tap the "Your Story" icon.
The camera icon will appear in the top left corner of the Facebook app and will offer dozens of effects such as masks, frames and interactive filters and even some voice distortion effects to jazz up photos and videos.
Film studios have teamed up with Facebook with some of the masks coming from Alien: Covenant, Despicable Me 3, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Power Rangers, Smurfs: The Lost Village and Wonder Woman. There will also be creative effects courtesy of two visual artists: Douglas Coupland and Hattie Stewart. In coming months, Facebook plans to roll out ways for users to create their own frames and effects.
For people who want to share individual photos and videos with specific friends for a limited span of time, Facebook has added Direct. Friends who are sent a photo or video over Direct will be able to view it once and replay it or write a reply. Once the conversation end, the content will no longer be visible.