by 18a Editorial
In the recent weeks Facebook have tried to create Stories similar to Snapchat. And let’s just say that it hasn't really worked as well as they would have hoped.
Stories appear at the top of your Newsfeed - but with no one posting stories, this led to a large amount of white space at the top of your screen. Therefore a week after Facebook released their Stories feature - just for it to be deemed by many as a complete flop - they’ve now added greyed out images of people that haven’t posted yet, to fill that empty void. Facebook have stated that they didn’t like the white space there, so they’ve placed ghost-like images of your friends floating around the top of your screen, waiting for them to post a story. Thanks, Facebook but it's not Halloween just yet!
And if you didn't know what a story is, it is a short photo or video of anything that you'd like to share with your friends. You can add filters, text, and stickers to your story similarly to Snapchat and Instagram. If you're familiar with these two social media applications then Facebook Stories will come as second nature to you.
They are different from a post as a post will stay on your page till you delete it, whereas a story will stay on your profile for 24 hours and it will then disappear forever unless you save it. You post them by selecting your Facebook profile photo at the top of your newsfeed, this will then open your in-app camera. You can either take a photo or video or chose a photo already you have on your phone and then post it to your story.
Although the Facebook stories have some interesting features like funky filters and quirky stickers to add it still just doesn’t work and isn’t as good as Snapchat and Instagram.
People are going mad about the Facebook stories, posting memes about other applications adding stories like Excel and even pregnancy tests! A lot of social media applications and messaging services have added these stories, like Instagram and even WhatsApp. Instagram’s stories are wildly popular but unfortunately, Facebook and WhatsApp didn’t crack the special recipe for making it successful. Hopefully, this will be the end of ‘stories’ as it seems that they’re taking over every social media application, and although it’s interesting seeing what your friends are doing we think it’s a bit too much.