Facebook’s Stories are one of the firm’s attempts to capitalise on the success of Snapchat’s stories by cloning the story format. WhatsApp and Instagram both have variants of stories, and bizarrely enough, Facebook offered users of both Messenger and the general Facebook app two different “story” features. As Facebook and Messenger are both interlinked, the arbitrary demarcation of these two features made no sense.
Now, the firm is doing the sensible, smart thing that it should have done in the first place and is merging its stories with Messenger Day(via TechCrunch), so users can crosspost the same stories and have them visible across both the Facebook and Messenger apps. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t have done this from the start, but at least its been done.
Facebook still hasn’t shared any metrics about the usage of the app, in stark contrast with the success of Instagram’s Stories, the usage stats of which have been compared to Snapchat as metrics caught up and overtook the latter in April this year.
Facebook’s Stories are still pretty much a ghost-town, make no mistake, but at least now there’s a chance of people moving in.