After Instagram adopted Snapchat’s 24-hour Stories into their app, Facebook is now planning to bring the same functionality to their mobile app. After Business Insider first reported on the feature earlier this month, Facebook is now testing the feature in Ireland. It’s quite common for Facebook to test new features like this in smaller territories before rolling it out to everyone.
As expected, the feature uses the new in-app camera that Facebook has built. It works a whole lot like Snapchat’s, allowing you to use different filters and add stickers to your pictures and video. It’s expected to work almost identically to what Instagram has currently. Where it shows stories from people you follow in the top section of the app. So you can tap on someone and view their story. You’ll be able to share both video and pictures. These stories do disappear after 24 hours, so it’s a great way to keep people in Facebook and using the service.
Facebook has been adding all sorts of video features to their social network over the past few years, and this is in an effort to not only bring more ad slots, but to also bring in more users. Or at least keep their users on the site longer. Recently, Facebook stated that they had ran out of ad slots and needed to find more spaces to sell to advertisers. Adding features like Stories will help them add more ad slots, as they can play ads between stories, like Snapchat does currently and Instagram will likely begin doing in the near future. Since Facebook’s only source of revenue is from ads, it’s important that they keep debuting new features like Stories so that they have more places to sell ads.
It’s currently unclear how long the social network will be testing Stories in Ireland and when it’ll be available elsewhere, but it could take quite some time. When they first started testing Reactions in Japan, it was months, almost a year, before it rolled out worldwide. Hopefully it won’t take that long, but it’s hard to say how long it’ll be. In the meantime, you can still use Instagram’s Stories, which they announced today that Instagram Live has rolled out to everyone, globally.