Why trust Greenbot
While Snapchat brought Stories to the world, Facebook seems remarkably focused on bringing its own Stories-inspired feature to its apps.
The next big addition for Facebook-owned products is WhatsApp, which has just announced that it is adding a new Stories feature, which will live in a new tab all to themselves.
The new Stories feature in WhatsApp begins rolling out today, for the iPhone app, Android users, and even Windows Phone users, because why not. The WhatsApp variant of the feature works in the same way: Take a photo with the in-app camera, and then you can edit that photo with text, emoji, and drawings. There’s a new “Status” tab, and the story will appear there, hosted for 24 hours before it disappears.
As The Verge reports, WhatsApp is symbolizing the eighth birthday of the messaging app:
“When WhatsApp launched nearly 8 years ago (on Feb. 24th), it started as an app for sharing status updates, where people could type a short line of text to let their friends know what they were up to,” the company said in a blog post. “When we noticed people were using the feature to communicate in real time, we redesigned WhatsApp as a messaging app.”
It isn’t a secret at this point that Facebook wants to blunt the growth of Snapchat, which is one reason why the Snapchat-like Stories keeps showing up in Facebook’s apps.
[via The Verge]
