Oh Snap.

Snapchat’s collaborative story feature is bad news for Facebook and Twitter.

I wasn’t at EDC Las Vegas, but thanks to Snapchat it felt like I was. I didn’t watch a minute of the ‘EDC Curated’ YouTube stream, but I couldn’t stop watching the never-ending updates from festivalgoers that made the cut into the official ‘EDClive’ Snapchat story.

The key to that previous sentence is “made the cut.” Snapchat expertly curated the stream for maximum engagement. (Lord help whoever actually sat there sifting through the raw stream of submissions. It was likely a monumental effort to weed out all the topless women and token drug-related snaps, but it’s yet another example of the virtues of human curation.) Photos were cut down to a mere two seconds, while sub-10-second videos showing the festival from different perspectives were peppered throughout the minutes-long stream.

[Our Story is yet] another example of the virtues of human curation.

There were Snapchats from helicopters, Snapchats of acrobats in silver jumpsuits flying through the air on trampolines, and Snapchats from behind, in-front-of, and on-top-of the DJ booth. There were even Snapchats taken by particularly risk-seeking attendees aboard the nauseating carnival rides on-site. There were also multiple Snapchats of people tying the knot.

What resulted was one of the most diverse, most engaging streams of content I have ever seen. Even when the story clocked in at over 500 seconds (nearly 10 minutes), the fast pace made it easily-digestible and inexplicably fun to watch. The photo-centric nature of Snapchat was worlds better than a feed of hashtagged Tweets or Facebook updates. That’s not to say people weren’t talking about EDC on Twitter or Facebook — it’s just that the Snapchat experience was decidedly different.

A TechCrunch reporter on-site at the festival says that the Snapchat-sponsored WiFi barely worked and lamented his inability to contribute to ‘Our EDC Story.’ From an outsider’s perspective, that doesn’t matter. I didn’t care that crappy cell service meant some Snaps didn’t go through because what did make the cut was fun, visually appealing, and made me feel like I was a part of it. The effort was reportedly worth it: Over 130,000 people tuned in on Snapchat according to the tech publication.

Contrast EDC Vegas with the World Cup, another event that dominated my social feeds this weekend. Every time there was a goal, there were Tweets. Every time there was a close call or funny line from the commentators, more Tweets. The experience of reading those Tweets, however, was… boring. After being presented with a relentless stream of images and videos from EDC through Snapchat, watching Twitter during a live event felt lame. And that is not a good thing for Twitter.

After being presented with a relentless stream of images and videos from EDC through Snapchat, watching Twitter during a live event felt lame.

Festival livestreams have become fairly formulaic: sweeping views of massive crowds with shots of the hulking stages and superstar DJs. They’ve become unexciting and impersonal. Insomniac attempted to change that up with its ‘EDC Curated’ livestream approach that included attendee interviews and more casual content, but the ungodly hours of the stream itself (8:30 PM PST to 8:30AM PST) combined with the watch-when-you-want nature of Snapchat completely overshadowed this effort. Plus, thanks to SiriusXM streams and enterprising copyright-infringers, the full audio from marquee sets always makes it to SoundCloud anyway.

Our Story is arguably one of the most important features Snapchat has added — and it should have Facebook and Twitter very, very worried.

Our Story is arguably one of the most important features Snapchat has added — and it should have Facebook and Twitter very, very worried. Yes, the images disappear after a period of time (though you can screenshot them) and yes, Snapchat is still largely skewed toward the younger demographic and pales in size compared to Facebook. But the concept was proven this weekend at EDC Vegas and, WiFi issues aside, it appears to have been a massive success.

People go to events like gigantic festivals to feel like they are a part of something larger, and Snapchat this weekend extended that experience to anyone who added the account to their friend list. It’s only a matter of time before Snapchat figures out an organic way to monetize the feature and repeats it again and again. I, personally, can’t wait until they do.

I’ll leave you with a staggering statistic that shows the disconnect between the EDC YouTube stream and the EDC Snapchat story (with data ironically gained from Twitter analytics tool Topsy): There were a mere 2,236 Tweets that contained ‘EDC Curated’ over the past 3 days. The number of Tweets containing ‘EDC Snapchat’ in the same timeframe? 14,703.