Facebook Stories Fail to Launch

Mark Zuckerberg has been looking at Snapchat with envy since the photo deleting app launched. He has tried to buy it, they said no. He tried to replicate it with an app called Flash, that flopped, and so now he has just ripped off Snapchat and added it to his suite of apps.

Over the past few months variations of “Stories” have been added to Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and now Facebook itself.

I don’t use the Facebook app, but I’ll often download it to check out and use new features, such as Facebook Live Videos, so I downloaded the app again to see if Facebook had finally created a Snapchat killer.

They didn’t.

It’s a ghost town.

I posted one picture and left it up for the 24 hours stories are kept up for and I realised in that time nobody else had posted their own story. So I thought I’d wait and see over the weekend, see if any activity picks up.

Nope. Nothing. Nada.

Not one person has posted a Facebook Story.

Interesting.

I think Mark Zuckerberg needs to realise what Facebook is as opposed to what he thinks it is.

Facebook is the establishment. It runs the show. People treat it accordingly.

From kids wanting to escape the snooping eyes of elders to others wanting to simply escape the messy newsfeed and self promotional posts, Snapchat is a haven. It’s a place where things are fleeting, nothing is taken too seriously, where you will share those silly, sometimes meaningless pictures because they will be gone before you know it.

Nobody wants to post these kind of pictures on Facebook for the world to see.

No thank you.

Stories seem to have worked on Instagram to a degree. Plenty of people are sharing stories there. Perhaps it’s because Instagram is a photo sharing environment, or perhaps because Instagram is not (well, was once not) Facebook.

I’ve not been seeing stories on Messenger and a couple on WhatsApp.

Perhaps the magic of Snapchat is Snapchat. You can’t pick that up and place it online.

Facebook have had some wicked successes, Facebook Live being one that springs to mind, but they do not have the touch of Midas.

Zuckerberg has set his sights on Snapchat much like he did on Google+. He took the best features of + and placed them into Facebook. However Google+ wasn’t really being used by anyone, so nobody really felt that those were “Google+ features” and not Facebooks. Yet Snapchat was and is being used. It has its own culture. One that is proving to be very resistant to replication.

Good for them!

I think it’s a shame, I really dig the Snapchat style of storytelling vs the Facebook reaction based system, more on that another time perhaps.

However Zuckerberg has clearly set his sight onto Snapchat. I wonder what his next move will be.

You’ll find me on Snapchat @mordmaman