Source: Social Right now, the standards we expect on the web are being re-written for mobile. The rise of stories across Snapchat, Instagram, Whatsa
Right now, the standards we expect on the web are being re-written for mobile. The rise of stories across Snapchat, Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger and Facebook is the perfect example of this.
The News Feed is outdated and stories are becoming the default for content consumption.
Very few formats, features, apps, or services are truly unique.
Facebook, for example, didn’t invent the vertical scrolling feed.
For decades, way before Mark Zuckerburg even enrolled in Harvard, online content has been viewed in vertical, scrolling feeds.
From reading content on blogs and news sites to seeing which of your friends had recently made changes on Bebo, we’ve been accustomed to seeing data aggregated vertically for as long as I can remember.
What Facebook actually popularized was the algorithmically-sorted feed, which they pioneered in 2006 with the release of their News Feed.
Since the New Feed’s launch, we’ve seen Facebook’s influence on across the web, with many platforms also adopting algorithms to show users more specific, personalized content that some data wizardry has deemed they’ll have an interest in:
- Twitter launched “While you were away” to show tweets you may have missed since you last opened the app
- Medium orders your homepage based on content you’ve read/recommended in the past
And now, since Snapchat brought the stories format to prominence, we’ve seen its influence reflected across mobile, with many of the largest social/media products in the world implementing their own version. From Facebook Stories to Medium Series and Twitter Moments.
You see it all the time. When one app or product breaks out and challenges the norm, others will follow. You just need to look at how many Uber-for-X or Tinder-esque apps have been released over the past couple of years.
But why do we see this copy-catting with successful new technologies?
As Wired writer, David Pierce explains, when a system works, it’s just easier if everyone implements it:
Having one broadly adopted system just makes life easier, since people don’t have to learn a new language and dance routine every time they want to try something. It happened a while ago on desktop PCs, for instance: it was eventually decided that keyboards should be QWERTY, interfaces should be graphical, and things should scroll up and down.
Why Stories are the new News Feed
The News Feed is not a native experience on mobile
The News Feed was designed for desktop and was a wonderful place to share text-based statuses and links to your favorite blog posts, the funniest YouTube videos and full albums of your holiday photos. But social media has now moved on.
Facebook now reaches 1.86 billion monthly active users and the biggest driver in revenue and user growth is on mobile. Facebook now counts 1.23 billion daily active users, where 1.15 billion of them are on mobile. For ad revenue, mobile represents 84 percent of the total, too.
In contrast, as mobile has increased its dominance across the web, Facebook has seen a drop in original user-generated content shared to its platform with a 21% decline reported between mid-2015 and mid-2016.
“The way people have been prompted to share for 10 years, it’s very text-centric,” Facebook Camera product manager Connor Hayes explained to TechCrunch. “Even when you look at the way we’ve done this on mobile, you can see half of the screen is still taken up by a place for you to type text.”
Whilst Facebook is seeing a downward trend in user-generated content, Snapchat is reportedly generating more than 10 billion video views daily and over 150m Instagram users are creating stories each day, too.
It seems that sharing to a feed isn’t quite as appealing anymore. Neither is consuming content via a vertical feed.
The camera is becoming the focal point of communication
With the News Feed, users have to put in a lot of work to get any value: Content is surrounded by empty space, you have to scroll to find something that interests you and, often, content doesn’t take up your whole screen, so you have to tap to enjoy the full viewing experience.
“We like to think of the camera as the new keyboard,” a Facebook Product Manager told TechCrunch. And in Snap’s IPO letter to investors, Evan Spiegel wrote: “In the way that the flashing cursor became the starting point for most products on desktop computers, we believe that the camera screen will be the starting point for most products on smartphones.”
Sometimes it’s hard to encapsulate moments or feelings in words and this is where the camera comes into its own as a communication tool. Through photos and videos we can share the fun, fleeting moments of our lives with those closest to us, without needing to sum them up in a sentance or two.
Of course, the camera won’t fully replace our need for a keyboard just yet, if ever. And Facebook see Stories as an “additive,” sitting alongside the News Feed and their other products rather than replacing them. “We’ve tested in markets with Instagram Stories and Messenger Day, and we’ve seen this as accretive. They end up posting more and they like using the Stories format across apps,” Hayes said.
A shift in sharing habits
With the rise of Snapchat, we’ve become accustomed to sharing multiple and frequent updates throughout the day – a way of communicating that just doesn’t fit with a traditional, web-based vertical feed.
With a vertical feed, it’s hard to lace together groups of posts into a cohesive story someone can easily follow along. A case in point here is live sports on Facebook, I often see scores and in-game updates showing in my feed hours after a game is completed.
But with stories, everything is there, in one place from start to finish. Viewers always see the first post in story ahead of the newest or most popular post.
The beauty of stories is really in how easy they are to create and consume. In just a couple of taps and swipes, you can create and share snippets of your day. Stories enable us to share the…
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