What’s the Story, Morning Glory?
Why Instagram “Stories” works where others do not
Instagram’s successful cloning of Snapchat’s “Stories” feature sugar-coated a very bitter taste: Facebook had tried numerous times previously to clone Snapchat. But each attempt failed. Further, subsequent attempts to clone Stories in WhatsApp, Messenger, and even Facebook itself don’t appear promising, to put it nicely (here’s putting it not so nicely). So how was Instagram able to do what others at Facebook — including others with even larger scale — weren’t able to do? The answer may be simple.
Beyond execution — which can’t be overstated, Instagram’s Stories functionality is very well done — we’ve been looking at the solution the whole time.
Instagram, at its core, has always been about images. Yes, years after its launch it became known as the place to put the most perfect version of your life forward, but it was always about expression and communication through visual means. Fundamentally, that — plus timing and again, execution — is why it took off in the first place. At a high level, the same is true with Snapchat.
Obvious, yes. And yet…
When Facebook has tried to cram the Stories format into other products (and when others have tried, like Microsoft with Skype, for example), those products — more specifically, those products’ users — have rejected them. Because visual sharing is not what those other products were built for.
I’d argue that Facebook got tricked by statistics in this regard. They know that X number of billion people use Facebook to share images on a regular, if not daily, basis. It’s the largest photo-sharing service in the world! But, that’s not actually what Facebook is, fundamentally. I don’t care if that’s what the data says people use it for, it’s not what it actually is. Because it wasn’t built to be that from the ground up. And so tacking on something like Stories is Frankenstein-ing your product.
The same is not true for Instagram. In this case, the host does not reject the new appendage because the blood type is the same. Stories is about visual sharing, just as Instagram was and is.
In fact, Stories itself was tacked on to Snapchat after the fact. The app started out as a one-to-one messaging service. But it was visual from the get-go. So a new visual format made sense. And I’d argue the Stories format itself always made sense — I recall a service called Days back in the… day, that was attempting to do something similar. It just didn’t have the scale. And the timing wasn’t right. Snapchat took the concept mainstream. And Instagram is extending upon it.¹
Anyway, again, all of this is fairly obvious. And yet I’m not sure Facebook itself sees this. And so we get Stories in WhatsApp, in Messenger, in Facebook. Yes, people share photos in all of those services. Maybe even more so than anywhere else in the world given the sheer scale of all of those services. But visual sharing is not why those services were built. And so tacking on such a core feature feels forced. And users of said services are rejecting it as such.
Which they’re not doing with Instagram. Clearly.
¹ Aside: I was asked recently for thoughts about Facebook in the next 5–10 years. My answer was that I wouldn’t be shocked if Instagram is actually larger than Facebook itself. It’s just such a brilliant platform and service for the world in which we live — and in which we will live, I imagine.²
² Beyond what they’re already doing with lenses, it’s easy to see an AR future for Instagram, for example.³
³ Yes, I just used a footnote within a footnote. Twice.
