Facebook is simplifying Stories. The social media giant will no longer have a separate Messenger Day and Stories feature, but will merge the two, under Stories, so that content shared in one also appears in the other. Along with merging the Messenger version and Facebook version of the sharing style originally created by Snapchat, Facebook will also now allow Groups to post inside Stories, and will also gradually bring the tool to Facebook Lite.
Messenger will still have a place to share Stories, but those posts will also be part of Facebook Stories and vice versa, instead of requiring users to post content separately to each. That means Messenger users will also notice that the feature is no longer called Day, but will share the name of Facebook Stories.
Along with cross-posting between Messenger and Facebook, the merger also means Stories that are viewed in one app will be marked as already viewed in the other app. The change, Facebook says, is designed to simplify Stories.
While the Messenger feature is becoming one and the same as the Facebook feature, the responses to Stories will now appear inside of Messenger instead of Facebook Direct. The change, as with mixing Day with Stories, helps clean up the system and leads to less confusion, but there’s one important distinction. Facebook Direct messages disappeared just like Stories restarts at the end of every day, but Messenger comments stick around.
Along with cleaning up the confusion of separate Stories, Facebook is also expanding the tool by allowing Group administrators as well as Facebook Events to post to Stories. Unlike the Stories from profiles, a Group with multiple administrators can have multiple contributors to the self-deleting daily log of photos and video clips. The change allows Facebook’s online communities to join in on the Stories feature, after launching the tool to business Pages last month.
Finally, Facebook is also bringing the Stories feature to Facebook Lite, the lightweight version of the app designed for using less data. The integration, however, starts with only viewing Stories, but the company says the feature is coming.
Stories, the string of video clips and photos that automatically delete after 24 hours, is a sharing format initially created by Snapchat. While the feature has been widely imitated with even Skype launching a variation of the tool, Instagram appears to have the largest number of users who actually share inside of Stories, though Facebook hasn’t revealed how many users actually use Stories on a regular basis.
