Facebook is testing Snapchat’s Stories feature

Facebook is testing in Ireland with the Stories feature, which allows users to watch montages of each other’s videos and photos from the past 24 hours. The feature comes from Snapchat and Facebook introduced it to Instagram before.

In the coming months, the Stories function should also be available in the rest of the world, a spokesperson for the social network confirms to tech site Recode. The feature sits above the News Feed at the top of the Facebook app. It contains people with round photos and a click on them shows the Stories of those people.

Adding photos and videos yourself is done in the same way as is already happening with posts, by sharing images via a camera interface in the app. The spokesperson said the feature was borrowed from Snapchat and Facebook expects that, like Twitter’s hashtag, it will be a feature that will become mainstream across all social media platforms.

Facebook already put Stories in Instagram last year and Facebook Messenger already had such a function. Facebook probably hopes with the function to persuade users to share more personal images via the social network. This has happened less and less in recent years, the company has noticed.