One of the core features of Snapchat is Stories, a collection of pictures and videos that are live for 24 hours and visible to a user’s followers. The feature has been ripped off by Facebook for Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and even Facebook itself. To try and get out from under the shadow of the world’s largest social network, Snapchat today announced that it’s rolling out a new kind of story which will make it easier for users to share group memories.
Once the custom stories feature goes live for users, they will be able to create global and geofenced stories with the contacts of their choosing. Think of it as an extension of Snap’s geofenced stickers which enables people to create custom stickers for events like birthdays and weddings.
Users can create a custom story by tapping on the new “Create Story” icon in the top-right corner of the Stories tab. They can then name their story and invite the friends that they want to share it with. It’s even possible to invite all nearby Snapchat users to the story, the app will do that by creating a 1-block geofence around the user’s current location.
Once the custom story has been created, it can be submitted underneath “My Story.” They will be visible on the stories page for as long as they are being actively contributed to, if no one contributes anything to the story for 24 hours then the story will disappear. The creator can delete the custom story at any time.