Views On New Facebook Stories Feature Won’t Be Anonymous

No more Facebook lurking, at least for this new feature.

Your days of anonymous browsing on Facebook are over, that is if you decide to starting viewing your friends “Stories.”

In its latest update, Facebook has added a feature some are already familiar with—especially if you’ve ever used Snapchat. The new feature is called Facebook Stories and it allows users to add multiple photos or short videos of whatever it is in their lives they feel like sharing. But almost identical to Snapchat, your Facebook Stories will only be available to watch for 24 hours before they disappear.

It’s a great feature for those who want to share snippets of their daily lives, but for the viewers, well, you might want to be aware that the person posting their “Stories” can see who’s viewed them.

It also wasn’t long ago, actually the beginning of August 2016 to be exact, that Instagram introduced “Stories.” The Facebook-owned company stated that it’s always been a place to share moments you want to remember, but with “Stories” you can not only share highlights, but everything in-between.

While this can potentially be a fun feature, some are saying that Facebook isn’t really the place for it.

Since the social platform has been around for over a decade, a lot of people we tend to be Facebook “friends” with aren’t necessarily the same people we’d be friends with in real life.

Some of your friends on the social media platform might not even be people whom you haven’t talked to in years, either on the site or in person. I mean, that kind of is the fun of the platform, right? It’s like the best parts of a high school reunion (aka getting caught up on everyone’s lives) without any awkward small talk required.

As with Snapchat, you can choose to direct your Facebook Story to just one or a handful of your Facebook friends with the Direct function (kind of like sending a private message). The Story will still disappear in 24 hours, however, unlike a message. It’s unclear if there will be a way to change your account settings to view a Story anonymously.

No one is really sure where this new technology may go. As mentioned, some aren’t so sure it’ll take off on Facebook, but others are saying that Snapchat really needs to up its game before Facebook takes over yet another social media platform.

So far, in the countries where Facebook Stories has tested, a product manager for Facebook said that the feature caused people to share more, which is ultimately what Facebook is all about.

Technology