How Snapchat Stories Became a Universal Format That Won’t Ever Go Away
You’re stuck with Fleets, and maybe that’s not all bad
Do you remember the internet before Stories?
When Snapchat introduced Stories in 2014, the format was novel but niche: It provided a new way to view pictures and video by tapping back and forth in full screen, an experience that fit smartphones better than anything that had come before it. Now, it feels like “Stories” are showing up everywhere.
In the six years since the format’s debut, it’s been adopted at an astonishing rate in almost every popular app, from Instagram to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google results, and beyond. The Stories format is now owned by nobody, transcending its creator entirely to become even more important: a user experience (UX) pattern easily adopted by anyone for visual content.
There are endless jokes and memes about what the next app to get the Stories treatment will be: Microsoft Excel, Visual Studio Code, maybe even your next calculator. Those jokes, however, reveal something bigger — Stories have become a universally understood format. If you see a round avatar with a thin colorful line around it, you know what it means: Tap here to see photos, videos, and an experience that will fill your smartphone display rather than a…
