Snapchat is stepping up its curation game today with an update available for the ephemeral sharing social app. In piggybacking off its Discover app and its recent turn towards covering news in interesting ways, the company has released ‘Story Explorer’ — a way for you to see more of that great thing you just saw six seconds ago.
Currently, Snapchat individually curates Stories to get a diverse perspective on a place or a thing — traveling around Rio De Janeiro, for example, or viewing last night’s American Music Awards. Stories are generally pretty large and cover a lot of different topics, if only briefly.
Story Explorer appears to be a threaded version of Stories, allowing users who have interest in a given topic — say, for example, Justin Bieber performing at the end of the AMAs — to swipe up and look at more Snaps related to that specific moment. The aim is to see the moment from different angles, perspectives, opinions. Instead of one clip of Bieber singing along to an acoustic guitar, a user might also get Bieber dancing in the rain, or a snap of the audience dancing to the performance.
Not all snaps within a given story will have an option to explore further; that’s at the discretion of Snapchat’s curators.
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With the introduction of Story Explorer, Snapchat is leveraging its popular Stories to create a more real-time and informational approach to the content shared on the platform. Conceptually, it’s not too far away from what Twitter is trying to do with its Moments feature: giving users, both new and seasoned, an opportunity to learn more about the world around them, and perhaps be inspired to create moments themselves.
It’s an incentive to tap Snapchat open when something interesting happens, and opens the door to use the platform as a tool for eye-witness experiences.
Story Explorer will launch on the New York and Los Angeles Stories today, with the technology rolling out to other Stories soon.
➤ Snapchat
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