Facebook Creates Another Way to 'Tell Stories'
posted Saturday Jun 3, 2017 by Scott Ertz
We all know how photo albums work: You take a photo and then you place it in an album based on date, time, location or any other qualifier you might have. For years, digital image services have offered this feature, with apps like Windows Photos and iOS Photos creating some albums automatically for you. Over time we have, as a technological society, added videos to those albums, because they are just moving pictures, right?
Facebook has decided that its albums are less like the photo albums you know and love, and more like scrapbooks, without the cool customization idea. Starting now on Android and Web, with Windows and iOS coming soon, Facebook will allow you to add non-media content to an album, such as text and check-ins. In addition, your friends can subscribe to an album to get notifications when it is updated.
If this feature sounds familiar, that's because it is. This feature lives in a very similar space to Facebook Stories, Instagram Stories, My Day in Messenger, and similar or identical features from Snapchat and more. The difference here is that most of these other features have expiring content, whereas albums are like diamonds: forever.
Clearly this new addition to albums is a response to continued competition from Snapchat, Google Photos and more products encroaching on Facebook/Instagram's social dominance in media collections. This could also signify a more heavy competition with YouTube, with whom Facebook has recently been battling for video dominance. If you think of a Facebook page like a YouTube Channel and an album like a Playlist, then Facebook just gave content creators a new way to interact with people who have subscribed to a playlist.
While this might not be a feature that immediately grabs the attention of standard consumers, high velocity content creators might be able to make this feature a cornerstone of their publishing process. Is this a feature that excited you? Let us know why or why not in the comments.