Snapchat Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel has announced a new feature called Story Explorer that debuted Monday. The feature is part of Live Stories, the tool that offers users “what’s happening” full-screen videos in a stream that jumps from one event to another recorded in the last 24 hours.
Story Explorer is currently available only locally for Los Angeles and New York with the promise to spread in other cities as soon as possible. What Live Stories offered before was a stream featuring a few seconds from a One Direction concert in Hollywood quickly followed by a video from the Los Angeles Auto Show.
But the 10 million to 20 million viewers drawn by these videos complained they are just teases, offering no depth to the cities – events, holidays or fashion shows – they featured. So this is how Story Explorer came to life, as a response to this issue.
According to Spiegel, it allows users to “jump” in the bodies of more people that snapped the same moment, watching it from more than one vantage point. Instead of leaving you with a feeling of “show me more,” the Story Explorer lets you experience that one moment “thousands” of unique times.
With the sheer amount of video submitted to Snapchat, the company was fortunate enough to be able to provide depth from a content perspective. Live Stories will still feature highlights of interesting situations picked by Snapchat employees.
But now, users can swipe up on their smartphone screens during any individual clip, to see if there are any similar shots of that moment. A swipe down will return users to the main stream.
Snapchat has proved again that it’s a force to reckon with in terms of being a creative leader in the ever-growing industry of mobile video. The ephemeral messaging platform is definitely standing out from the video content posted by Facebook, YouTube, Vine or Twitter.
The Story Explorer is fed with content and powered by an array of computers charged with analyzing video submissions. The algorithms will consider location, submission times and the objects in the videos in order to create extensive back-up for Live Stories. There are some other data being analyzed that Snapchat’s keeping quiet about.
Story Explorer could also give people who don’t feel comfortable sharing their private lives a new reason to open Snapchat. The feature is a long-overdue fix for the one domain Snapchat has been lagged behind: the search experience. You can now browse things that are public and newsworthy.
Image Source: Support Snapchat