Our Story is Snapchat’s genius expansion to its Stories feature

If you’re developing a hugely successful independent messaging app, you need to stay on your toes while the big names try and cash in on your idea. For Snapchat, that means adding extra features and functions to its app: the recent launch of Stories has proved a hit with users, and the next upgrade in the pipeline is called Our Story. As reported by Josh Constine at TechCrunch, who had an early preview of the way Our Story works, the feature pulls together photos and videos from any user based around a single event. You can think of it as the equivalent of a Twitter hashtag in the way it gives users the opportunity to check out snaps being posted by other people whether or not they are connected as friends.

What does it feel like to be a massive music festival? Nothing like a glossy livestream of the mainstage. Much more like Snapchat’s new Our Story feature, a curated channel of user submitted photos of videos from all around a big event. I was there last night at Vegas’ Electric Daisy Carnival, an 140,000-person dance music festival where Snapchat piloted Our Story. I can vouch that the decentralized perspective was remarkably accurate. Our Storyhas huge potential, and you can follow along tonight by adding “EDC Live” on Snapchat. The startup’s other big experiment at EDC didn’t fare so well. See, cell phone networks get overloaded at every music festival. Wouldn’t it make sense for Verizon or AT&T or someone to set up extra towers or Wifi to help their customers or lure in competitor’s? Well Snapchat tried to beat them to it by providing free wifi for the mega-rave, but only for using the official EDC app and…Snapchat. The idea was that while people’s texts, Instagrams, Facebook posts and tweets wouldn’t send, Snapchats would go through in an instant. Unfortunately, it didn’t really work.