On a protracted sufficient timeline, each social media app developments to including tales, and now it’s apparently TikTok’s flip: the favored video app is experimenting with a brand new tales function. The function was highlighted by Matt Navarra on Twitter, and a TikTok spokesperson confirmed the check in an e-mail to The Verge.

The new function, merely referred to as “TikTok Stories,” seems to work equally to different tales features on apps like Instagram or Snapchat. Stories stay in a newly added slide-over sidebar, the place you’ll be capable of see tales posted by accounts that you simply observe on TikTok for twenty-four hours earlier than they’re routinely deleted. Other customers will be capable of react and remark in your story, too. And identical to on Instagram and different platforms, you’ll additionally be capable of faucet on a person’s profile image to load a narrative.

TikTok describes the function within the app as “a new way to interact with your fans.” Users can create a brand new story by tapping a “create” button that’s been added to the sidebar, and so they can add the same old captions, music, and textual content. True to TikTok’s video-first nature, it appears tales need to be movies, not nonetheless photographs.

“We’re always thinking about new ways to bring value to our community and enrich the TikTok experience,” a TikTok spokesperson wrote in an announcement to The Verge. “Currently we’re experimenting with ways to give creators additional formats to bring their creative ideas to life for the TikTok community.”

The firm didn’t present any particulars on how extensively it’s testing TikTok Stories, nor when (or even when) it’ll see a wider launch. However, a fast search on Twitter reveals a number of TikTok users who have already gotten access to the feature.

The proven fact that TikTok would experiment with tales isn’t shocking. Stories have been one of many only true constants in social media, with platforms from Instagram to Facebook to Linkedin to Pinterest to Netflix to YouTube to the Xbox app replicating Snapchat’s authentic function from 2013. When they work, tales are a good way to get customers to work together with one another on an app, provide a brand new place for adverts, and customarily hold the suggestions loop of a social media app in movement.

Stories aren’t all the time profitable, nonetheless: simply ask Twitter, which was compelled to shutter its personal tales clone — the creatively named Fleets — earlier this week, simply eight months after it launched them, because of a normal apathy towards the function.