The Meta is introducing a new API that makes it easy to create and share a Facebook Story directly from a computer or a third-party web application.
Social networking ad titan first introduced Stories to the main Facebook app in 2017, emulating a feature it had added to Instagram the previous year as well as Messenger and WhatsApp — these features were more or less “borrowed” from Snapchat, acting as a more ephemeral way to share video and image-based content that didn’t stay on a user’s profile forever.
While Facebook itself has north of 3 billion users, Meta doesn’t typically release user numbers for Stories, though CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared that it had surpassed 500 million users in 2019.
Meta has previously opened up access to sharing content in Stories from other mobile apps, but with the new one Facebook Stories APIit’s now possible for content-focused creator software to integrate their web or desktop apps directly with Facebook Stories — this is likely aimed at the more professional market, as somewhat acknowledged by Meta, which refers to the new product as “enterprise solution”.
Moving forward, apps that integrate with the new API will allow their users to share Facebook Stories directly with minimal friction. For example, companies such as Adobe, Canva and Picsart Offer tools specifically for creating Facebook Stories, packed with image editors, templates, and other customizable elements — but at the end of it all, the user has to download their story and re-upload it to Facebook.
With the Facebook Stories API, developers can include a shared share button directly within their app, although this will of course require the app developer to implement Facebook login authentication for the end user to grant access to their personal or business of accounts.
Apps that have already gone through Facebook’s approval process will not need to do so again to access the Stories API.
