Storie: Holiday Edition!
By now, we hope that many of you have updated to your Storie app to the latest version (2.0). If you see snowflakes drifting lazily down your screen, you know you have the latest update. (And yes we plan to remove the holiday motifs around the same time you take down your holiday decorations.)
Introducing Unlisted Stories
One of the biggest features in this new update is Unlisted Stories, which is our way of letting you keep some stories private and share them only with your close friends and family (or nobody). Unlisted stories work like unlisted phone numbers. You share your storie by passing around a URL link, and anybody with the link can view your storie. Everyone else will not know that you’ve posted that storie. You can make your stories unlisted at any time — just go to the Edit Storie Details screen and flip the unlisted switch from off to on.
Now, Storie is an inherently social app, so there were quite a few things we needed to do to ensure that your unlisted stories are not inadvertently “outed” through the various social bells and whistles in the app. Unlisted stories don’t show up when someone pokes around your profile and looks at the stories you have posted or are watching. When someone Likes an unlisted storie, it isn’t broadcast to the person’s followers in their Updates feed. There’s a few of these holes we had to close before launching this feature, but as far as you — the user — are concerned, you don’t have to worry about any of these things. Just interact with Storie the way you always have, and Storie will work the way you expected it to.
Sharing an unlisted storie
You share an unlisted storie just like any other storie, by going to the Goodies menu and selecting any of the Sharing options, e.g. sending an email or text message, sharing on Facebook or posting on Twitter (makes sense if your Twitter stream is protected). All of these sharing options disclose your storie’s “secret” web link to the person you want to share the storie with. These URL links look something like this: www.storieapp.com/storie/123?t=abcdef. The part after “?t=” is what makes these URLs virtually unguessable.
If the person you are sharing with has Storie, they can launch the Storie app directly from the web link, which takes them to the storie you are sharing. They can then bookmark the storie, if they wish, by “Watching” it. They can of course also Like it, leave a comment or do whatever it is they usually do on Storie.
Now, if they don’t have Storie, they can browse your entire storie at the web link. The web version of your storie automatically comes in two flavors, one for desktop computers and another for mobile phones (works great on Android phones).
I hope you found this blog post helpful in understanding how Unlisted Stories work. As always, if you have any questions, you can reach us directly using the in-app feedback form.
Happy storie-telling!
