This could come as a surprise to many. Multinational companies, particularly the American ones, would normally introduce new concepts and features in the US market and then duplicate them in other markets, particularly in India. But Facebook, which boasts of a membership of 217 million in India, is now planning to add a few features in its ‘Stories’ section for the first time that are specific to its Indian audience.
These features include storing voice messages, creating an archive of the stories though the default mode will be the one-day shelf life and the third feature will be the use of the Facebook camera to take photos and save them on the app but not within the mobile phone’s internal storage.
All these are being made available to the Indian users of Facebook first before being taken to other countries. Facebook, on its part, says such India-first features have been done already in the case of the blood donation feature on its app as well as the profile picture guard.
In the case of the saving of images captured through the Facebook app, the option ‘Save’ enables them to be saved within the Facebook app and in the gallery of images in the person’s profile page.
When it comes to the Voice Posts, Facebook has used the provision of recording audio clips in its WhatsApp app and brought it to Facebook too. And these can be made part of the Stories section, where it will remain for 24 hours after the person has shared it with the intended recipient. Here again, the user has the option to save the audio clip and use it later. If the user fails to save it, then the clip will get deleted as per the Stories format. Facebook has added the facility to change the background color etc.
The choice of the voice messaging on Facebook in the Indian context is quite understandable since there is a huge population out there who are not comfortable with typing in English and they would rather record their message and share it.
Facebook appears to be in a hurry to shake off the negative image it acquired following the Cambridge Analytica episode.