Slack is set to become the latest tech company to add Stories to its communication platform this year, the company shared on Wednesday. It’ll join a growing list of companies that have embraced the feature, allowing users to post videos or messages with a temporary shelf life.
“It’s very much like Instagram stories, or Snapchat stories, but in Slack,” Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told The Verge. “There was a joke going around that soon all software will have it, and I thought that was funny at the time. But especially during the pandemic, and the difference in how we as a company are approaching work, means it’s an idea that’s time has come.”
Slack believes Stories can help reduce work calls and the seemingly never-ending text chats that often come with work-from-home life. The feature will likely appear alongside the conversation channels users see on the left side of their apps. And while there is no set date for the feature’s debut, Butterfield said he expects it to launch by the end of the year.
Snapchat first launched Stories 7 years ago this month. About three years later, Instagram introduced its own copycat version of the feature — helping the app push to more than 1 billion users in the last few years. Now, it’s already become a tired joke that if a major app doesn’t have Stories, it soon will. LinkedIn and Pinterest recently announced their own Stories feature, adding to major apps like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp that have also embraced the feature within the last few years.
Slack’s stock price was up 2.3% during early-morning trading on Wednesday, hitting $29.10 per share.