Google+ rolls out Stories feature that generates interactive albums from photos and videos
Stories: Google's Way of Organizing Your Digital Life — Let's face it: No one has the time to organize their thousands of digital photos and videos. Some of these files get shared in social networks …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google+ had made Photos one of the pillars of its 2013 redesign alongside Stream and Hangouts, then improved the basics with faster uploads and album-management controls. Stories moves that photo effort beyond filing and transferring images toward assembling them for the user.
The change matters because Google+ is making photo organization a product feature rather than asking people to maintain large libraries manually.
First-order effects
- Google+ users can turn accumulated photos and videos into interactive albums without doing the underlying organization themselves.
- Google+ gains an automated photo experience that builds on its existing upload and album tools.
Second-order effects
- The value of Google+'s earlier album controls shifts from being the main organizing workflow to supplying the material that Stories can curate.
- Photo products competing for users' attention must increasingly differentiate on how they surface and package media, not only on storage and upload mechanics.
Third-order effects
- If automated curation becomes the expected photo-library interface, manual folders and albums become supporting infrastructure rather than the primary way people revisit personal media.
The trend: Personal-media services are moving from storing and sorting files toward automatically curating them into consumable experiences.