Snapchat Launches Our Story at Electric Daisy Carnival
Recently Snapchat teamed up with a Las Vegas music festival, Electric Daisy Carnival, to present a new feature for Snapchat users: Our Story.
Our Story is a spinoff of Snapchat’s My Story, launched last October, which allows users to add snaps to a personal stream. Unlike typical Snapchat messages, which disappear immediately after being viewed, each My Story snap lives in the stream for 24 hours before disappearing. Friends can check your My Story stream to follow along with your day-to-day life.
But unlike My Story’s individual focus, Our Story puts the community perspective front and center. From Snapchat’s blog:
We built Our Story so that Snapchatters who are at the same event location can contribute Snaps to the same Story. If you can’t make it to an event, watching Our Story makes you feel like you’re right there!
Since I was at Electric Daisy Carnival during Snapchat’s latest feature launch, I decided to give Our Story a try.
By following the Snapchat account “EDC Live” my fellow Electric Daisy Carnival attendees and I were able to upload our pictures and videos to the EDC Our Story stream. Only users in the immediate geographical vicinity of EDC were allowed to upload to the stream. The stream was also “curated” by Snapchat for length and screened for inappropriate posts.
Snapchat promised to provide free wifi at the festival for attendees to access the EDC and Snapchat apps. Unfortunately, despite being well-advertised before the event and on numerous posters at the venue, the wifi didn’t quite come through for festival attendees.
On the first night of the festival, Friday, the Snapchat wifi wasn’t available for connection at all in my iPhone’s wifi settings. On Saturday night I was able to see several Snapchat wifi signals listed, but every time I attempted to connect I was greeted with an error message. And when I tried to post my snaps to EDC Live using my own cell service, my phone’s signal wasn’t strong enough for the snaps to go through:
I had to wait until the next morning at my hotel to view the EDC Our Story stream. I saw many similar complaints about the lack of Snapchat wifi at EDC from users on Twitter, but to my knowledge neither Snapchat nor the festival organizers ever addressed the issue publicly.
Despite the frustrating technical troubles that plagued the event, enough folks were able to upload their snaps to the EDC Our Story stream to generate over 300 seconds’ worth of pictures and videos to view. I also read many positive comments across various social networks from both festival attendees and those that tuned in from home.
Snapchat has yet to announce any future events for Our Story, but more should be expected soon given the relative success of this new event live blogging tool.
Would you use Our Story? Let me know in the comments below.
Here is Snapchat’s promotional video for EDC Our Story:
