Snapchat’s Story Explorer gives you multiple points of view within a story

Snapchat has debuted a new way to help you provide more insight into a story that’s designed to give users a different perspective about what’s being snapped. Called Story Explorer, this feature can be activated by just swiping up on a particular snap to see more from that same moment. It’s launching today on the service’s New York and Los Angeles live stories, with plans to roll this out further in the future.

Story Explorer is like Stitchcam but curated by technology developed by Snapchat’s research team. The company will look for user snaps of that same moment — whether it’s the Golden State Warriors’ Stephen Curry dropping an epic three-point shot in a game or the red carpet at last night’s American Music Awards. This is specifically for Live Stories and applicable to those snaps that are submitted to a particular story; when a user swipes up on any displayed snap, they’ll see about 10 similar shots that they can cycle through. By swiping down, they’ll return to the default story.

Since it’s only limited to brand stories, it’s probably easy for Snapchat to apply this technology. Would it be prudent to bring it to personal stories, though? Probably not, because then it makes those snaps less interesting because it’s not from that person, but by a group of people within a “personal” story.

As the Los Angeles Times reported, by increasing the amount of time a user spends on Snapchat, the greater the possibility of getting them to sit through a video ad, which campaigns are said to cost $100,000 versus the $700,000 a year ago. However, company chief executive Evan Spiegel declined to comment on whether Story Explorer would generate new ads, telling the Los Angeles Times: “We’ll let it go and see what happens.”

There are 6 billion videos viewed daily on Snapchat, and that number is rapidly growing. One way to help this trend is by making videos and snaps more engaging, and Story Explorer seems to be designed to do just that.