Has anyone tried Google’s new ‘Stories’ feature?
It’s one of the latest tools to fling it’s hat in the social ring and not without merit judging by initial feedback. But then, there’s always an ulteria motive.
So, you’ve just got back off your hols, a wedding or a festival and you have hundreds of photos and videos on your phone. Enter Google+ Stories, which can automatically weave your photos, videos and the places you visited into a beautiful travelogue.
It’s a nice idea. No more sifting through photos for your best shots, you can actually relive your favorite moments and share them really easily.
The tool also includes effects, transitions and a soundtrack. All you have to do is back-up your photos and videos to Google+. And that’s it. Something called Auto Awesome will get to work in the background, and you’ll get notified when a story or movie is ready. This idea is also touched on by another app called Cameo, which allows you to take 6 second clips and create a 2 minute video.
If your photo library is already online with Google +, you may already have stories waiting for you.
The beauty is that it takes the hard work out of it. Most of us take weeks to get around to making albums.
This way the stories algorithms will automatically look through your photos, evaluate time stamps, and geo-tag data in your images to figure out whether you’ve been traveling and then whether you took enough photos/videos to merit a Story.
Remarkably it also scans to see if any of your photos include recognisable landmarks. That’s pretty impressive.
It will also look through for landmarks to highlight, but you can go in and customize places you visited and add captions. And only takes 24 hours of your return home for a story to be created.
Has anyone done it before?
Yes, Facebook had ‘Look Back’ videos a few months ago.
What’s the catch?
Google are making money from your data. Yes it’s true. The more data a tool like this has at its disposal, the better its customisation for you is going to be. But they are really justifying taking more data from you. The more data Google has, the more ads it can sell and the more money it can make. It makes sense then if something like Stories encourages people to automatically upload even more photos, it’s a big bonus for Google. The least they can do is send you a link to your own story for giving you all that information for free
