Facebook Stories May Be Coming To Instagram Soon

While it does have its fair of controversy, Instagram has so far remained a force to reckon with in the social media space. It may have even started to threaten Facebook so it's not really that surprising that its parent company has been making moves to make sure everyone knows who owns who. Its latest attempt, fortunately, may actually be a welcome one, depending on how Facebook ultimately implements the ability to cross-post its Stories to Instagram.

Instagram is probably the one that popularized the Stories format that everyone is now attempting to implement in one way or another. In fact, even Facebook has its own Stories feature and three years ago it created a one-way bridge between its two properties. That is it allowed users to post their IG Stories on Facebook but not the other way around.

Reverse engineer extraordinaire Jane Manchun Wong, however, has spotted signs that traffic might flow in both directions soon. Fiddling around with Facebook revealed a toggle that would allow posting FB Stories on Instagram. Although the two social networks serve different audiences, there is an intersection of users (read: brands and influencers) who'd want to hit both birds with one stone if possible.

Sadly, it doesn't exactly show how Facebook will implement this Story-sharing bridge. It may simply be a fire-and-forget type of deal and Stories from either side will see no interaction or sharing of data. In particular, it may be that viewing a story on one won't mark it as viewed on the other.

Despite the convenience, it won't be surprising if Instagram fans see this as yet another example of Facebook marking its territory. Of course, it Facebook was to be asked, it would have probably unified all its social networks and messaging services into one long ago, antitrust regulations be damned.