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Snapchat lets you watch and create group videos of live events with 'Our Story'

Snapchat lets you watch and create group videos of live events with 'Our Story'

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New feature creates collections of photos and videos from people attending the same live event, like the World Cup and Electric Daisy Carnival

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Promo image of an event featured on Snapchat's new Our Story feature
Promo image of an event featured on Snapchat's new Our Story feature
Snapchat

Snapchat isn't just for sharing slices of your life with your friends anymore. A new feature called "Our Story" has begun rolling out to all users today, which lets you create and view public collections of photos and videos captured at the same live event — say a concert or sports game — even with people who aren't on your Friends list.

Here's how it works: if you're using Snapchat at a big event where other people are also using the app, you can choose to add your video and photo snaps to a larger public collection. Anyone in the world with Snapchat can then open their app, find the collection of snaps from that event, and watch it as a single Snapchat Story. The feature doesn't identify who created which snaps, only showing that they were all captured at the same event.

The company first tested the feature at the Electric Daisy Carnival, an EDM music festival that took place in Las Vegas in June, and later followed it up with another test at the World Cup in Brazil in July. But in both cases, only the people who had Snapchat and were physically present at those specific events had the opportunity to check out the feature.

Now Snapchat is bringing the Our Story feature to everyone. As the company announced in a blog post, if there is a collection from a live event in your area, it will appears in a new label marked "Live" found under the "Recent Updates" section of the app (see the image above). While the feature seems tailor made for entertainment events, it could also prove to be a useful journalistic tool. One can only imagine the kinds of snaps that would have showed up from the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, earlier this month, had the feature been available back then. It's also a bit of a bitter pill for those affiliated with Color, a much-hyped app for sharing group photos at events that never took off and was later purchased by Apple.