Facebook rolls out India-first features for its stories format, voice posts

Facebook has rolled a bunch of India-first features to its stories format, including voice posts and stories archive, before hitting the rest of world, media reports said. The new features will be available first in India, home to some 27o million users, before being made available to everyone else in the world, TheVerge reported yesterday. The social media giant is launching the new features at a time when it is facing increasing scrutiny over the alleged misuse of user data on its platform across the world.

Among the new features include voice posts, stories archive and the ability to save photos and videos from the Facebook Camera app while avoiding using up space on the user's mobile phone. The three updates will help users better "create and save memories." The changes will let you save your photos and videos directly to your account in the Facebook cloud, share voice messages with friends, and archive your favourite Facebook Stories, the report said.

"We know that the performance and reliability of viewing and posting Stories is extremely important to people around the world, especially those with slower connections," it quoted Connor Hayes, Director of Product Management, Facebook Stories as saying. "We are always working on ways to improve the experience of viewing Stories on all types of connections, and have been investing here ? especially on our FB Lite app," Hayes said.

With each story expiring in 24 hours, Stories archive will provide users access to all the stories they have previously shared on the platform. The feature will be an opt-in addition and users will have the option to either permanently delete these or reshare it again either as a Story or a post at a later date.

Facebook has been caught up in the data scandal involving Cambridge Analytica, the British political consulting firm which collected the data of nearly 87 million Facebook users without their knowledge and permission.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, 33, had said that he accepted blame for the data leak, which has angered users, advertisers and lawmakers, while also saying he was still the right person to head the company he founded in 2004.

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Zuckerberg has also agreed to meet European Parliament members behind closed-doors to answer questions in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.