Face­book’s Sto­ries High­lights will dis­play as a hor­i­zon­tal scroll bar on a user’s profile.

Face­book has con­firmed it will begin test­ing a new “High­lights” fea­ture that allows users to save Sto­ries to their pro­files beyond the cur­rent 24-hour time peri­od a Sto­ry remains available.

“Peo­ple have told us they want a way to high­light and save the Sto­ries that mat­ter most to them. We’ll soon start test­ing high­lights on Face­book — a way to choose Sto­ries to stay on your pro­file, mak­ing it eas­i­er to express who you are through mem­o­ries,” says a Face­book spokesperson.

Saved High­lights will dis­play as a hor­i­zon­tal bar on a user’s pro­file and will show view counts. Users can cus­tomize High­lights with a name and cov­er photo.

Face­book first copied Snapchat’s Sto­ries, not even tak­ing the effort to rename the fea­ture, when the com­pa­ny made it part of Instagram’s plat­form two years ago. After adding it to Insta­gram, Face­book released its own ver­sion of Sto­ries in March of last year, and by Octo­ber extend­ed it to Pages.

By giv­ing Sto­ries over to Pages, Face­book opened up the fea­ture to brands and pub­lic fig­ures on the app. In May, TechCrunch report­ed Face­book had begun test­ing 5- to 15-sec­ond skip­pable video ads in Sto­ries on both Insta­gram and Face­book. The TechCrunch report includ­ed a break­down of how many peo­ple were using Sto­ries across Face­book-owned apps com­pared to Snapchat’s entire user base. The num­ber of dai­ly active Face­book Sto­ries users was 150 mil­lion and Insta­gram Sto­ries had dou­ble that at 300 mil­lion. At 191 mil­lion total dai­ly active users, Snapchat’s user base is less than half the num­ber of peo­ple using Sto­ries across Face­book and Instagram.

By extend­ing the life of its Sto­ries fea­ture, Face­book is tak­ing the idea it bor­rowed from Snapchat and turn­ing it into some­thing much dif­fer­ent — remov­ing the ephemer­al Snapchat qual­i­ty of Sto­ries to make them more Face­book-ish. In doing so, the com­pa­ny cre­ates a way for users to hold onto and high­light their pre­ferred con­tent, while at the same time cre­at­ing more adver­tis­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for itself.

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