In a bid to attract or hold onto users who want to share less-stylized images from their daily lives, Instagram today introduced Stories, a new photo-and-video-sharing feature that borrows heavily (entirely?) from rival Snapchat. Tapping on an avatar will open a photo or a short video clip (of up to 10 seconds) that they have posted to the Stories feed within the last 24 hours.
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Instagram Stories is a clone of Snapchat Stories that lets people cobble together a montage of photos and videos to share with friends. Instead, comments on photos and video will be sent to users through direct messages. A telling line from the company’s blog post is: “With Instagram Stories, you don’t have to worry about overposting”.
Instagram Stories will be rolled out in coming weeks to versions of the application tailored for smartphones powered by Android or Apple iOS software. Stories can also be hidden from specific people.
That’s right; Instagram Stories is a new feature that resembles the Snapchat platform in many ways.
The new feature is very similar to Live Stories on Snapchat. Don’t fret, you can just swipe left or tap the upper left screen. You can also specify people you don’t want to see your story, to make backstabbing even easier!
The bubbles on top of the feed show the accounts you follow and contain stories from those users.
Instagram’s spin appears to be that they’re owned by Facebook, the 800-lb gorilla that gets what it wants. Text and doodles can be added to each image using the tools provided, just as they can in Snapchat’s version of the feature. Stories shared on public accounts will be visible to all users. The users feel very comfortable and able to save and reshare their pictures to Instagram stories easily.
Instagram takes a page out of Snapchat’s playbook.
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Adding in content that disappears can help Instagram tackle that problem. Let us go over the similarities.
