Instagram today introduced a new feature called Stories, which lets its 500 million users create slideshows of images and videos that will vanish after 24 hours.
Disappearing stories? If you think that sounds an awful lot like Snapchat Stories, well, you’re right. It is.
Instagram Stories borrows heavily and unapologetically from Snapchat, the image- and video-messaging app that made its name on updates with a limited lifespan.
8 Things You Need To Know About Instagram Stories
Here are the details on Instagram Stories:
- Stories appear as colored rings around profile pictures of friends, celebrities, and brands at the top of users’ Instagram feeds. Tapping on one of those rings will start playing the story in full screen.
- Images and videos appear in Stories in the order the user uploads them.
- Stories are no longer than 10 seconds.
- Text and drawings can be added to the images and photos.
- Stories can be shared with publicly, privately, or to a selected audience.
- You can view who has seen each photo and video by swiping up when watching your story.
- Instagram users can’t like or comment on Stories.
- After 24 hours, Stories will no longer appear on a user’s profile page or in the feed.
Why Instagram Stories?
Instagram told the New York Times part of thinking behind Stories was to showcase more moments, instead of just the highlights, by reducing “a ton of the pressure people have to post their absolute best stuff.”
In other words, users don’t like it when they post an image that only get a few likes. This causes people to post pictures less often to Instagram, which is bad for Facebook-owned Instagram.
Will Instagram Stories Last Or Quickly Vanish?
Instagram Stories will begin rolling out today on iOS and Android, and should be available to all users within the next few weeks.
Unlike Snapchat, which has 150 million daily users, Instagram stories won’t (yet?) be monetized with advertising. But you have to imagine some sort of advertising won’t be far off for brands and businesses should this feature succeed.
Facebook has a pretty poor record at trying to copy Snapchat features. Remember Facebook Poke? How about Slingshot? Yeah, me neither.
So we’ll know soon enough whether Instagram Stories can gain momentum or will, itself, disappear.
Featured Image created by author from images provided by Instagram
