Instagram Debuts Ephemeral 'Stories' In Battle With Snapchat
On Tuesday, the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company began rolling out a new ephemeral sharing tool called "Instagram Stories" that heavily mimics the core Snapchat feature of the same name. Stories lets users add full-screen photos and videos, overlayed with text, emojis, filters and bright drawings in a slideshow of content that disappears after 24 hours. Users can choose to save the clips to their camera roll or share them on their traditional Instagram profile, where they can still post filtered photos and videos per usual. Users can capture clips for Stories through an in-app camera, or share camera roll content that is up to 24 hours old.
"As we've grown, Instagram has become the best place to share your highlights–the amazing meal out with friends, the beautiful view– but there are a lot of moments in life between your highlights," said Instagram's head of product Kevin Weil, noting that users are hesitant to share spontaneously on the app when every post sticks to their profile. "The community wants more flexibility to share those moments. With Stories, Instagram becomes the best place to share your highlights and all of the moments between your highlights."
"Stories is something you're going to see adopted by a lot of different apps," said Weil, who joined Instagram four months ago from Twitter, where he served as VP of product. "Stories is a format the community has wanted to use within Instagram for a long time."
Users will be able to see Instagram Stories from friends and accounts they follow in an algorithmically-ordered row at the top of their feed. When people add new content to their Story, a colorful ring appears around the Story icon, the circular profile photo, letting others know there is new content. Tapping someone's profile photo opens their Story, and users can move forward and backward between clips. Instead of liking or publicly commenting, users can send private messages via "Instagram Direct," a feature the company said now has more than 250 million monthly users.
"We've gone to lengths to make sure the feed and Stories feel integrated," Weil said. "At the same time they're separate spaces. With the ephemeral nature of Stories, we want you to feel safe sharing without worrying about who will see it, who will comment on it or how many likes you'll get."
Simple can be a good thing sometimes, don't know why all these apps feel the need to add all these useless goodies to an already working formula; specially when these goodies are taken from other apps, they're just loosing their identities.
