Today, Instagram announced a new feature rolling out over the next couple weeks called Instagram Stories. Appearing at the top of your home feed, you can now watch and create your own temporary stories that do not appear on your profile grid.
Describing Instagram Stories is easy. Simply think of how Snapchat looked a couple years ago. You have the 24-hour temporary timeline of media, a slideshow of everything you capture for a story, and you can add basic drawings, text, or emojis to your recorded moments.
The appeal with using Instagram Stories over Snapchat is the ability to have everything in one place. You don’t have to build up two followings over separate social networks. If Instagram can do most everything that Snapchat can with a little added on feature, but Snapchat can’t — and isn’t attempting to as far as I know — do everything Instagram can, they are positioning themselves to plug the holes from losing any more of their user base to Snapchat. Even if this new feature is a blatant rip off of Snapchat, I think many will give in to the ease of having everything in one place and we will find Stories to be quite popular in the coming months. Be on the lookout for Stories from the Fstoppers Instagram account as we try out the new feature once available.
If you are interesting in reading more, check out the Instagram blog post for today’s announcement.
"I made this"
Exactly my first thought when I heard about this.
Still waiting for my Insight Stats to kick in and my account is four years old.
If you switch your personal account to a business account you can force the Insight Stats. Also I'm not so sure they are determining this based on account age. The Fstoppers account gained them almost right away, but my personal account which has been around almost since the beginning didn't get them for weeks.
Can I quit this world already? Technology is cool, but all this social media are anything but social...