Despite getting dissed for stealing Snapchat’s prized feature, Instagram’s Stories has now achieved 100 million daily active users in just two months of its launch.
For Facebook-owned Instagram, 2016 has been a year of changes, achievements and then criticism. The service celebrated its sixth anniversary yesterday. Instagram started off as a standalone social networking platform primarily focused on images. Soon, its popularity grew worldwide with people loving the preloaded filters and hashtags. Back when Instagram first launched for Android, and I started using it, I had a feeling the app is only going to get bigger. Now taken over by Facebook, the app has over 500 million monthly users. Instagram is celebrating another milestone as its newly launched Stories service has gained 100 million daily active users worldwide in just two months of its launch.
The milestone comes months after Instagram was heavily criticized for copying Snapchat for its Stories feature. I was one of those regular Snapchat users who was disappointed when Instagram copied the feature. But it seems despite so much criticism everyone eventually ended up using Stories. Popularity of Instagram’s Stories feature shows how powerful Instagram is as an app alone and also how social trends have so much influence on the millennials. Though, it is not the first time internet-companies have drawn inspiration from each other.
Although Instagram was heavily criticized, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom defended the move to adopt Snapchat’s prized feature. However, he unconsciously agreed that whatever the case may be, their move of doing so did work out. “And a signal that it is working is that after just a few months, over 100 million people, daily use Instagram stories. So, forget about pride of authorship, internally or externally – it’s working,” he said in an interview to BuzzFeed. Now that’s how you ‘Drop the Mic’.
Instagram Stories appear at the top of the user feed and can be viewed by tapping on the profile photo icons. Users can tap to go back and forward and also swipe to view another person’s story. Users can comment on someone’s story, and the comment would go as a Direct Message to that particular user. The only feature that is different in Instagram Stories and Snapchat is that on Instagram, users can choose which part of their story that they want to upload.
Speaking about the major changes Instagram made this year, it began by changed the order of the feed on a user’s profile. The app eliminated the chronological way of displaying feed and moving to the algorithmic filtering to show “the moments we believe you care about the most.” This led to revamp of its five-year-old Instagram logo, which too created a huge spur on the internet. On a lighter note, Instagram also rolled out a much needed feature wherein it allowed users to save their posts as drafts. It seems Instagram is looking to experiment and try out new changes without compromising much with the overall user experience. With Facebook on its side and quick success like Instagram Stories, the service is destined to grow even bigger in the near future.
Source: bgr.in
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