Introducing Instagram Stories

http://blog.instagram.com/post/148348940287/160802-stories

by buttscicles • 10 years ago

84 96 10 years ago

blog.instagram.com

madeofpalk2• 10 years ago

This is Facebook's third attempt at trying to compete against Snapchat, this time with the exact same name as their product. I guess third time's a charm.

Interesting though that they're only implementing the most basic features (drawing over a video?), and not the more interesting and fun face tracking stuff that Snapchat does now.

Personally, I can't see this being successful. Snapchat will remain to be a quick and dirty way to get 'moments' to my friends (like twitter, but with video), whereas Instagram will be for more more 'serious', 'arty' photos.

tdkl3• 10 years ago

Well, Snapchat Memories is a functionality to save recorded pictures.

Instagram Memories is just plain old Snapchat - story with expiration date.

Yhippa2• 10 years ago

I've stopped using Insta for the most part. I'm an old and I feel like Snaps are just more fun for me. The major issue with that is a lot of my friends haven't caught on yet.

Insta just feels like it has too many buttons and notifications from spammers flying at me. They lost the plot from the simple app they used to be a long time ago. Plus the new algorithm change is terrible for me. Every time I open the app I see the same pictures over and over again and lots of advertisements in there now.

AJ007• 10 years ago

Yeah anecdotally, my in app time for Snapchat vs Instagram flipped once they changed the feed. Twitter was even worse, I don't use it anymore. How insane would it be if your email inbox didn't sort chronologically?

I don't know what cohorts Facebook is looking at. Are they seeing a drop in engagement but balance it doesn't matter because of the revenue stream from advertisers? Or may be the bulk of users have increased engagement with a non-chronological feed? Perhaps more users than I realized follow over 1,000 users and the chronology value was lost a very long time ago.

Oddly enough I'm finding myself returning back to RSS feeds. Lots of excellent independent bloggers still out there who actually write useful things. edit: and photographers.

spike0215• 10 years ago

Snapchats are surprisingly better than alternatives nowadays.

I personally really dislike the new feeds by popularity route that services are adopting, and Snapchat's Stories are great because I can find a friend's feed for the day and just catch up immediately, rather than having to either dig and dig until a feed thinks a particular post is important, etc.

shurane• 10 years ago

It's funny you mention that, because I know more people who use Instagram than Snapchat. Could be an age demographic? What I do know is my friends who use Snapchat don't use the stories mode, relying on sending direct snaps to the people they want to send it to. Not the case with Instagram.

typetypetype• 10 years ago

I don't think there is much overlap between Snapchat and IG user bases, so I think this is more about adding well-received features as opposed to directly competing. In other words, they are leveraging all the time and effort that Snapchat put into developing a mature feature.

jrowley• 10 years ago

Just an anecdote, but the majority of people I follow on snapchat have an instagram.

the_watcher2• 10 years ago

I don't think there is much overlap between Snapchat and IG user bases

Huh? The overlap is probably one of the largest of any social networks. Simply take a look at the sheer volume of Instagram's that are obviously touched up Snaps.

tdkl3• 10 years ago

I see it as a welcomed edition :

- they already launched it, not taking weeks like some other industry bozos where they announce something then ship it when no one cares anymore (Google how's that Allo doing)

- Snapchat client sucks balls on Android, it drains battery, horrible performance

- low friction to use the feature

But of course both will survive and can coexist.

alex_g• 10 years ago

I use instagram because everything stays there I use snapchat because it's quick and temporary.

Why couldn't they make it possible to have a story that appears as a single tile in your profile permanently?

madebysquares• 10 years ago

I initially thought that is what they built but, They went the snapchat route.

splouk• 10 years ago

This is so blatant that it is almost satirical.

taytus• 10 years ago

Had to double check the domain because I really thought it was a joke.

bluetidepro• 10 years ago

Is it April Fools' day already? They didn't even bother to change the name from the direct feature rip of Snapchat? haha All I can think of is this meme: http://bluetide.pro/1eJqM/4NFGBKsg

NN88• 10 years ago

Annnnnd IG is done.

meira• 10 years ago

I feel that the second dotcom bubble finally burst with the fall of Uber yesterday.

xfour• 10 years ago

I would call it the 3rd dotcom bubble, there was a pretty big one forming that popped during the 2008 financial crisis as well, at least in San Francisco.

nilved2• 10 years ago

Is there some news that I missed yesterday?

askafriend2• 10 years ago

That wasn't really a fall, just a dissapointment. They still made a pretty hefty return on their investment there which adds to the cash position of the company and I'm sure the investors are pleased with the attempt to crack China.

overcast5• 10 years ago

Looking past the obvious verbatim copy. Have we reached the point where everyone is completely sick of another way to "share", update, and post every moment of our lives. It's really exhausting. Is this a function of getting old?

Grazester• 10 years ago

What! Didnt that video of the cool kids having fun inspire you to share your awesome life stories?

I do get where you are coming from. I dislike snapchat because while it may be a way to share something silly its not a serious way to communicate. I have a friend that tries to use it for this and drives me nuts.

overcast5• 10 years ago

Add it to my list of things I don't "get". Photos are something I intend to keep, that's why I'm taking a picture.

the_watcher2• 10 years ago

Have we reached the point where everyone is completely sick of another way to "share", update, and post every moment of our lives.

Obviously, no. Snapchat's rise is all the proof you need.

nilved2• 10 years ago

I think that Facebook and other companies need to consider that it's better to change nothing than add the wrong feature. This blurs the lines too much with Snapchat. If I still used Instagram when they added this feature, I would stop using it in favour of Snapchat. (But I've already stopped using Snapchat since they feature-creeped all the way into photo backups.)

intoverflow2• 10 years ago

I think that Facebook and other companies need to consider that it's better to change nothing than add the wrong feature

Instagram seemed to be following this policy until very recently, now the users have got bored and FB is trying desperately to catch up.

rjeli• 10 years ago

I had to check that it's not April 1st.

MAGZine• 10 years ago

I had turned auto-update off ahead of the new instagram UI update because I prefered the look of the old Instagram. I'm now glad that I did. I don't need stories slowing down the experience, taking up more real estate, or eating more bandwidth.

I don't mean to be cynical, but I think Instagram as a product has peaked. Their core functionality was perfect, and in many ways, the product only gotten worse as they've rolled out updates (prioritized feeds, sending DMs by default when you @ people, ...). Instagram hasn't rolled something out in a long time that's made me "wow," which is too bad, because it was my favourite social network not that long ago.

I'd be very annoyed if I had any personal stake in the company.

ljk• 10 years ago

Also turned off auto-update but few weeks ago the app signed me out automatically and prevented me from logging in unless I update to the latest version.

Haven't used the app since then. Every social app is trying to do the same thing it's pretty pointless now imo

settsu• 10 years ago

What I'm unclear about, as both an Instagram user and with an interest in product development (from a UI/UX perspective), is what question this answered.

I suppose it should not be entirely a surprise for a half billion user, Facebook-owned service to take the throw-feature-at-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks approach.

Regardless, it appears to be unobtrusive (though it seems odd to bury ephemeral content creation/consumption...)

instakill• 10 years ago

Instagram, instead of focusing on making important improvements to its own app and platform, decide to clone Snapchat. Color me surprised.

Things that are shit with IG and still require attention:

- there is no real onboarding experience [1]

- good luck contacting a human that works at Instagram with a support query as a user [2]

- good luck contacting a human that works at Instagram with a support query as a developer [2]

- developer libraries are abandoned [3]

- the API is a joke.

- There is still a lack of support for HD photography.

- The 3rd party developer experience is ... well ask some of your peers and you'll quickly find out.

[1] Someone at Instagram, for the love of the internet just do some reading up on this. Here's an article to get you started: https://medium.com/@scottbelsky/crafting-the-first-mile-of-p...

[2] unless you stalk them on Twitter. That's not creepy at all though, is it?

[3] https://github.com/facebookarchive/instagram-ruby-gem

svens_3• 10 years ago

Can you elaborate a bit on your developer experience?

I've started building an app for Instagram and would like to know. Apart from the newly introduced sandbox and app approval requirements I haven't noticed any major pain points yet.

It's true that most libraries are only seldom updated, but on the other hand the API doesn't change much and it's REST with OAuth after all.

Yabood2• 10 years ago

We went through the Instagram approval process about a week ago, and it was fine. The API itself is pretty good I think, and has a pretty good coverage of their platform functionality. New sandbox and approvals are bit more limiting than the previous version, but it was ok in general. Our application was approved for all requested permissions in less than two days.

tcdent2• 10 years ago

In addition to other major legal restrictions, the latest API update crossed a line for accessing your own posts; now you can only retrieve 20 of the most recent entries and pagination has been disabled.

Yes, Instagram legally owns your data, but now they are actively preventing you from accessing it as well.

overcast5• 10 years ago

Considering Instagram was founded on ruining pictures with crappy filters, I doubt HD photos are anywhere on their radar.

pconner• 10 years ago

Plenty of "real" photographers use Instagram now (and have for several years).

tedmiston14• 10 years ago

That's very nearly the opposite of why Instagram was founded: good mobile photography was hard.

From transcript:

How many people have heard of Burbn/use it? .... Long story short, we worked on that for a little while and then realized it wasn't really going anywhere. But the thing people loved the most about it was actually sharing images of what they were doing.
So what we did was we listed out these five problems. And I remember the top three that we circled. Number 1 was that mobile photos don't look so great. We've all had that experience... you're seeing the sunset, you take a snapshot, and it looks washed out, you can barely see the sun, etcetera. And we were like, 'That's the major problem we want to solve.' Number 2 was that uploads on mobile phones take a really long time. So we were like, 'What could we do around that?' Well, maybe if we started the upload way before you're done even editing the photo's caption, and what if we sized down the photo just to fit perfectly on the screen but nothing else? And that's the small little problem and solution that it turns out really delights people because they press 'done' entering their caption, it's already been uploaded.

From Stanford to Startup [Entire Talk] http://ecorner.stanford.edu/videos/2735/From-Stanford-to-Sta...

ArmandGrillet• 10 years ago

One more thing to add on your list: spamming is ruining the entire experience. For a company that sells AI as the next big thing, not being able to detect accounts following 5000 people, having 8 followers and posting thousands of comments "GET 1000 FOLLOWERS ON [URL]" every day is kind of a joke.

Yhippa2• 10 years ago

I want to upvote this twice. This is the single biggest dissatisfier I have with Instagram. I've given up on blocking and reporting fake or spammy users.

tedmiston14• 10 years ago

As someone with a small-medium sized account (~2k followers), I currently get ~10–20 spam followers per week. I aggressively report as spam + block, but it's a nuisance.

Their reporting flow has so many taps and steps that it feels like it's designed to be inefficient to give them less requests.

DAddYE• 10 years ago

Add to this list this awful new trend (twitter does that too) that every time I open instagram they "suggest" someone to follow. I think I follow like 40 ppl. More than enough for me. Not for them.

tedmiston14• 10 years ago

- There is still a lack of support for HD photography.

Another is support for panoramas is nonexistent. They've abandoned the square format already, but there's still currently a minimum w:h ratio.

treigerm• 10 years ago

I would really like to know why Facebook thought that this would be a better feature for Instagram than for Messenger or WhatsApp. That's how I use my social media apps:

- WhatsApp: Messaging with most of my friends (I'm from Germany and here everyone I know uses WhatsApp) - Messenger: Messaging with people that don't have WhatsApp - Snapchat: Letting my friends now what I'm up to right now. I don't put much thought into what I post there. I mostly follow close friends because I honestly don't really care about the stories of people I don't know. - Instagram: Posting pictures that I think look nice. Often that are pictures that I took with my DSLR and edited on my laptop. I also follow a lot of people I don't know but who I think take nice pictures.

Therefore I don't see me using Instagram Stories anytime soon because

1. Snapchat already has that feature and they probably implemented it better, 2. the content on Instagram is simply different than the one on Snapchat (more high-quality instead of the quick and dirty Snaps).

If I wouldn't have Snapchat and they brought Stories to one of their Messaging apps I might have used it. But Instagram? No chance. It would be interesting to know how other people use these apps (if at all). I realise that I'm probably younger than most people here so my experience might differ quite bit.

armandososa• 10 years ago

That's easy. Instagram is a cooler brand among the same demographic that is crazy about snapchat.

tedmiston14• 10 years ago

Can't speak for everyone but my followers on Instagram are quite different from my Facebook friends. Over half of them I don't know personally. Besides the fact that my account is public, I think this impacts what I would post on there vs Snapchat significantly.

tdkl3• 10 years ago

WhatsApp and Messenger aren't "broadcast first", which Snapchat and Instagram are.

balls1872• 10 years ago

Ugh.

I hope Apple Photos releases a simple social network that lets you share photos without all this annoying crap trying to hook young adults.

I liked IG a lot for it's intended purpose: easy to use photo app.

rajathagasthya• 10 years ago

There's already iCloud photo sharing, if you haven't checked that out.

balls1872• 10 years ago

Yeah I've used it, it's okay. I like the approach social networks take: have a feed, and I can subscribe to it.

boto32• 10 years ago

I've been to a couple of Instagram ML meetups. I am not surprised that this is what they came up with. There seemed to be a lot of technically gifted people there, but I always felt there was a lack of creativity and deep domain understanding. All the projects seemed to be in the line of: we added this feature, and we saw our user engagement increased by this percentage. Everyone seemed to be working on incremental improvements without a purposeful leadership and vision.

They do have the technical talents though. I think one of the word2vec authors was there, but he was giving a talk about using the same technique on emoji icons :-( I would think there are more interesting problems to tackle with the available resources at FB.

abalone3• 10 years ago

What is an Instagram ML meetup?

boto32• 10 years ago

machine learning, sorry.

pducks32• 10 years ago

Go home instagram, you're drunk!

erdevs• 10 years ago

Are there any good stats available on Instagram's usage over trends over time? Seems like people are using it less and less.

rickyc091• 10 years ago

As an educator, I can tell you that young teens still use both Snapchat and Instagram equally. I would say that younger kids are actually more drawn to Snapchat due to the face swap and goofiness functionalities.

spike0215• 10 years ago

Meanwhile any time I look at Instagram now I'm hard-pressed to find any posts from the current day because they only show me the "important" highlights from more than a day ago.

Yeah, I'm serious.

the_mitsuhiko• 10 years ago

Instagram also cloned Vine and the responses were pretty similar if I remember correctly.

vthallam• 10 years ago

Way to innovate by ripping off the name and feature of Snapchat!:|

enahs-sf• 10 years ago

I wonder when VSCO will add stories...

abalone3• 10 years ago

Serious question: what is it like being on an engineering team like this? Where the explicit objective is to clone a competitor head-to-toe. Does it impact morale? Can you recruit great people to such teams?

(Note, I get that nothing is completely original out there, and that there are a few differences between this and Snapchat.)

tedmiston14• 10 years ago

I have met some members of Instagram's engineering team at Python conferences. They also run a dedicated engineering blog (https://engineering.instagram.com).

Despite the fact that they use an old version of Django, and the product has not exactly changed drastically since it became popular, they don't seem jaded.

Sometimes it's fun to build your own version of something regardless of what exists in the rest of the world. I'm sure nuances will become more prominent in time.

askafriend2• 10 years ago

The Instagram folks are awesome, and active in the developer community!

justindocanto3• 10 years ago

What's funny about this thread is it's almost all people complaining about dev experience, APIs, etc and saying IG is dead...

Meanwhile their customers are very happy and very active. Look at how many snaps you see on your snapchat right now and then go look at how many IG stories have already been posted in the first couple hours.

I'd say that was a successful launch.

Nit picking things, as a developer, i understand... but ultimately what matters is: are customers using it? Right now the answer is, without a doubt, yes.

Thousands (Millions?) are debating deleting their snapchats at this very moment. I know I am.

IG did a great job getting a whole lot of activity back on their app. Congrats to them.

dtien• 10 years ago

I agree, seems to be a lot of anger/hate on the developer side of things, but it's a smart move on IG's side from a user and business strategy perspective.

I was having a similar discussion with someone else on a duplicate of this post, so thought I'd share some of my thoughts here as well since they're especially relevant to your comment. The general point of the prior discussion was that IG was simply cloning SC, and might do better by releasing it as a separate app vs inside their main app. But by releasing it within their main app will result in certain failure since SC's crowd of tweens/millennials wouldn't leave SC.

[my responses with minor edits]

I disagree, I think integrating it with their main product is the perfect way to release this. Just look at Periscope ( and Vine ) living as separate products from Twitter, vs FB releasing FB Live deeply embedded into their primary product. The likelihood of the mainstream user's willingness to try out and adopt the new product/feature is increased.

And in this case, I think all the additional features that comes with IG Stories is actually very cohesive with the rest of IG's core experience. All the new stickers, overlays, filters, and I'm sure they'll be adding the same animated video filters are all very natural extensions of the IG user experience.

So many people use Snapchat as a photo/filter editor to then share on IG/Twitter/FB, now they can do that very same experience directly in IG and share it with their existing fans.

And maybe an overlooked aspect is IG's better UX vs snapchat's bizarre stubbornness to maintain their user antagonistic UX.

But I think it's just as telling with SC's recent spate of features that are moving away from the ephemeral nature of the app ( ie Memories ). Where you can store or save Snaps or Stories.... oh you mean sort of like a personal gallery? And now you want to view a collection of the latest/most popular collected snaps from your friends? oh you mean like a newsfeed?

Bottom line is that the photo/messaging apps are converging. And I don't think there's necessarily any loyalty to a particular platform especially if they have very similar features. The crowd will move to the platform where their friends are, and where the celebs/bloggers/artists/influencers are. And IMO I think IG has a slight advantage with that group at this point because of the non-ephemeral nature of their app which led/leads more naturally to those types building their 'brand' and following. Nobody wants to spend hours and energy creating content that simply disappears. But these types have followed the crowd onto SC and lived by the SC rules, but I'd have to believe they would prefer the other model if they had a choice.

So I guess what I'm saying is that these 2 apps are converging to the same point, albeit from different ends of the spectrum with differing pressures. And once they reach a certain level of parity, loyalty to a platform goes out the window, and being able to capture the cool kids and influencers will be the key to where the rest of the crowd goes. So I don't think it's 'certain failure' from IG's point of view, and certainly still anyone's game.

justindocanto3• 10 years ago

Your comment deserve a longer response, but i have to leave the office shortly.

My short reply is... I agree that staying within the app is a win. The overall mood seems to be "yes, one less app i have to use now..."

I don't keep apps I dont need or use, and a lot of people feel the same way. I dont want YET ANOTHER social networking app. This app feels like snapchat and IG merged, except in reality, IG just stole a lot of Snapchats thunder/users.

tedmiston14• 10 years ago

By customer, are you referring to (free) consumers or business that pay IG for advertising?

Looking at the latest update of Instagram (v9.0 on iOS), the Stories feature does not seem to be accessible for my account to try it.

The post makes it sound like no one has it yet:

Instagram Stories will be rolling out globally over the next few weeks on iOS and Android.

justindocanto3• 10 years ago

By customer, i meant users. By users, I mean the people who spend time on the app and are the reason there are advertisers and/or a business in the first place.

Regardless of what the post says to you, people have it and are already posting a LOT. Vogue already has anna wintour in multiple posts on their IG story. Brands already are posting. A lot of the vine/snapchat "stars" are already 20-30+ posts deep. I see fashion bloggers, tech writers, etc. A lot of people are already using it.

abalone3• 10 years ago

They're doing the "tap for photo, hold for video" thing too. I thought there was a patent dispute around that?[1] Is that resolved now?

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/14/snapchat-patent/

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