In a bid to attract or hold onto users who want to share less-stylized images from their daily lives, Instagram today introduced Stories, a new photo-and-video-sharing feature that borrows heavily (entirely?) from rival Snapchat.
With the ability to draw goofy stuff on images, share as many as you like and then have all of it disappear in 24 hours, Instagram is making a move toward a less-fussy photographic audience that until now hasn’t wanted to share that way in the normal feed.
A post on the Instagram blog lays out the details of how the whole thing will work, with a new bar at the top of the feed featuring friends and favorite popular accounts. When those folks have a story to share, the profile photo will have a colorful ring around it. Users whose accounts are private will also have private Stories, visible only to those who follow them. Also, there are no likes and no comments in the feature.
“Instagram has always been a place to share the moments you want to remember,” the company said in its post. “Now you can share your highlights and everything in between, too.”
Sharing everything in between is what Snapchat is all about, and news stories Tuesday about Instagram’s move didn’t pull any punches about the copycat appearance of it all.
Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom told TechCrunch that Snapchat deserved “all the credit,” before insisting, “This isn’t about who invented something. This is about a format, and how you take it to a network and put your own spin on it.”
The Verge called Instagram Stories a “near-perfect copy” of the central feed that helped supercharge Snapchat’s growth rate.
Instagram, which surpassed 500 million active monthly users in June, was purchased by Facebook for $1 billion in 2012. In 2013, Facebook tried to acquire Snapchat for $3 billion. Today, Snapchat has 150 million daily users.
Instagram Stories is being released today on iOS and Android.
