Introducing Instagram Stories

Instagram, instead of focusing on making important improvements to its own app and platform, decide to clone Snapchat. Color me surprised.<p>Things that are shit with IG and still require attention:<p>- there is no real onboarding experience [1]<p>- good luck contacting a human that works at Instagram with a support query as a user [2]<p>- good luck contacting a human that works at Instagram with a support query as a developer [2]<p>- developer libraries are abandoned [3]<p>- the API is a joke.<p>- There is still a lack of support for HD photography.<p>- The 3rd party developer experience is ... well ask some of your peers and you&#x27;ll quickly find out.<p>[1] Someone at Instagram, for the love of the internet just do some reading up on this. Here&#x27;s an article to get you started: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@scottbelsky&#x2F;crafting-the-first-mile-of-product-7ed25e8f1027#.s8mqxfdna" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@scottbelsky&#x2F;crafting-the-first-mile-of-p...</a><p>[2] unless you stalk them on Twitter. That&#x27;s not creepy at all though, is it?<p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;facebookarchive&#x2F;instagram-ruby-gem" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;facebookarchive&#x2F;instagram-ruby-gem</a>

This is Facebook&#x27;s third attempt at trying to compete against Snapchat, this time with the exact same name as their product. I guess third time&#x27;s a charm.<p>Interesting though that they&#x27;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.<p>Personally, I can&#x27;t see this being successful. Snapchat will remain to be a quick and dirty way to get &#x27;moments&#x27; to my friends (like twitter, but with video), whereas Instagram will be for more more &#x27;serious&#x27;, &#x27;arty&#x27; photos.

I would really like to know why Facebook thought that this would be a better feature for Instagram than for Messenger or WhatsApp. That&#x27;s how I use my social media apps:<p>- WhatsApp: Messaging with most of my friends (I&#x27;m from Germany and here everyone I know uses WhatsApp) - Messenger: Messaging with people that don&#x27;t have WhatsApp - Snapchat: Letting my friends now what I&#x27;m up to right now. I don&#x27;t put much thought into what I post there. I mostly follow close friends because I honestly don&#x27;t really care about the stories of people I don&#x27;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&#x27;t know but who I think take nice pictures.<p>Therefore I don&#x27;t see me using Instagram Stories anytime soon because<p>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).<p>If I wouldn&#x27;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&#x27;m probably younger than most people here so my experience might differ quite bit.

What&#x27;s funny about this thread is it&#x27;s almost all people complaining about dev experience, APIs, etc and saying IG is dead...<p>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.<p>I&#x27;d say that was a successful launch.<p>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.<p>Thousands (Millions?) are debating deleting their snapchats at this very moment. I know I am.<p>IG did a great job getting a whole lot of activity back on their app. Congrats to them.

I had turned auto-update off ahead of the new instagram UI update because I prefered the look of the old Instagram. I&#x27;m now glad that I did. I don&#x27;t need stories slowing down the experience, taking up more real estate, or eating more bandwidth.<p>I don&#x27;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&#x27;ve rolled out updates (prioritized feeds, sending DMs by default when you @ people, ...). Instagram hasn&#x27;t rolled something out in a long time that&#x27;s made me &quot;wow,&quot; which is too bad, because it was my favourite social network not that long ago.<p>I&#x27;d be very annoyed if I had any personal stake in the company.

Looking past the obvious verbatim copy. Have we reached the point where everyone is completely sick of another way to &quot;share&quot;, update, and post every moment of our lives. It&#x27;s really exhausting. Is this a function of getting old?

This is so blatant that it is almost satirical.

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

I&#x27;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.<p>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.

Meanwhile any time I look at Instagram now I&#x27;m hard-pressed to find any posts from the current day because they only show me the &quot;important&quot; highlights from more than a day ago.<p>Yeah, I&#x27;m serious.

I use instagram because everything stays there I use snapchat because it&#x27;s quick and temporary.<p>Why couldn&#x27;t they make it possible to have a story that appears as a single tile in your profile permanently?

I think that Facebook and other companies need to consider that it&#x27;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&#x27;ve already stopped using Snapchat since they feature-creeped all the way into photo backups.)

Ugh.<p>I hope Apple Photos releases a simple social network that lets you share photos without all this annoying crap trying to hook young adults.<p>I liked IG a lot for it&#x27;s intended purpose: easy to use photo app.

Go home instagram, you&#x27;re drunk!

What I&#x27;m unclear about, as both an Instagram user and with an interest in product development (from a UI&#x2F;UX perspective), is what question this answered.<p>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.<p>Regardless, it appears to be unobtrusive (though it seems odd to bury ephemeral content creation&#x2F;consumption...)

They&#x27;re doing the &quot;tap for photo, hold for video&quot; thing too. I thought there was a patent dispute around that?[1] Is that resolved now?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;08&#x2F;14&#x2F;snapchat-patent&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;08&#x2F;14&#x2F;snapchat-patent&#x2F;</a>

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

Are there any good stats available on Instagram&#x27;s usage over trends over time? Seems like people are using it less and less.

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

I wonder when VSCO will add stories...

Annnnnd IG is done.

Is it April Fools&#x27; day already? They didn&#x27;t even bother to change the name from the direct feature rip of Snapchat? haha All I can think of is this meme: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bluetide.pro&#x2F;1eJqM&#x2F;4NFGBKsg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bluetide.pro&#x2F;1eJqM&#x2F;4NFGBKsg</a>

I had to check that it&#x27;s not April 1st.