Since its acquisition by Facebook, Instagram has showed tremendous growth and development. It crossed 600 million subscriber mark this month which is a big milestone for the popular photo / video sharing social networking platform.
Recently Instagram introduced Instagram Stories – a feature that was first introduced by Snapchat. Instagram basically copied the idea, changed the interface and launched it as Instagram Stories. The move has been criticized by tech gurus and even by the users considering the fact that Instagram blatantly copied Snapchat.
With the recent update Instagram has again copied Snapchat’s basic ideology – and they have even one-upped Snapchat!
The update adds sticker supports, location stickers and hands-free video recording. The latter is considered as Snapchat killer considering that it does not support the same as of now. The stickers consist of both dynamic content (like current temperature and weather based on your location) and the static images.
Instagram allows you to use multiple dynamic stickers at once, whereas Snapchat treats them as filters (thus allowing only one). You can access the stickers from the new button on the top right when editing a Story image.
The hands-free video recording support is a major upgrade, instead of holding down the record button to capture video (much like Snapchat and Instagram’s ‘Normal’ mode), you have to simply press the button once to record and press again to stop recording.
In addition to that, a few weeks ago Instagram also added ‘saved posts’ to view them later and Live Video support. The live video support feature was well received by both users and celebrities. A few ‘Instagram celebrities’ have started using the same regularly to give a glimpse of their day to day lifestyle.
But even with all the changes Instagram has done, the fact that they copied the basic ideas from Snapchat is perpetual.Which is an indecent action done by a popular and respectable platform owned by multi-billion Facebook.
With a great deal of newer features and mainly the hands-free video recording option, Snapchat has to come up with something innovative to ensure that it remains the top image messaging and multimedia app.
Let us know how you feel about Instagram copying Snapchat’s design and ideas.