Sometimes you shouldn’t share the same content with your group of friends your family group, and your workgroup. It’s always tough explaining your festive pictures to your colleagues when you get back in January or justifying other posts to your grandparents and aunts over the festive season. Instagram hopes to make (some of) those conversations a thing of the past. More on that in a moment, however.
This week, Meta-owned Instagram introduced Notes – which let users post short 60-character notes that use only text and emojis.
“To leave a note, go to the top of your inbox, select the followers you follow back or people on your Close Friends list, and your note will appear at the top of their inbox for 24 hours,” says Instagram.
Instagram says you’ll get replies to notes as DMs in your inbox.
Instagram says that, during testing, it learned that “people liked having a lightweight, easy way to share what’s on their mind and start conversations”. It says Notes are designed to give users a casual and spontaneous way to express themselves.
Read More: Instagram nudges you to be kinder, lets you automatically block trolls
Candid Stories: I’ll show you mine if you show me yours
Instagram says it’s finally testing Candid Stories – a feature similar to BeReal which launched in 2019. BeReal tasks users with a once-daily post and limits interactions between users.
Candid also prompts users, once a day, to share a selfie, and those who want to see the post need to also post something. So users only share content with those who also share.
Users use both the front and rear-facing cameras simultaneously when using the feature.
Meta says users can “capture a candid from the stories camera, the multi-author story at the top of the feed, or from the daily notification reminder that starts after your first candid”. If you don’t like daily prompts to post a Candid, you can turn it off in your settings.
Meta says it’s also testing a similar feature for Facebook.
Group profiles
Instagram users will soon be able to share content with a limited number of people instead of everyone on their contact list.
“Whenever you share content to a Group Profile, that content will only be shared to group members instead of your followers, and will be posted on the Group Profile instead of your own.”
Instagram is also testing “Collaborative Collections” which lets users connect with those who have shared interests. The feature will let users save some posts in a collaboration collection in a group or in DMs.
“You can start or add to a collaborative collection by saving a post directly from the feed or sharing a post to a friend via DM and saving it from there,” says Meta.
Source: Meta
