Instagram was for our best selves
Instagram was for our best selves:- It is always a bit of a production. You may take a zillion of photos of that sunset on the pier, but only “one” lands on the Instagram. And that “one” took some time. You have edited the photo, added a filter. In a world of oversharing, Instagram was for our best selves. High class.
Well, just go ahead and just throw that entire first paragraph out the window. With stories, Instagram – which is owned by the social media Facebook –has been now encouraging you to share anything and everything to a vertical slide show for friends. Add text, maybe even a doodle, and within a time span of 24 hours the story will disappear. If this sounds like Snapchat, you are correct.
This is not just about Instagram (and, by extension, Facebook) replicating the next fad in social platforming, though that is part of it. This is about how every major platform is further looking to jump ship and change course for new audiences.
What Instagram/Facebook has been doing makes sense. A Bloomberg estimate in the month of June shows Snapchat has more daily active users than Twitter – at 150 million – and some already forecast the app will slow down expected Facebook growth. New trends in the market are forcing long-standing apps to adapt.
Others social media apps have also made changes
Those apps includes Snapchat, where snaps last forever. And Vine, where those vines are 140-seconds. Tumblr has adopted live video. You can even add stickers to photos on Twitter. Every platform reinvents what has been done before.
The question is whether, these apps strive to become everything, and they are further risking to lose what made them so unique in the first place. That risk is particularly obvious in an app like Instagram, which monopolized the niche for beautiful social photography. Just look at some of the habits Instagrammers have developed: deleting photos that do not compare to their larger collections, limiting themselves to one post per day.
Instagram was for the best of yourself, and Snapchat had for everything else. Now that dividing line seems to have further fallen away.
That is not to say that Instagram Stories would not work, of course: This is not Facebook’s first rodeo. Facebook created Slingshot a few years ago to compete directly with Snapchat before taking the app off the market last December.
Still, it is sort of concerning to see these apps drop the features and limitations that once made them unique. Take those away and you’re left with little more than a competition for the biggest, best party.
