Instagram steals Snapchat stories
It wasn’t enough to strike once, but Instagram was hellbent on making it clear that it was on a warpath to secure its place as a mostly visual medium in a social media scene populated by text-based giants like Facebook and Twitter. Instagram’s ability to allow users to publish photos (and now videos, see last slide) in their feed was the main appeal of the app, until 2016.
In a bid to engage users further, Instagram ripped a page out of Snapchat’s book. Snapchat was less of an Instagram competitor and more of a text message competitor, as Snapchat’s appeal to a young demographic was disappearing photo messages complete with text and drawing tools, but Instagram saw a Snapchat feature that would completely change the game: Stories. Snapchat stories allow users to upload a photo to their “story” that will disappear after 24 hours, and Instagram announced their version of it in August 2016.
