Don’t fret about always posting a perfect photo on Instagram. Now there’s a way to post photos and videos that disappear from the site after 24 hours.
“With Instagram Stories, you don’t have to worry about overposting. Instead, you can share as much as you want throughout the day — with as much creativity as you want. You can bring your story to life in new ways with text and drawing tools. The photos and videos will disappear after 24 hours and won’t appear on your profile grid or in feed,” the company wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.
Wait a minute. If the feature looks and sounds familiar, it’s because Snapchat also has a feature called Stories. The ephemeral messaging app is popular among teens and is considered a competitor to social media giant Facebook, which owns Instagram — and which once reportedly tried to buy Snapchat.
Some users are calling Instagram out on social media for being a copycat.
Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom has acknowledged the feature’s striking resemblance to one on Snapchat. “They deserve all the credit,” he told TechCrunch in an interview. But he also said “This isn’t about who invented something. This is about a format, and how you take it to a network and put your own spin on it.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on recently that the new feature is part of the company’s video-first efforts.
“This is the latest step in putting video at the center of all our services. People are already creating and sharing more video, so we’re going to make it even easier,” he said.
Comments to Zuckerberg’s post were also filled with thoughts about the new feature’s similarity to Snapchat.
