
Introducing Instagram Stories - buttscicles
http://blog.instagram.com/post/148348940287/160802-stories
======
instakill
Instagram, instead of focusing on making important improvements to its own app
and platform, decide to clone Snapchat. Color me surprised.

Things that are shit with IG and still require attention:

\- there is no real onboarding experience [1]

\- good luck contacting a human that works at Instagram with a support query
as a user [2]

\- good luck contacting a human that works at Instagram with a support query
as a developer [2]

\- developer libraries are abandoned [3]

\- the API is a joke.

\- There is still a lack of support for HD photography.

\- The 3rd party developer experience is ... well ask some of your peers and
you'll quickly find out.

[1] Someone at Instagram, for the love of the internet just do some reading up
on this. Here's an article to get you started:
[https://medium.com/@scottbelsky/crafting-the-first-mile-
of-p...](https://medium.com/@scottbelsky/crafting-the-first-mile-of-
product-7ed25e8f1027#.s8mqxfdna)

[2] unless you stalk them on Twitter. That's not creepy at all though, is it?

[3] [https://github.com/facebookarchive/instagram-ruby-
gem](https://github.com/facebookarchive/instagram-ruby-gem)

~~~
ArmandGrillet
One more thing to add on your list: spamming is ruining the entire experience.
For a company that sells AI as the next big thing, not being able to detect
accounts following 5000 people, having 8 followers and posting thousands of
comments "GET 1000 FOLLOWERS ON [URL]" every day is kind of a joke.

~~~
tedmiston
As someone with a small-medium sized account (~2k followers), I currently get
~10–20 spam followers per week. I aggressively report as spam + block, but
it's a nuisance.

Their reporting flow has so many taps and steps that it feels like it's
designed to be inefficient to give them less requests.

------
madeofpalk
This is Facebook's third attempt at trying to compete against Snapchat, this
time with the exact same name as their product. I guess third time's a charm.

Interesting though that they're only implementing the most basic features
(drawing over a video?), and not the more interesting and fun face tracking
stuff that Snapchat does now.

Personally, I can't see this being successful. Snapchat will remain to be a
quick and dirty way to get 'moments' to my friends (like twitter, but with
video), whereas Instagram will be for more more 'serious', 'arty' photos.

~~~
Yhippa
I've stopped using Insta for the most part. I'm an old and I feel like Snaps
are just more fun for me. The major issue with that is a lot of my friends
haven't caught on yet.

Insta just feels like it has too many buttons and notifications from spammers
flying at me. They lost the plot from the simple app they used to be a long
time ago. Plus the new algorithm change is terrible for me. Every time I open
the app I see the same pictures over and over again and lots of advertisements
in there now.

~~~
spike021
Snapchats are surprisingly better than alternatives nowadays.

I personally really dislike the new feeds by popularity route that services
are adopting, and Snapchat's Stories are great because I can find a friend's
feed for the day and just catch up immediately, rather than having to either
dig and dig until a feed thinks a particular post is important, etc.

~~~
tedmiston
I also find it much easier to ignore the uninteresting people, or rather,
people that tend to post 5+ times per day than it is on Facebook.

~~~
spike021
Yeah. Just because a plethora of people like someone's post doesn't mean that
I will, but with many new feeds that kind of post would be prioritized over
something with fewer likes/comments that I would actually want to see.

------
treigerm
I would really like to know why Facebook thought that this would be a better
feature for Instagram than for Messenger or WhatsApp. That's how I use my
social media apps:

\- WhatsApp: Messaging with most of my friends (I'm from Germany and here
everyone I know uses WhatsApp) \- Messenger: Messaging with people that don't
have WhatsApp \- Snapchat: Letting my friends now what I'm up to right now. I
don't put much thought into what I post there. I mostly follow close friends
because I honestly don't really care about the stories of people I don't know.
\- Instagram: Posting pictures that I think look nice. Often that are pictures
that I took with my DSLR and edited on my laptop. I also follow a lot of
people I don't know but who I think take nice pictures.

Therefore I don't see me using Instagram Stories anytime soon because

1\. Snapchat already has that feature and they probably implemented it better,
2\. the content on Instagram is simply different than the one on Snapchat
(more high-quality instead of the quick and dirty Snaps).

If I wouldn't have Snapchat and they brought Stories to one of their Messaging
apps I might have used it. But Instagram? No chance. It would be interesting
to know how other people use these apps (if at all). I realise that I'm
probably younger than most people here so my experience might differ quite
bit.

~~~
armandososa
That's easy. Instagram is a cooler brand among the same demographic that is
crazy about snapchat.

------
justindocanto
What's funny about this thread is it's almost all people complaining about dev
experience, APIs, etc and saying IG is dead...

Meanwhile their customers are very happy and very active. Look at how many
snaps you see on your snapchat right now and then go look at how many IG
stories have already been posted in the first couple hours.

I'd say that was a successful launch.

Nit picking things, as a developer, i understand... but ultimately what
matters is: are customers using it? Right now the answer is, without a doubt,
yes.

Thousands (Millions?) are debating deleting their snapchats at this very
moment. I know I am.

IG did a great job getting a whole lot of activity back on their app. Congrats
to them.

~~~
tedmiston
By customer, are you referring to (free) consumers or business that pay IG for
advertising?

Looking at the latest update of Instagram (v9.0 on iOS), the Stories feature
does not seem to be accessible for my account to try it.

The post makes it sound like no one has it yet:

> Instagram Stories will be rolling out globally over the next few weeks on
> iOS and Android.

~~~
justindocanto
By customer, i meant users. By users, I mean the people who spend time on the
app and are the reason there are advertisers and/or a business in the first
place.

Regardless of what the post says to you, people have it and are already
posting a LOT. Vogue already has anna wintour in multiple posts on their IG
story. Brands already are posting. A lot of the vine/snapchat "stars" are
already 20-30+ posts deep. I see fashion bloggers, tech writers, etc. A lot of
people are already using it.

------
MAGZine
I had turned auto-update off ahead of the new instagram UI update because I
prefered the look of the old Instagram. I'm now glad that I did. I don't need
stories slowing down the experience, taking up more real estate, or eating
more bandwidth.

I don't mean to be cynical, but I think Instagram as a product has peaked.
Their core functionality was perfect, and in many ways, the product only
gotten worse as they've rolled out updates (prioritized feeds, sending DMs by
default when you @ people, ...). Instagram hasn't rolled something out in a
long time that's made me "wow," which is too bad, because it was my favourite
social network not that long ago.

I'd be very annoyed if I had any personal stake in the company.

~~~
ljk
Also turned off auto-update but few weeks ago the app signed me out
automatically and prevented me from logging in unless I update to the latest
version.

Haven't used the app since then. Every social app is trying to do the same
thing it's pretty pointless now imo

------
overcast
Looking past the obvious verbatim copy. Have we reached the point where
everyone is completely sick of another way to "share", update, and post every
moment of our lives. It's really exhausting. Is this a function of getting
old?

~~~
Grazester
What! Didnt that video of the cool kids having fun inspire you to share your
awesome life stories?

I do get where you are coming from. I dislike snapchat because while it may be
a way to share something silly its not a serious way to communicate. I have a
friend that tries to use it for this and drives me nuts.

~~~
overcast
Add it to my list of things I don't "get". Photos are something I intend to
keep, that's why I'm taking a picture.

~~~
tedmiston
Photos in Snapchat are more a way to convey the moments that make up your life
rather than capture something to keep.

------
splouk
This is so blatant that it is almost satirical.

~~~
taytus
Had to double check the domain because I really thought it was a joke.

------
abalone
Serious question: what is it like being on an engineering team like this?
Where the explicit objective is to clone a competitor head-to-toe. Does it
impact morale? Can you recruit great people to such teams?

(Note, I get that nothing is completely original out there, and that there are
a few differences between this and Snapchat.)

~~~
tedmiston
I have met some members of Instagram's engineering team at Python conferences.
They also run a dedicated engineering blog
([https://engineering.instagram.com](https://engineering.instagram.com)).

Despite the fact that they use an old version of Django, and the product has
not exactly changed drastically since it became popular, they don't seem
jaded.

Sometimes it's fun to build your own version of something regardless of what
exists in the rest of the world. I'm sure nuances will become more prominent
in time.

~~~
askafriend
The Instagram folks are awesome, and active in the developer community!

------
boto3
I've been to a couple of Instagram ML meetups. I am not surprised that this is
what they came up with. There seemed to be a lot of technically gifted people
there, but I always felt there was a lack of creativity and deep domain
understanding. All the projects seemed to be in the line of: we added this
feature, and we saw our user engagement increased by this percentage. Everyone
seemed to be working on incremental improvements without a purposeful
leadership and vision.

They do have the technical talents though. I think one of the word2vec authors
was there, but he was giving a talk about using the same technique on emoji
icons :-( I would think there are more interesting problems to tackle with the
available resources at FB.

~~~
abalone
What is an Instagram ML meetup?

~~~
boto3
machine learning, sorry.

------
spike021
Meanwhile any time I look at Instagram now I'm hard-pressed to find any posts
from the current day because they only show me the "important" highlights from
more than a day ago.

Yeah, I'm serious.

------
alex_g
I use instagram because everything stays there I use snapchat because it's
quick and temporary.

Why couldn't they make it possible to have a story that appears as a single
tile in your profile permanently?

~~~
madebysquares
I initially thought that is what they built but, They went the snapchat route.

------
nilved
I think that Facebook and other companies need to consider that it's better to
change nothing than add the wrong feature. This blurs the lines too much with
Snapchat. If I still used Instagram when they added this feature, I would stop
using it in favour of Snapchat. (But I've already stopped using Snapchat since
they feature-creeped all the way into photo backups.)

~~~
intoverflow2
> I think that Facebook and other companies need to consider that it's better
> to change nothing than add the wrong feature

Instagram seemed to be following this policy until very recently, now the
users have got bored and FB is trying desperately to catch up.

------
balls187
Ugh.

I hope Apple Photos releases a simple social network that lets you share
photos without all this annoying crap trying to hook young adults.

I liked IG a lot for it's intended purpose: easy to use photo app.

~~~
rajathagasthya
There's already iCloud photo sharing, if you haven't checked that out.

~~~
balls187
Yeah I've used it, it's okay. I like the approach social networks take: have a
feed, and I can subscribe to it.

------
pducks32
Go home instagram, you're drunk!

------
settsu
What I'm unclear about, as both an Instagram user and with an interest in
product development (from a UI/UX perspective), is what question this
answered.

I suppose it should not be entirely a surprise for a half billion user,
Facebook-owned service to take the throw-feature-at-the-wall-and-see-if-it-
sticks approach.

Regardless, it appears to be unobtrusive (though it seems odd to bury
ephemeral content creation/consumption...)

------
abalone
They're doing the "tap for photo, hold for video" thing too. I thought there
was a patent dispute around that?[1] Is that resolved now?

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/14/snapchat-
patent/](https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/14/snapchat-patent/)

------
the_mitsuhiko
Instagram also cloned Vine and the responses were pretty similar if I remember
correctly.

------
erdevs
Are there any good stats available on Instagram's usage over trends over time?
Seems like people are using it less and less.

~~~
rickyc091
As an educator, I can tell you that young teens still use both Snapchat and
Instagram equally. I would say that younger kids are actually more drawn to
Snapchat due to the face swap and goofiness functionalities.

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vthallam
Way to innovate by ripping off the name and feature of Snapchat!:|

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enahs-sf
I wonder when VSCO will add stories...

------
NN88
Annnnnd IG is done.

~~~
meira
I feel that the second dotcom bubble finally burst with the fall of Uber
yesterday.

~~~
nilved
Is there some news that I missed yesterday?

~~~
arthurcolle
Uber sells Uber China to Didi

------
bluetidepro
Is it April Fools' day already? They didn't even bother to change the name
from the direct feature rip of Snapchat? haha All I can think of is this meme:
[http://bluetide.pro/1eJqM/4NFGBKsg](http://bluetide.pro/1eJqM/4NFGBKsg)

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rjeli
I had to check that it's not April 1st.

