A week after Snapchat declared that it separated the social and media aspects of its service, Instagram did the same.
Instagram is testing a stand-alone application for its private messaging feature, the Facebook-owned photo and video platform announced on Thursday. Called Direct, the app is tested in six non-US countries – Chile, Israel, Italy, Portugal, Turkey and Uruguay – and Instagram plans to roll it out globally next year, according to a spokesman for the US. # 39; company.
By moving his email tab into his own app, Instagram's move is parallel to that of his parent company when Facebook created Messenger as a stand-alone service in 2011. However, it also reflects Snapchat's redesign recently announced.
Last week, Snapchat said that people's friends would be placed in a separate part of its application. Now Instagram is setting the stage for following the move, but in a separate application.
During the testing phase, the Instagram Direct app is comparable to the Snapchat version before the redesign, with the Stories and Discover tabs disabled. The other features of the Instagram Direct app you will recognize from Snapchat include:
- the application opens to the camera
- People Can Sweep to See Their Inbox for Private Messages
- People can send photos and videos that include augmented reality filters and illustrations
- where they can choose to send text messages instead
The Instagram app Instagram opens on the camera (left), has an inbox ( center) and allows you to add animations and illustrations to private messages (right)
Direct is not a complete facsimile of Snapchat's product in the same way as Stories. For example, instead of sliding to the left to access this inbox as Snapchat, people will slide to the right to find it in Direct. Specifically, the redesign of Snapchat will allow people to see the stories of their friends in the tab reserved for friends, but direct users will still have to open the main application of Instagram to see the stories of their friends. However, this could change.
If Snapchat's position that social media and the media must be separated proves a precedence – if people are looking for a private space for their friends apart from celebrities, media, brands and all those whose presence serves mainly as entertainment. to follow quickly.
It's easy to predict Instagram allowing direct users to see the stories of their friends in Direct. He could even link these stories to profile photos displayed in the inbox of a person, which happens to be how Snapchat combines stories and private messages in his only friends feed. And to make sure this privatization is profitable, Instagram could even insert advertisements after a friend 's story, which he' s already doing in the Stories feed of his main application and that Snapchat will do in his feed reserved for friends.
About the author
Tim Peterson, Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has been reporting for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. Angeleno, born and raised, graduated from the University of New York, currently lives in Los Angeles.
He broke stories on Snapchat's advertising plans, Jason Kilar's attempt at founding CEO of Hulu, to turn to YouTube and assembling the ad-tech battery of Amazon; analyzed YouTube's programming strategy, Facebook's advertising ambitions and increased blocking of ads; and recorded the largest annual event of the VidCon digital video, the BuzzFeed brand video production process and the Snapchat Discover ads charge six months after its launch. He has also developed tools to monitor the early adoption of live applications by brands, compare search patterns from Yahoo and Google, and review the NFL's YouTube and Facebook video strategies.