Facebook-owned photo sharing app Instagram has launched a new feature called ‘Close Friends’. If you time and again have to edit your Stories Settings on Instagram because you don’t like sharing some moments with your entire followers list, then ‘Close Friends’ is the feature you need. With Instagram’s ‘Close Friends’ feature, you can share your Stories with a small group of people.
The new feature will be available on your Instagram profile’s side menu and it will enable you to create a smaller group of friends and share your Stories exclusively with them.
Speaking about its new feature, Instagram said to Reuters, “If you’re on someone’s close friends list, you’ll see a green ring around their photo in the Stories tray and a green badge when you’re viewing their stories.”
Instagram has now become Facebook’s fastest-growing revenue generator and that can be the reason why the social networking giant if focussing on it so much. It’s core platform has been on the receiving end of a lot of criticism this year with regulators asking for improvement in information safeguards for individual privacy and better ways to stop misinformation or fake news.
The year also saw high-profile exits of Instagram’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. After this happened, Facebook appointed long-term insider Adam Mosseri as the head of the popular photo-sharing app.
Instagram close rival Snap, from which it often gets inspired for new features, has been revamping its app in order to lure more users and advertisers. The company has also bagged $250 million as an investment from Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal after it shifted towards a self-serve model for advertisers.
It is worth noticing that Instagram had initially picked up the Stories feature from Snapchat. The feature then wormed its way to WhatsApp, Facebook’s app and Messenger. In June this year, Instagram said that it has 400 million daily users of the Stories feature. Compared to Snapchat’s 191 million daily active users for Q1 2018, Instagram’s number was more than double.
Both the apps are currently in a close competition with each other and as a result, we get to see a slew of new features and updates in them regularly that they roll out in order to get new users onboard.
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