Facebook-owned image sharing network Instagram announced in a blogpost, that its users can now archive their Stories which disappear 24 hours after being posted in a new separate section called ‘highlight’. The feature is available globally on both iOS and Android platforms.
How Archive works: The stories will automatically save to your archive when they expire. To access the stories in your archive, tap the Archive icon on your profile. From there, you can easily switch between your Posts Archive and your new Stories Archive. In your Stories Archive, your stories will appear in a grid with the most recent stories at the bottom. The first story from each day will show a date indicator to help you navigate your archive as you scroll. The archived Stories can be re-posted as a new story or as a normal post on Instagram. Also, only an account holder can see his/her archived stories and can choose to turn off auto-archiving through profile settings.
How Highlight works: The separate section- highlight- appear on user’s profile below the bio. To create a highlight, you have to tap ‘New’ circle at the left, below your bio, and from there, you can choose stories from your archive, edit and save it. Once done, your highlight will appear as a circle on your profile that plays as a stand-alone story when someone taps it. Highlights stay on your profile until you remove them.
Instagram wants to snap at Snapchat?
Note that the development comes a week after Snapchat announced that it is redesigning the app with multiple new features. Instagram’s Stories feature is anyway a copy of Snapchat’s Memories feature. However, Highlights feature is a deviation from it copying features from Snapchat.
In October, Instagram launched a new polling feature which is similar to Snapchat polling feature, which was offered after its integration with social polling app Polly for its users. The feature had gone viral amongst Snapchat users, as around 20 million users used it and generated some 100 million answers last month.
Before that, Instagram introduced three new tools on the platform to simplify Stories for advertisers and marketers on the platform. These tools were similar to Snapchat tools. Snapchat had launched a self-service Ad Manager for the advertiser, and Instagram possibly took a cue from that. Before that, Snapchat too had a copy-cat moment, when it launched Facebook (and now Instagram)-like ads power editor.
But Instagram has been more effective in converting its existing Facebook user base into active users. In December last year, Instagram crossed 600 million active users(MAUs) just six months after it hit the 500 MAUs mark in June. Its competitor Snapchat on the other had claimed 150 million Daily Active Users as of June.
