Recently, social media users on Twitter took a break from lambasting Donald Trump and posting Authur memes to discuss Facebook-owned Instagram ripping off direct competitor Snapchat with their new app feature called “Instagram Stories”. Instagram released news about their new digital endeavor Monday morning in an article posted to their blog. The blog post explained what Instagram Stories was and the new twist it adds to the normal picture posting seen on the platform.
Instagram is promoting their new story feature as a solution to overposting. Overposting is essentially flooding your followers timelines with pictures and videos in rapid succession, preventing them from seeing the posts of the other people they follow. But, if you look at the moves that Instagram has been making over the past year, you can tell they’re trying to position themselves as players in the new video driven area that we’ve landed in online. Back in March, they broke the news that they were extending their video length from 15 seconds to a full minute. If you read the blog post Instagram posted about the video extension, you even can see that they’ve been scheming on creating a story type feature for months.

Video is king in this new, social media world. Up until this past year, both Facebook and Twitter have been behind in the dog race behind Snapchat on how to properly utilize video. Both of the companies have put their hat in the live streaming world with Facebook Live and Periscope respectfully.

But, Facebook has been wanting to knock Snapchat off of their pedestal since 2013. After three failed attempts at building a platform to compete with Snapchat, Mark Zuckerburg and the crew decided to fall into the philosophy “If you can’t beat or buy them, steal from them”.
Instagram Stories is, indeed, a rip off of the whole interface that Snapchat created. It’s literally everything Snapchat is and isn’t. The CEO of Instagram even admits they ripped off the concept. Hey, at least he’s honest! Of course Twitter users are going to go in on any popular topic that comes up in the world but I see Snapchat users salty that Instagram made this move. They’re so invested in the brand that they don’t realized that the competition between these tech companies is an amazing thing!
Now, Instagram has given you a new way to interact with your fans. Seeing that the story features is a part of the app, you don’t have to start from scratch building your follower base. Then, your story is seen first by the users that interact with you the most. That’s a definite improvement over having to scroll down a long list friends on Snapchat to try to get to the one story you want to see. Snapchat’s Discover feature is just plain horrible too! It always crashes, especially Comedy Central! Maybe it’s just me…
Nevertheless, Instagram has declared war with Snapchat and we should all be happy. As they fight for brand supremacy, our reach only grows larger.