Starting this week, Instagram will release a new update of the app where you’ll find three brand new features (Mentions, Links, and Boomerang) to its video platform, Stories.
Three months ago, Instagram stories were released as the app’s introduction to the short video making a segment that was under Snapchat’s dominance. In the beginning, Stories was seen as a blatant copy of its competitor, but with this new update, things are changing for the wildly popular application.
Something is clear, and each functionality offers many advantages to Stories. Mentions will allow you to tag or mention your friends in the videos or photos that you include in your stories. Links will mark the first time that Instagram will let you include working, clickable links within the app. This feature for the moment will only work on Stories. At last, there’s Boomerang, an option that will give you the ability to create short looping videos just like the standalone app of the same name but without using anything other than Instagram.
Mentions, Links, and Boomerang separately are not considered real game changers. But the fact that they are all built on Instagram’s main interface changes this perspective, by giving the user two frequently requested core functionalities (Mentioning other users in a story and the option of inserting working links) and including the capacities of a separate app (Boomerang) into one. This update will help Instagram become a more complete and reliable overall social media platform.
Rest assured that with these upgrades and a team of programmers working hard to develop more and more new features, Instagram is charging ahead, looking to cut more and more into Snapchat’s social media presence.