Popular social media platform, Instagram, has announced a bunch of new features for Android users. Instagram's parent company, Meta, announced in an official blog post that it is adding Notes, Candid Stories, and Group Profiles, giving its users more ways to stay connected to their friends and family using different formats.
The Instagram ‘Notes' feature is a new way of sharing your thoughts on the platform. Users can share whatever they want in the form of text (up to 60 characters) and emojis. In order to use the Instagram Notes feature, you need to head to your inbox, select any of your followers or close friends and post it. Similar to Stories, Notes will be visible for 24 hours and displayed on top of your inbox. Viewers' responses will appear in DMs.
Another interesting feature is ‘Candid Stories.' This feature is under testing, and it will notify users to take a picture of what they are doing at the moment. The candid images will only be visible to those who also share their own Candid Stories. If you are not a fan of this feature, you can turn it off under Settings. Meta plans to roll out Candid Stories for Facebook soon.
Instagram has added ‘Group Profiles' where people can join this new type of profile and share posts/stories with their friends. The content of this group will only be shared with the group and not with your followers. You can create a new Group Profile by tapping the plus (+) icon and selecting Group Profiles.
Instagram is also testing the ‘Collaborative Collections' feature that will allow users to connect with friends “over their shared interests by saving posts to a collaborative collection in your group or 1:1 DMs.” Features that are under testing will roll out very soon, while other features are already live.
